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Instead of fighting against "paper mills", let’s fight against journals. There are strong arguments against the need for peer-review for example [1]. Science do

Instead of fighting against "paper mills", let’s fight against journals. There are strong arguments against the need for peer-review for example [1]. Science does not get worse when there are more bad papers, science gets better when there are more good papers. Most papers in AI aren’t even reviewed by peers or editor and guess what: we have lots of progress happening. I’m not saying that is because the lack of review, I’m saying that reviews are not necessary for progress. Furthermore, was the iPhone good because it was reviewed by a board of "independent" reviewers? No it wasn’t. Let’s just ignore Nature. Good papers are good because they have good arguments and if they are not good, then time will tell. Papers are not good simply because Nature (TM) put a stamp on it. [1]: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...

ethanbond 3y ago
The cases you mentioned have clear and immediate commercial incentives that push them toward quality. Not quite so for basic research that might (optimistically) be decades away from commercialization and will probably be commercialized from someone very very far away in the value chain from the original researcher. FWIW I'm also really critical of peer review/journals, just don't think this is a great line of analogy.
- SQueeeeeL 3y ago
  I've found most people who are deeply critical of peer review as a process (and not just how shady modern journals are) have never engaged in serious scientific work. They have no idea how lost in the weeds researchers can get, and how useful having a somewhat uninformed 3rd party see if they can parse your prose is for having a work be understandable. Commercialization really only applies to a very small subset of scientific discoveries
webnrrd2k 3y ago
Re: "Science does not get worse when there are more bad papers"... I don't think that this is true at all. Weeding through bad papers is, at a minimum, an opportunity cost, as is a good paper built on top of a bad one. Also, there is a societal cost in that bad research can get picked up and believed by people, like the anti-vax crowd. Or, bad research can be used to push an agenda, like anti-climate change.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  You are correct. Many people want research to work like a social media site where everyone can contribute, believing this is an egalitarian--and therefore better--solution. In reality, it would slow research to a crawl, as noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information.
  - huijzer 3y ago
    > noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information. That's actually a great point. Who says this isn't already the case? There isn't much evidence to suggest that things have gotten better after the Why Most Published Research Findings Are False paper in 2005. I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read, irregardless of a peer review stamp.
    - SantalBlush 3y ago
      >I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read This is a mistake that many HN readers make; they think that if one is equipped with some above-average level of intelligence, one can discern the validity of new research. But this is wrong. It usually takes many years of study before one can begin to clearly understand what is even being said, let alone whether it has any veracity. People of above-average intelligence often resent this fact, because it suggests that their smart opinion isn't as valuable as the opinion of an expert, but that is simply a sad fact of life. If they haven't put in the work in that field, then they don't know what they're talking about in that field, and they are incapable of applying skepticism in that field correctly. This is precisely and unfortunately why we are forced to place our trust in experts.
      - mike_hearn 3y ago
        In practice that's not the case. Maybe for some fields it is, but there are definitely plenty of fields where minimal expertise is required to do basic sanity checks of a paper. And there are many generic 'tells' that are indicative of issues across a wide range of fields, e.g. if a paper is reporting mostly P = 0.049 results, well ... As an example of an issue that doesn't require much expertise to spot, I was reading a health paper a couple of days ago that reported on an intervention in a specific population. The paper said words to the effect of "[the intervention] was effective, especially for men". The associated chart not only had (somehow?!) got a legend that didn't match the actual chart lines, but whilst the line for men did indeed go down the line for women was very clearly flat! This should have been reported as "no effect in women but an effect in men" but wasn't. When the wording doesn't match the data being reported, that's a good sign in any field that the researchers know they're treading on thin ice. That particular claim was a correlation/causation fallacy anyway, which is very common in health. They didn't have any proof it was their intervention causing the reduction and there were a bunch of reasons to suspect it wasn't. But the intervention was long term and high effort so it's not a surprise they wanted to find something.
