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> Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat. Reduce the social, political, pro
by nixpulvis 4y ago
> Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat.
Reduce the social, political, professional, and academic cost of "being wrong", learn to have a little more empathy and suddenly negative reviews will hold more meaning once again. People will learn to learn instead of learn to defend. (Of course, defense is a skill worth learning as well. Please don't take what I'm saying as this-or-that.)
You simply cannot do away with peer review! What you can eliminate is the control strictures that exist today which punish failure unfairly. This is true at all levels, from the highest institution right on down to that conversation you had with a colleague over coffee yesterday.
- bratwurst3000 4y agoThanks you nailed it
- Vinnl 4y agoThat's the key here: if peer review is feedback rather than a barrier to sharing your findings and progressing in your career, then negative (though of course, in this situation review would no longer be a binary negative/positive) feedback could be considered input again. But the current setup of peer review, like this article is arguing against, assigns a high cost to "being wrong" (in the eyes of about two reviewers).
- nixpulvis 4y agoRight, but where is the threshold for wrongness which is so widely accepted as truth that it becomes harmful enough to be actively removed? If I began preaching of the correctness of 1+1=3 surely someone would deny my publication, no? Or, the critics would outweigh the proponents. How can this be accomplished without division or empathy?
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoYou'd still have peer review, but in a very different sense. Instead of a formal process by 3 reviewers, you'd have an informal process by everyone who read the paper. People would read your dumb 1+1=3 paper, realize that it was wrong, ignore it, and pay less attention to you in the future.
- nixpulvis 4y agoWhat motivates people to even pick up the paper in the first place in this system?
- p0pcult 4y agoWhat motivates people to "do science"?
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoThe paper is in their field of research?
- Vinnl 4y agoI mean, where is it now? > That debunked theory about vaccines causing autism comes from a peer-reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and it stayed there for twelve years before it was retracted. How many kids haven’t gotten their shots because one rotten paper made it through peer review and got stamped with the scientific seal of approval? The point is not to prevent it from getting out there in the first place — that is already possible, you can just upload a PDF to some website. Doing that for a paper arguing 1+1=3 wouldn't be any more accepted if peer review's role would be limited.
- photochemsyn 4y agoAI peer review might be a solution. This would hopefully tend to limit rejections to technical issues like a poor choice of statistical analysis, and eliminate ideological conflicts. Where peer review gets a bit more shady and political is in the federal funding system, where the outcome is not a publication, but delivery of thousands to millions of dollars in federal funding. That's where politics really comes into play, although nobody in any field wants to talk much about it publicly.
- nixpulvis 4y agoExcuse me, but AIs are not my peers. Thank you.
- photochemsyn 4y agoPeer as in the aristocratic tradition of people of equal social standing and status? That's how you end up with institutional corruption, one hand washing the other, PI's rubber-stamping each other's shoddy work because members of the club are expected to support each other, and so on. Or, peer as in someone of equivalent actual knowledge and experience? AI isn't there yet, but I imagine a machine learning model trained on published papers in a given field would be able to quickly spot a lot of simple errors and/or poorly supported conclusions.
- sideshowb 4y agoAnd presumably only accept your paper if you make all the same mistakes the currently dominant paradigm does
- vehemenz 4y agoA general purpose AI is going to struggle with technical concepts and terminology that it has never learned before, but the whole point of many papers is to introduce these very concepts and terms.
- staticman2 4y ago"AI peer review might be a solution." Or you could just consult an Ouija board.