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I agree with the core of your message, and you are far from alone with this opinion. The history of science is a sequence of profound platitudes, each time ref

I agree with the core of your message, and you are far from alone with this opinion. The history of science is a sequence of profound platitudes, each time refining the prior ones. It is a part of awakening to pick the lowest hanging fruits first, just to get a foot in the door. While its not theoretically impossible to go straight from ignorance to -say- the postulates of quantum field theory, its incredibly unlikely to scale such a huge step at once, both for scientists at the frontier as well as each generation of students catching up. In this sense the profound platitudes are quasi necessary to build up an understanding of the world around us. Individually each outdated platitude may appear so very wrong when looking back with 20 / 20 hindsight, and most of these individual platitudes could plausibly have been skipped by scaling 2 or 3 steps at a time, but no one could scale all of them at once. Literally respect and review mean the same thing. To view or observe anew (re-). One may objectively claim that each step or correction of a prior platitude was an improvement of our worldview, even though in hindsight each step of correction also contributed the next erroneous stumbling block to be scaled. Throughout history policy decisions (from household decisions, to court decisions, to budget decisions, to research direction decisions, etc...) humans sought ways to settle matters. The desire for Finality is universal and justified. However the expectation that this universe came with a manual is not. A core tenet of the scientific mindset is the recognition that this finality is a temporary illusion. Selling this illusion of a recipe for finality is profitable and what journals and gatekeepers have gravitated toward, especially since information became dirt cheap to duplicate.

godelski 3y ago
I think you missed my point. I have no problem citing, and actively encourage it. I do have a problem with someone rejecting my work because I failed to cite a work which would have been impossible for me to cite. The key is that it was released (as a preprint) AFTER my paper. Not only is it in bad taste to make concurrent works a requisite (happy to update btw), but it is ludicrous to require that I have a time machine. This isn't about respect and me complaining about pomp and circumstance. This is me complaining about the frequency that I have been criticized for not having a time machine. The point is that a system that allows people to reject works due to lack of access to a functioning time machine is not a system we should support.
- DoctorOetker 3y ago
  I think this is a simple mix-up ;) Perhaps you confused me for xorbax, or you were still in the stream of consciousness of discussing with him: if you double-check which of your comments I replied to I think that you'll find it is not the one where you mention the demand for a citation that was simply non-existent. It appears you believed my comment to be a reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 while in fact I replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 I would appreciate if you re-read your own comment at the last link, and observe the second paragraph you wrote about peer review, and then re-read my correctly placed comment. I think you'll find my comment to make more sense, and in my opinion ties in nicely with your second paragraph. I was not tryihg to summarize you, merely appending my gripes with the supposed finality and atomicity of the Journals redefinition of "peer review". In reality the real peer review is in the back and forth discussions within the community, spread out over many papers, and sometimes even over generations. As an oversimplified example consider relativistic mechanics correcting Newtonian mechanics: if we anachronistically pretend Newton published his Principia in some Respectable Journal under the current implementation of "peer review", then it would have been accepted with apparent Finality under peer review, even though it would eventually be repudiated by relativity generations later; this artificial example should make anyone pause about the insinuated Finality of "peer review", effectively forcing one to recognize that the current concept of artificially muzzled "peer review" through the arbitrary selection of the reviewers by journal editors does not constitute true peer review. I'm not saying it's useless to have an initial screening, but then it needs a better name, perhaps "Quality Control" or "Publication Criteria" or "Discipline Specific Methods and Publication Criteria" etc... Before the modern incantation where reviewing by peers is made artificially atomic and pseudo-final, anyone in the field could provoke questions about specific claims. The illusion of Finality works discouraging: where-as in the past you would feel compelled to respond to any criticism, the current concept of "peer review" implies "it already happened since its published" and nothing forces an author to come up with a rebuttal for a criticism. While this may help prop up appearances of the scientific field with an aura of Finality of conclusions made in its domain, its really damaging to the scientific process. Back to the comment confusion: I've seen this happen to others when a sub-thread gets a lot of attention, resulting in a high rate of replies, where one of the authors gets confused which exact comment was being replied to. I would be lying if I were to claim it never happened to me ;)

godelski 3y ago

I think you missed my point. I have no problem citing, and actively encourage it. I do have a problem with someone rejecting my work because I failed to cite a work which would have been impossible for me to cite. The key is that it was released (as a preprint) AFTER my paper. Not only is it in bad taste to make concurrent works a requisite (happy to update btw), but it is ludicrous to require that I have a time machine. This isn't about respect and me complaining about pomp and circumstance. This is me complaining about the frequency that I have been criticized for not having a time machine. The point is that a system that allows people to reject works due to lack of access to a functioning time machine is not a system we should support.

DoctorOetker 3y ago
I think this is a simple mix-up ;) Perhaps you confused me for xorbax, or you were still in the stream of consciousness of discussing with him: if you double-check which of your comments I replied to I think that you'll find it is not the one where you mention the demand for a citation that was simply non-existent. It appears you believed my comment to be a reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 while in fact I replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 I would appreciate if you re-read your own comment at the last link, and observe the second paragraph you wrote about peer review, and then re-read my correctly placed comment. I think you'll find my comment to make more sense, and in my opinion ties in nicely with your second paragraph. I was not tryihg to summarize you, merely appending my gripes with the supposed finality and atomicity of the Journals redefinition of "peer review". In reality the real peer review is in the back and forth discussions within the community, spread out over many papers, and sometimes even over generations. As an oversimplified example consider relativistic mechanics correcting Newtonian mechanics: if we anachronistically pretend Newton published his Principia in some Respectable Journal under the current implementation of "peer review", then it would have been accepted with apparent Finality under peer review, even though it would eventually be repudiated by relativity generations later; this artificial example should make anyone pause about the insinuated Finality of "peer review", effectively forcing one to recognize that the current concept of artificially muzzled "peer review" through the arbitrary selection of the reviewers by journal editors does not constitute true peer review. I'm not saying it's useless to have an initial screening, but then it needs a better name, perhaps "Quality Control" or "Publication Criteria" or "Discipline Specific Methods and Publication Criteria" etc... Before the modern incantation where reviewing by peers is made artificially atomic and pseudo-final, anyone in the field could provoke questions about specific claims. The illusion of Finality works discouraging: where-as in the past you would feel compelled to respond to any criticism, the current concept of "peer review" implies "it already happened since its published" and nothing forces an author to come up with a rebuttal for a criticism. While this may help prop up appearances of the scientific field with an aura of Finality of conclusions made in its domain, its really damaging to the scientific process. Back to the comment confusion: I've seen this happen to others when a sub-thread gets a lot of attention, resulting in a high rate of replies, where one of the authors gets confused which exact comment was being replied to. I would be lying if I were to claim it never happened to me ;)