artursapek 3y ago
I forget which episode, but Andrew Huberman discussed somewhere how the incentives behind getting published in science journals and the peer review process often lead to poor studies.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
No, science definitely goes worse when there are more bad papers. There's a popular argument about freedom of speech that comes down to "the solution to bad speech is more good speech, not limiting bad speech," but that only works (assuming it's true at all) when there's some way for a listener to discern truth with some research or effort. > "Good papers are good because they have good arguments" No they are not. Good papers are good when they collected data correctly and then presented the results fairly. Arguments about what that data means hardly enters into it. You can't argue whether the data is correct or not without gathering it yourself, and you can't gather it yourself.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Yeah, the problem with that "more speech" argument is the imbalance... lies are way easier and faster to generate than truth, and can be crafted perfectly to play on what the audience wants to hear. The truth has to be the truth, so it can't be crafted in the same way.
- stale2002 3y ago
  > You can't argue whether the data is correct or not without gathering it yourself, and you can't gather it yourself. You actually can argue about the data being "correct". The way to do is, is studies need to be much more radically open with their raw data sources. In AI, that would mean actually releasing the code you used, so people can try it themselves. Or, in more sociology stuff, where you are doing, I don't know, interviews with humans, you could release the physical videos of your interviews. And then for science stuff, show pictures/vidoes of the science you are doing. I'm sure there would still be way to hack this. But significant more code and data transparency would do a huge amount for allowing other people to replicate or verify your work.
- huijzer 3y ago
  > There's a popular argument about freedom of speech that comes down to "the solution to bad speech is more good speech, not limiting bad speech," but that only works (assuming it's true at all) when there's some way for a listener to discern truth with some research or effort. Yes exactly. If it is too hard for a group of scientists to figure out a flaw, then it is also too hard for two peer reviewers to figure out a flaw. Only time can detect all errors in science, assuming that nonconformist papers are allowed into the conversation. > Good papers are good when they collected data correctly and then presented the results fairly. This is only true for empirical papers. Good data is a part of a good argument in the case of empirical papers.
eldaisfish 3y ago
This line of thinking is dangerous and ignores very real problems as the other comments point out. Instead of targeting peer-review, i recommend approaching this problem as one of incentives. Under the current system, what is the incentive for a reviewer to read and critique a paper? None. If they were paid in cash, there is a clear incentive. The publishers do not want this overheard and the associated legal requirements so they seek out "volunteers" and "compensate" them with rubbish like book copies and "reputation". The fault is with publishers, not the peer-review process. At the moment, the current model allows parasites like Elsevier to derive the maximum benefit while not paying most folks involved in creating the actual value - the reviewers, editors and authors. Citizen journalism tried this, failed and is now hollowing out established journalism. We need proper funding and proper incentives for journalism just as we need proper incentives for academic research.