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It still is a quite useful filter, as without it most fields would be even more overwhelmed. As a reviewer, have you seen what garbage gets submitted sometimes?

It still is a quite useful filter, as without it most fields would be even more overwhelmed. As a reviewer, have you seen what garbage gets submitted sometimes? There are incentives to attempt to get garbage published, so throwing out a significant part of submissions does add quite a lot of value to readers, so that they get at a somewhat curated list of papers from that journal or conference. And while all you say is true, it's probably the most we can get for free in a reasonable amount of time; requiring an independent lab to repeat an experiment would generally be far more delay and cost than we'd accept, other researchers do generally want to see the outcome as soon as the first experiment is documented; and there are people doing great research which won't bother to submit if they'd have to pay for the replication - it's generally the bad research that has motivation to spend more money for a publication. The general public might want to wait for extra confirmation, but they're not the target audience of research papers, those are intended as communication by researchers for researchers. And also quite a few media outlets would disagree and probably prefer grabbing up hot rumors even earlier, even if they turn out to be false afterwards.

swatcoder 3y ago
All of what you wrote is true too, but it’s also the hollowed out support beam at bottom of “evidence-based everything” culture, which has taken over almost everything. The truth is that good science is slow and that most “evidence-based” practices are referring to a huge, nebulous cloud of bad results and weak suggestions rather than the evidence that supposedly gives them authority over traditional or intuitive practices. Scientists participate on “Little Science” and the responsible ones often maintain the perspective that you’re describing here. But modern society has built itself around the institution of “Big Science” which is structurally forced to assert truths before they can responsibly be defended. It’s way bigger than the general public being curious or the media wanting to get eyeballs — it’s everything going on in government, economics, medicine, psychology, agriculture, etc etc etc It’s a house of cards and you’ve just summarized what the core problem is.

swatcoder 3y ago

All of what you wrote is true too, but it’s also the hollowed out support beam at bottom of “evidence-based everything” culture, which has taken over almost everything. The truth is that good science is slow and that most “evidence-based” practices are referring to a huge, nebulous cloud of bad results and weak suggestions rather than the evidence that supposedly gives them authority over traditional or intuitive practices. Scientists participate on “Little Science” and the responsible ones often maintain the perspective that you’re describing here. But modern society has built itself around the institution of “Big Science” which is structurally forced to assert truths before they can responsibly be defended. It’s way bigger than the general public being curious or the media wanting to get eyeballs — it’s everything going on in government, economics, medicine, psychology, agriculture, etc etc etc It’s a house of cards and you’ve just summarized what the core problem is.