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 bac

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.