8 ms·

Why not? The idea that the only valid way to publish a scientific result is in a (so-called) peer-reviewed journal is a relic from 200 years ago when the scien

by lisper 2y ago

Why not? The idea that the only valid way to publish a scientific result is in a (so-called) peer-reviewed journal is a relic from 200 years ago when the scientific community was small enough to fit within the monkeysphere [1]. It is being clung to only because it is profitable for a small group of powerful academics and publishing houses, not because it has any actual merit in terms of the advancement of science. In fact, it's probably in no small measure responsible for contemporary replication crises. I'm as staunch an advocate of the scientific method as you will hope to find (I'm writing a book about it!) but IMHO traditional peer review is long past its sell-by date. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Because Discord is a proprietary glorified IRC SaaS; its contents are, by nature, ephemeral and under control of the vendor. I'd expect such links to rot very quickly. Collaborating on Discord is fine. Important results, including citations backing them, should really be published or at least replicated in more durable medium that's less susceptible to link rot, and easier to archive. Today, that's PDFs in paper repositories, or even regular blog posts.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pollyturples 2y ago
  MySpace: 16 years (2003–2019) Friendster: 12 years (2002–2013) Google+: 8 years (2011–2019) Vine: 4 years (2013–2017) Orkut: 10 years (2004–2014) Path: 8 years (2010–2018) Yik Yak: 4 years (2013–2017) Meerkat: 2 years (2015–2017) Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger): 15 years (1999–2014) AIM (AOL Instant Messenger): 20 years (1997–2017) ICQ: Ongoing (since 1996) but significantly declined after the early 2000s Yahoo Messenger: 20 years (1998–2018) Bebo: 14 years (2005–2019, relaunched in 2021) Google Wave: 2 years (2009–2011) Ping (Apple): 2 years (2010–2012) Discord: 8 years (2015-) so clearly discord is inherently different and here to stay forever! /s feels like time is a circle sometimes ha
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Even with services that lived over a decade, it's not clear whether messages were accessible for all that time. E.g. Google Talk/Meet/Whatever seemingly lost all messages before ~2013. Links to Facebook posts tend to die quickly, as both users and Meta itself seem to constantly play with privacy features. Etc.
    - tsterin 2y ago
      I really like your point (I'm one of bbchallenge maintainers). I think that Discord is close to optimal for us in the short term, but bad for the reasons you and other have mentioned mid/long term.
  - yzydserd 2y ago
    ICQ 1996- June 26th, 2024. It’s shuttering.
- lisper 2y ago
  I don't see any reason why the original publication venue has to end up being the canonical reference. That's not even true for traditional peer-reviewed papers. Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them. The right way to reference scientific publications is by URN [1], not URL. That makes the location irrelevant, as it should be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name
  - JadeNB 2y ago
    > Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them. I'm not sure that they're collector's items, but they're probably not in that many university libraries. For example, the University of Michigan library has a physical copy in its special collection, but my university's considerably smaller library does not. But that's just because of age: this is a 119-year-old paper; were it a little younger, say, about 70 years, it would be in my university's holdings. I think that's a considerably different order of magnitude of its lifetime from a Discord link that I'd be absolutely astounded to see last a decade, and that in practice will probably last much less time than that.
    - lisper 2y ago
      What difference does it make if the original lasts a year or a century? The original is irrelevant except for historical purposes. What matters from a scientific point of view is that the results withstand scrutiny, and that they are reliably replicated and accessible.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        We discover new approaches to replication all the time. Have you never come across foundational papers and arguments that everyone loved at the time, but made big methodological mistakes that led to the wrong conclusion? Or worse, found a source everyone references based on yet other secondary sources, only to look at the original context to discover that everyone's been misquoting it for decades? That happens regularly.
vlovich123 2y ago
To be fair, the responsibility for the replication crises is much trickier. It’s based on human motivations and poor science: 1. Outright fraud 2. Lack of independent verification of results before building up a body of work resulting in a bunch of garbage. Contributes to making #1 “easy”. 3. Financial pressures to publish or perish contributing to 1 & 2. If peer review didn’t exist you’d still something similar about producing “recognized” results. This is also probably why we haven’t done any major breakthroughs in particle physics which now has a much longer term thinking phase to come up with anything. The biggest problem with peer review is actually the establishment of an orthodoxy which discourages itself being upended by controlling the career success of anyone who dare challenge it - you have to support the orthodoxy to get career success and you fail to get recognition if your idea challenges the peer reviewers ideas and careers. That being said, such pressures existed before, but at least you could try to build your own following and it was competing orthodoxies instead of a single one winning out.
- lisper 2y ago
  > Financial pressures to publish or perish But those only exist because of the current peer-review model. There is a huge non-linearity built in to the publication process that provides disproportionate rewards for conning a small number of people, fewer than half a dozen. That, combined with a presumption of trustworthiness, produces a perverse incentive for attempting such cons because they are very easy to pull off, much easier than actually doing good science.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    The rewards come from the grant model which I forgot to mention and also has similar problems to peer review. The stipulation to publish is a secondary effect. If peer review didn’t exist there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field.
    - lisper 2y ago
      > there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field And how do you tell who are the leading experts in the field?