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  The incentives of paid peer review would not be easy to get right. Especially if you want the compensation to be high enough that it would actually be an incentive to the reviewer. Many universities limit the number of hours their faculty can commit to paid external activities. Paid peer review would be one of those activities, and it would have to compete against other activities. Such as consulting, which can be very lucrative in some fields. So maybe you have to pay $10k peer review fee when you submit a paper. And then it gets rejected after the first round of reviews, because you aimed too high or the editor and the reviewers just didn't like the topic. You resubmit to another journal and pay another $10k. After a couple of additional rounds of reviews ($5k each), the journal seems to be interested in publishing the paper. But reviewer 2 wants you to cite some of their papers that are not really that relevant. Do you agree, or do you argue against and risk another round of reviews (another $5k)? Or maybe you get the feeling that reviewer 3 is stalling the process with superficial requirements, as they get easy money from the reviews. Except that most academics can't afford that. American academics are massively overpaid by global standards, and peer review would naturally be outsourced to developing countries, where the expectations of pay are more reasonable. Many of the academics there are reputable, after all. Unfortunately the institutional culture is often more problematic, and corruption also tends to be more prevalent. Do we really want to let those institutions shape the practices of science worldwide? One of the unfortunate features of capitalism is that being a middleman is more profitable than doing the actual work. Instead of a system where you pay $x for reviews, we could end up with one where you pay $1.1x to a middleman, who then pays $0.8x for the reviews. The middlemen get even richer than in the current system, because there is more money in publishing than there used to be.
malikNF 3y ago
I understand how journals made sense during a time when distribution was a hard problem. Now with the internet I don’t get the reason for them to exist in the form it does in 2023.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  A journal is a way of ensuring that the paper you are about to read meets a minimum standard of quality. My anecdote: the second worst paper I've ever read was an ArXiv paper, presented by a young researcher who had no idea of how bad this paper was, Had I not teared it down (which was a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved) it would have been further propagated by other young researchers. And the worst paper? Submitted to a conference, rejected outright during review, and I still wonder if someone was trying to sneak a machine-generated article for fun. No one has the time to keep up with all the research coming out, not to mention all the fake research published in bad faith. Life is not restricted to Elsevier and ArXiv, and there are sane alternatives out there.
  - dndn1 3y ago
    [flagged]
noobermin 3y ago
Let's be real, there are a lot of papers in AI right now because it's been hot, not just recently but for years. Still, no one is reading random papers from insert-unknown-group-here. People read papers from already established scientists who have pedigree. And, how did they become established? Because they actually published before arxiv. In that sense, peer review should be an equalizer, because the only way to be read and cited then is to have the holy academic lineage, which is what would happen if we abolished peer-review as it exists in the current academic word we're in.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> Most papers in AI aren’t even reviewed by peers or editor and guess what: we have lots of progress happening. If by progress you mean a constant creep of SOTA on meaningless benchmarks, then yeah, we have "progress", but that progress is a strange kind of progress that is measured only on its own, self-selected criteria, and that does nothing to advance the total sum of knowledge. The main beneficiaries of this "progress" are large technology corporations who have now taken over research in AI and are turning it to profit. There has definitely been proress in money-making schemes and personal aggrandisement schemes of charlatans and mountebanks, in AI, aplenty. If by progress you meant scientific progress, then, no, there has been none of that in recent years. It is questionable if there has ever been any kind of scientific progress associated with AI. While early pioneers of AI, like John McCarthy and Claude Shannon, wished to establish a scientific programme of research in human and machine intelligence, with the purpose of understanding the former by developing the latter, this programme was soon set aside, and activity concentrated instead in what McCarthy used to call the "look ma, no hands disease of AI": >> Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthill.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi... And this is where we still are today. AI is no science.

