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> But if you fixed that, it wouldn't be academia anymore. That's a bold claim worthy of consideration. To assess it, we need to first ask: have the academic i

• mike_hearn 4y ago
  If it were the case that peer review was driven by governments, they'd pay people to do it. What's your proposed alternative? No expectations of output at all? Academia has changed many times over the centuries, it's not even clear it has a natural state. As something essentially willed into existence by governments and mega-donors, it's not even really describable as natural. The reproducibility crisis probably isn't new. Maybe public awareness of it is, though I'd say the start of the "crisis" is coming up to its 15th birthday now. But there were people talking about that sort of problem in psychology way back in the 60s and 70s, and examples of bad research claims in other fields that became widely can be found readily when looked for. It seems like reproducibility and other problems are the natural consequence of flooding universities with research grants. Removing the incentive to publish isn't a fix, because then you'd just be flooding universities with money that'd then just disappear, or more likely, get diverted into political campaigning. The money has to be buying something. Because it doesn't buy actual verified results but only papers asserting such results exist, reproducibility problems are an inevitable consequence.
  • ghc 4y ago
    To quote the paper I referenced above: > it was only in the late twentieth century that peer review came to be seen as a process central to scientific practice. Throughout the nineteenth century and into much of the twentieth, external referee reports were considered an optional part of journal editing or grant making. The idea that refereeing is a requirement for scientific legitimacy seems to have arisen first in the Cold War United States. You're asking what the alternative is, but government-funded research isn't new at all. Only the peer review requirement is new. The requirement doesn't need to be replaced with anything. Here is what Peter Higgs has to say about it: > He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."
    • mike_hearn 4y ago
      Right, but you're conflating two different things: peer review requirements and the expectation to produce papers. You want to get rid of both? IMO rolling back academia to the pre-war period is fine if you accept also rolling back the size of it to that era but that would mean almost all researchers losing their jobs. If that isn't acceptable then there has to be some kind of expectation of quality and quantity of output. Yes in the past there wasn't, but that's because so few people worked in academia that it hardly mattered. Nowadays proposals to get rid of peer review will run into objections from people who aren't satisfied with the quality of even peer reviewed papers (assholes like me). There are way too many published papers that are completely fraudulent or outright auto-generated for eliminating what few checks exist to be reasonable. After all, peer review is really a very low bar. The average programmer both is given and gives far more rigorous reviews of their work every week, and then on top we have automated testing, static analysis tools, crash reporters etc because human-driven reviews really aren't enough to ensure quality output. Scientific research hasn't gone the same way and that's leading to a wider loss of trust.