by lisper 2y ago

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Because Discord is a proprietary glorified IRC SaaS; its contents are, by nature, ephemeral and under control of the vendor. I'd expect such links to rot very quickly. Collaborating on Discord is fine. Important results, including citations backing them, should really be published or at least replicated in more durable medium that's less susceptible to link rot, and easier to archive. Today, that's PDFs in paper repositories, or even regular blog posts.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pollyturples 2y ago
MySpace: 16 years (2003–2019) Friendster: 12 years (2002–2013) Google+: 8 years (2011–2019) Vine: 4 years (2013–2017) Orkut: 10 years (2004–2014) Path: 8 years (2010–2018) Yik Yak: 4 years (2013–2017) Meerkat: 2 years (2015–2017) Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger): 15 years (1999–2014) AIM (AOL Instant Messenger): 20 years (1997–2017) ICQ: Ongoing (since 1996) but significantly declined after the early 2000s Yahoo Messenger: 20 years (1998–2018) Bebo: 14 years (2005–2019, relaunched in 2021) Google Wave: 2 years (2009–2011) Ping (Apple): 2 years (2010–2012) Discord: 8 years (2015-) so clearly discord is inherently different and here to stay forever! /s feels like time is a circle sometimes ha
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Even with services that lived over a decade, it's not clear whether messages were accessible for all that time. E.g. Google Talk/Meet/Whatever seemingly lost all messages before ~2013. Links to Facebook posts tend to die quickly, as both users and Meta itself seem to constantly play with privacy features. Etc.
  - tsterin 2y ago
    I really like your point (I'm one of bbchallenge maintainers). I think that Discord is close to optimal for us in the short term, but bad for the reasons you and other have mentioned mid/long term.
- yzydserd 2y ago
  ICQ 1996- June 26th, 2024. It’s shuttering.
lisper 2y ago
I don't see any reason why the original publication venue has to end up being the canonical reference. That's not even true for traditional peer-reviewed papers. Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them. The right way to reference scientific publications is by URN [1], not URL. That makes the location irrelevant, as it should be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name
- JadeNB 2y ago
  > Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them. I'm not sure that they're collector's items, but they're probably not in that many university libraries. For example, the University of Michigan library has a physical copy in its special collection, but my university's considerably smaller library does not. But that's just because of age: this is a 119-year-old paper; were it a little younger, say, about 70 years, it would be in my university's holdings. I think that's a considerably different order of magnitude of its lifetime from a Discord link that I'd be absolutely astounded to see last a decade, and that in practice will probably last much less time than that.
  - lisper 2y ago
    What difference does it make if the original lasts a year or a century? The original is irrelevant except for historical purposes. What matters from a scientific point of view is that the results withstand scrutiny, and that they are reliably replicated and accessible.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      We discover new approaches to replication all the time. Have you never come across foundational papers and arguments that everyone loved at the time, but made big methodological mistakes that led to the wrong conclusion? Or worse, found a source everyone references based on yet other secondary sources, only to look at the original context to discover that everyone's been misquoting it for decades? That happens regularly.

vlovich123 2y ago

To be fair, the responsibility for the replication crises is much trickier. It’s based on human motivations and poor science: 1. Outright fraud 2. Lack of independent verification of results before building up a body of work resulting in a bunch of garbage. Contributes to making #1 “easy”. 3. Financial pressures to publish or perish contributing to 1 & 2. If peer review didn’t exist you’d still something similar about producing “recognized” results. This is also probably why we haven’t done any major breakthroughs in particle physics which now has a much longer term thinking phase to come up with anything. The biggest problem with peer review is actually the establishment of an orthodoxy which discourages itself being upended by controlling the career success of anyone who dare challenge it - you have to support the orthodoxy to get career success and you fail to get recognition if your idea challenges the peer reviewers ideas and careers. That being said, such pressures existed before, but at least you could try to build your own following and it was competing orthodoxies instead of a single one winning out.

lisper 2y ago
> Financial pressures to publish or perish But those only exist because of the current peer-review model. There is a huge non-linearity built in to the publication process that provides disproportionate rewards for conning a small number of people, fewer than half a dozen. That, combined with a presumption of trustworthiness, produces a perverse incentive for attempting such cons because they are very easy to pull off, much easier than actually doing good science.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  The rewards come from the grant model which I forgot to mention and also has similar problems to peer review. The stipulation to publish is a secondary effect. If peer review didn’t exist there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field.
  - lisper 2y ago
    > there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field And how do you tell who are the leading experts in the field?