ethanbond 3y ago

The cases you mentioned have clear and immediate commercial incentives that push them toward quality. Not quite so for basic research that might (optimistically) be decades away from commercialization and will probably be commercialized from someone very very far away in the value chain from the original researcher. FWIW I'm also really critical of peer review/journals, just don't think this is a great line of analogy.

SQueeeeeL 3y ago
I've found most people who are deeply critical of peer review as a process (and not just how shady modern journals are) have never engaged in serious scientific work. They have no idea how lost in the weeds researchers can get, and how useful having a somewhat uninformed 3rd party see if they can parse your prose is for having a work be understandable. Commercialization really only applies to a very small subset of scientific discoveries

webnrrd2k 3y ago

Re: "Science does not get worse when there are more bad papers"... I don't think that this is true at all. Weeding through bad papers is, at a minimum, an opportunity cost, as is a good paper built on top of a bad one. Also, there is a societal cost in that bad research can get picked up and believed by people, like the anti-vax crowd. Or, bad research can be used to push an agenda, like anti-climate change.

SantalBlush 3y ago
You are correct. Many people want research to work like a social media site where everyone can contribute, believing this is an egalitarian--and therefore better--solution. In reality, it would slow research to a crawl, as noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information.
- huijzer 3y ago
  > noise and conflicted interests dominate the conversation and drown out more rigorous or valuable information. That's actually a great point. Who says this isn't already the case? There isn't much evidence to suggest that things have gotten better after the Why Most Published Research Findings Are False paper in 2005. I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read, irregardless of a peer review stamp.
  - SantalBlush 3y ago
    >I think people should be extremely skeptical of anything they read This is a mistake that many HN readers make; they think that if one is equipped with some above-average level of intelligence, one can discern the validity of new research. But this is wrong. It usually takes many years of study before one can begin to clearly understand what is even being said, let alone whether it has any veracity. People of above-average intelligence often resent this fact, because it suggests that their smart opinion isn't as valuable as the opinion of an expert, but that is simply a sad fact of life. If they haven't put in the work in that field, then they don't know what they're talking about in that field, and they are incapable of applying skepticism in that field correctly. This is precisely and unfortunately why we are forced to place our trust in experts.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      In practice that's not the case. Maybe for some fields it is, but there are definitely plenty of fields where minimal expertise is required to do basic sanity checks of a paper. And there are many generic 'tells' that are indicative of issues across a wide range of fields, e.g. if a paper is reporting mostly P = 0.049 results, well ... As an example of an issue that doesn't require much expertise to spot, I was reading a health paper a couple of days ago that reported on an intervention in a specific population. The paper said words to the effect of "[the intervention] was effective, especially for men". The associated chart not only had (somehow?!) got a legend that didn't match the actual chart lines, but whilst the line for men did indeed go down the line for women was very clearly flat! This should have been reported as "no effect in women but an effect in men" but wasn't. When the wording doesn't match the data being reported, that's a good sign in any field that the researchers know they're treading on thin ice. That particular claim was a correlation/causation fallacy anyway, which is very common in health. They didn't have any proof it was their intervention causing the reduction and there were a bunch of reasons to suspect it wasn't. But the intervention was long term and high effort so it's not a surprise they wanted to find something.

artursapek 3y ago

I forget which episode, but Andrew Huberman discussed somewhere how the incentives behind getting published in science journals and the peer review process often lead to poor studies.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

No, science definitely goes worse when there are more bad papers. There's a popular argument about freedom of speech that comes down to "the solution to bad speech is more good speech, not limiting bad speech," but that only works (assuming it's true at all) when there's some way for a listener to discern truth with some research or effort. > "Good papers are good because they have good arguments" No they are not. Good papers are good when they collected data correctly and then presented the results fairly. Arguments about what that data means hardly enters into it. You can't argue whether the data is correct or not without gathering it yourself, and you can't gather it yourself.

cortesoft 3y ago
Yeah, the problem with that "more speech" argument is the imbalance... lies are way easier and faster to generate than truth, and can be crafted perfectly to play on what the audience wants to hear. The truth has to be the truth, so it can't be crafted in the same way.
stale2002 3y ago
> You can't argue whether the data is correct or not without gathering it yourself, and you can't gather it yourself. You actually can argue about the data being "correct". The way to do is, is studies need to be much more radically open with their raw data sources. In AI, that would mean actually releasing the code you used, so people can try it themselves. Or, in more sociology stuff, where you are doing, I don't know, interviews with humans, you could release the physical videos of your interviews. And then for science stuff, show pictures/vidoes of the science you are doing. I'm sure there would still be way to hack this. But significant more code and data transparency would do a huge amount for allowing other people to replicate or verify your work.
huijzer 3y ago
> There's a popular argument about freedom of speech that comes down to "the solution to bad speech is more good speech, not limiting bad speech," but that only works (assuming it's true at all) when there's some way for a listener to discern truth with some research or effort. Yes exactly. If it is too hard for a group of scientists to figure out a flaw, then it is also too hard for two peer reviewers to figure out a flaw. Only time can detect all errors in science, assuming that nonconformist papers are allowed into the conversation. > Good papers are good when they collected data correctly and then presented the results fairly. This is only true for empirical papers. Good data is a part of a good argument in the case of empirical papers.

eldaisfish 3y ago

This line of thinking is dangerous and ignores very real problems as the other comments point out. Instead of targeting peer-review, i recommend approaching this problem as one of incentives. Under the current system, what is the incentive for a reviewer to read and critique a paper? None. If they were paid in cash, there is a clear incentive. The publishers do not want this overheard and the associated legal requirements so they seek out "volunteers" and "compensate" them with rubbish like book copies and "reputation". The fault is with publishers, not the peer-review process. At the moment, the current model allows parasites like Elsevier to derive the maximum benefit while not paying most folks involved in creating the actual value - the reviewers, editors and authors. Citizen journalism tried this, failed and is now hollowing out established journalism. We need proper funding and proper incentives for journalism just as we need proper incentives for academic research.

