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> It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. As jjgreen points out (http

by JadeNB 4y ago

> It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. As jjgreen points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266), it does. But, whether or not your point of view is legitimate—in my case, I agree with your point of view, and won't give serious consideration to anything only available on vixra, and even just finding out an otherwise reputable-seeming paper was on vixra would give me pause—it is literally credentialism.

User23 4y ago
I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far more than anyone could possibly hope to read with care. Using a credentialism filter is one possible step in the process of narrowing down the set of papers available to read to a subset small enough that you can read them all. It's a popular method that has been practiced in some form for as long as there have been organized intellectual pursuits. And while it's evidently good for maintaining some approximation of a local optimum, I suspect it's also why the adage that scientific progress comes one funeral at a time rings so true. We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
There's no getting around it. Are you going to invest in the guy trying to sell his engine that runs on water? He's not in any reputable channels either. Maybe it's suppressed by oil companies. I think it's good enough to rely on the fact that the world has a lot of people in it, and there are more than enough people, not even including the idiots and misguided, but more than enough provably rational people who just have decided it's their hobby or even their vocation, to investigate even wacko claims, purely for academic reasons without necessarily caring about the claims themselves. They will bring anything worth our attention to us. Maybe we are all one of those people on occasion or on specific topics. To me that is quite sufficient way to allow for the possibility that someone did actually discover a way to burn water essentially like gasoline.

by JadeNB 4y ago

User23 4y ago

I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far more than anyone could possibly hope to read with care. Using a credentialism filter is one possible step in the process of narrowing down the set of papers available to read to a subset small enough that you can read them all. It's a popular method that has been practiced in some form for as long as there have been organized intellectual pursuits. And while it's evidently good for maintaining some approximation of a local optimum, I suspect it's also why the adage that scientific progress comes one funeral at a time rings so true. We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

There's no getting around it. Are you going to invest in the guy trying to sell his engine that runs on water? He's not in any reputable channels either. Maybe it's suppressed by oil companies. I think it's good enough to rely on the fact that the world has a lot of people in it, and there are more than enough people, not even including the idiots and misguided, but more than enough provably rational people who just have decided it's their hobby or even their vocation, to investigate even wacko claims, purely for academic reasons without necessarily caring about the claims themselves. They will bring anything worth our attention to us. Maybe we are all one of those people on occasion or on specific topics. To me that is quite sufficient way to allow for the possibility that someone did actually discover a way to burn water essentially like gasoline.