jltsiren 3y ago
The incentives of paid peer review would not be easy to get right. Especially if you want the compensation to be high enough that it would actually be an incentive to the reviewer. Many universities limit the number of hours their faculty can commit to paid external activities. Paid peer review would be one of those activities, and it would have to compete against other activities. Such as consulting, which can be very lucrative in some fields. So maybe you have to pay $10k peer review fee when you submit a paper. And then it gets rejected after the first round of reviews, because you aimed too high or the editor and the reviewers just didn't like the topic. You resubmit to another journal and pay another $10k. After a couple of additional rounds of reviews ($5k each), the journal seems to be interested in publishing the paper. But reviewer 2 wants you to cite some of their papers that are not really that relevant. Do you agree, or do you argue against and risk another round of reviews (another $5k)? Or maybe you get the feeling that reviewer 3 is stalling the process with superficial requirements, as they get easy money from the reviews. Except that most academics can't afford that. American academics are massively overpaid by global standards, and peer review would naturally be outsourced to developing countries, where the expectations of pay are more reasonable. Many of the academics there are reputable, after all. Unfortunately the institutional culture is often more problematic, and corruption also tends to be more prevalent. Do we really want to let those institutions shape the practices of science worldwide? One of the unfortunate features of capitalism is that being a middleman is more profitable than doing the actual work. Instead of a system where you pay $x for reviews, we could end up with one where you pay $1.1x to a middleman, who then pays $0.8x for the reviews. The middlemen get even richer than in the current system, because there is more money in publishing than there used to be.

malikNF 3y ago

I understand how journals made sense during a time when distribution was a hard problem. Now with the internet I don’t get the reason for them to exist in the form it does in 2023.

probably_wrong 3y ago
A journal is a way of ensuring that the paper you are about to read meets a minimum standard of quality. My anecdote: the second worst paper I've ever read was an ArXiv paper, presented by a young researcher who had no idea of how bad this paper was, Had I not teared it down (which was a very unpleasant experience for everyone involved) it would have been further propagated by other young researchers. And the worst paper? Submitted to a conference, rejected outright during review, and I still wonder if someone was trying to sneak a machine-generated article for fun. No one has the time to keep up with all the research coming out, not to mention all the fake research published in bad faith. Life is not restricted to Elsevier and ArXiv, and there are sane alternatives out there.
- dndn1 3y ago
  [flagged]

noobermin 3y ago

Let's be real, there are a lot of papers in AI right now because it's been hot, not just recently but for years. Still, no one is reading random papers from insert-unknown-group-here. People read papers from already established scientists who have pedigree. And, how did they become established? Because they actually published before arxiv. In that sense, peer review should be an equalizer, because the only way to be read and cited then is to have the holy academic lineage, which is what would happen if we abolished peer-review as it exists in the current academic word we're in.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> Most papers in AI aren’t even reviewed by peers or editor and guess what: we have lots of progress happening. If by progress you mean a constant creep of SOTA on meaningless benchmarks, then yeah, we have "progress", but that progress is a strange kind of progress that is measured only on its own, self-selected criteria, and that does nothing to advance the total sum of knowledge. The main beneficiaries of this "progress" are large technology corporations who have now taken over research in AI and are turning it to profit. There has definitely been proress in money-making schemes and personal aggrandisement schemes of charlatans and mountebanks, in AI, aplenty. If by progress you meant scientific progress, then, no, there has been none of that in recent years. It is questionable if there has ever been any kind of scientific progress associated with AI. While early pioneers of AI, like John McCarthy and Claude Shannon, wished to establish a scientific programme of research in human and machine intelligence, with the purpose of understanding the former by developing the latter, this programme was soon set aside, and activity concentrated instead in what McCarthy used to call the "look ma, no hands disease of AI": >> Much work in AI has the ``look ma, no hands'' disease. Someone programs a computer to do something no computer has done before and writes a paper pointing out that the computer did it. The paper is not directed to the identification and study of intellectual mechanisms and often contains no coherent account of how the program works at all. http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthill.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/lighthill/lighthi... And this is where we still are today. AI is no science.