4 ms·

So much of this started with the rise of the peer-review journal cartel, beginning with Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's fa

So much of this started with the rise of the peer-review journal cartel, beginning with Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father). "Peer review" didn't exist before then, science papers and discussion was published openly, and scientists focused on quality not quantity.

john_strinlai 8mo ago
>Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father) perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?
- benterix 8mo ago
  It's useless, but I'm ashamed to admit I found this tiny piece of trivia interesting.
  - readthenotes1 8mo ago
    Like the paywall blocking many scientific arti6, perhaps it would be best if we released also the Epstein Files?
- anonymars 8mo ago
  I imagine it's the interesting peculiarity that the same people seem to crop up over and over and over again. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something, except it's like one or two degrees. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" For example Donald Barr (father of twice-former US Attorney General Bill Barr) hiring college-dropout Jeffrey Epstein whilst headmaster at the elite Dalton School Additional fun facts about Donald Barr: he served in US intelligence during WWII, and wrote a sci-fi book featuring child sex slaves
  - jl6 8mo ago
    Also the Epstein-Barr virus causes Mono, the clone of .NET, which was created by Bill Gates, known associate of Epstein, whose father was president of the Washington State Bar Association. And you know who else works in Washington? Join the dots, people.
    - Henchman21 8mo ago
      This might be my fav HN comment ever. Well done!
    - underlipton 8mo ago
      We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right, at which point we call them "right". And somewhere in between, if they manage to get a job, we call them "Simpsons writers."
      - weregiraffe 7mo ago
        >We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right They are never right, but boy do they love to pretend they are.
        qsera 7mo ago
        They are never right, even when they are right; they are only right 50 years down the road....at which point no one cares..
- tialaramex 8mo ago
  Ghislaine's father (Robert Maxwell) was also a terrible person but for different reasons. Robert Maxwell was a crook, he used pension funds (supposed to be ring-fenced for the benefit of the pensioners) to prop up his companies, so, after his slightly mysterious death it was discovered that basically there's no money to pay people who've been assured of a pension when they retire. He was also very litigious. If you said he was a crook when he was alive you'd better hope you can prove it and that you have funding to stay in the fight until you do. So this means the sort of people who call out crooks were especially unhappy about Robert Maxwell because he was a crook and he might sue you if you pointed it out.
- bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
  I believe by saying it is coincidental they are saying there is probably no relevance, just an interesting piece of trivia, why put out this interesting piece of trivia? Because maybe someone will be able to make an argument of relevance.
  - pocksuppet 8mo ago
    It's more than coincidental, but tangential to the point. It shows crime runs in families.
- bartread 8mo ago
  If you want to know more about the history of Pergamon Press there's a great Behind the Bastards episode on Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell's father) - who himself was a scumbag in a variety of ways that were entirely distinct from Ghislaine Maxwell's brand of scumbaggery - that covers this. Might even be a multipart episode - it's a while since I've listened to it, but I have a feeling it's at least a two parter.
- pessimizer 8mo ago
  "Coincidental" means random, with no causal connection being explicitly claimed. It just means that two things share some characteristic (such as being relatives.) The thing that is coincidental is that the person who founded the company being discussed is also the father of another person who current events have brought into prominence. It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause. So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - john_strinlai 8mo ago
    sorry. what is the relevance to the discussion about journals and peer review is my main question. if i randomly mentioned that your name appears to be an alternate spelling of a 3-band active EQ guitar pedal, coincidentally sharing all of the letters except one, in my reply to you, most people would be confused. that is how i felt when randomly reading "Ghislaine Maxwell" in this context of journals and peer review.
- SimianSci 7mo ago
  People have always been fascinated by where they might find monsters. This one so happens to be in our history, so many will find it noteworthy.
leoc 8mo ago
I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.
- assaddayinh 8mo ago
  [dead]
- pdfernhout 8mo ago
  A deeper issue from the post-war era and science according to Dr. David Goostein, then vice-provost of Caltech from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.c... "The crises that face science [from the ending of exponential growth in science funding after the Cold War period] are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists. The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common. Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science. Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past. ..." The paper may have a point in that the internet makes possible a certain scale of deception via paper mills and brokers and such -- but the motivation to use the internet that way comes from the growing financial pressures that Dr. Goodstein identified.
throwaway27448 8mo ago
> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.
- LarsDu88 8mo ago
  Fun fact, he almost got the worldwide console rights to Tetris back in the 80s, and tried going to Soviet officials to get those rights. To the point he's the antagonist of a recent "Tetris" movie that came out.
  - throwaway27448 8mo ago
    This is a fun fact, thank you.
- lovich 8mo ago
  Never knew of the guy but what a terrible sounding person from his Wikipedia at least. Shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree I guess.
butILoveLife 8mo ago
>scientists focused on quality not quantity. I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature. He didn't look at methodology or data. From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method. It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.
- fc417fc802 8mo ago
  When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? People are constantly filtering everything based on heuristics. The important thing is to know how deep to look in any given situation. Hopefully the person you're referring to is proficient at that. Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
  - irishcoffee 8mo ago
    > When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? It is if what you read is factually incorrect, yes. For example, I have read in a textbook that the tongue has very specific regions for taste. This is patently false. > Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job. So, we should probably just discount half of what we read from research scientists as "bad at their job" and not pay much attention to it? Which half? Why are you defending corruption?
    - cyberax 8mo ago
      The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself. You likely have your own deadlines, and/or you want to do something more interesting than replicating statistical tests from a random paper.
underlipton 8mo ago
Some "fun" reading on the subject of Mr. Maxwell: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines tl;dr He is the bridge that uncomfortably links Biden's former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Jeffrey Epstein and Mossad. Hence, *gestures at the last couple of weeks and years*. Dude was just, like, Fraud Central, apparently.
canjobear 8mo ago
Peer review existed before 1951 in the US at least. See for example Einstein’s reaction to negative reviews when he tried to publish in Physical Review in 1935 https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-think-of-peer-review/ https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-t...
jayde2767 8mo ago
I wish you had highlighted or bolded "cartel", which is exactly how those industry players act.
DoctorOetker 8mo ago
100% this. What is currently called "peer review" didn't exist back then, back then the meaning of "peer review" was just the back and forth happening in the open academic literature. Note the inevitable lack of finality in the original concept of peer review, a discussion in the scientific community could go on for 100's of years before being finally resolved. The current concept of "peer review" is closer to the concept of a delegation of some opaque ministry of truth composed of some opaquely selected experts (who often truly intend well) to settle in a short duration the finality. Some measurements or experiments or questions to be settled can be very actionable and provide highly accurate results, others require much longer gathering of data to draw a clear picture. The modern concept of "peer review" tries to sell the idea of almost immediate finality, like an economic transaction. In reality it is selling just the illusion, and creating lots of victims ranging from truth, individuals, departments institutions, or even entire fields (think of the replication crisis in psychology) along with any patients or others they treat.
ArchieScrivener 8mo ago
Hey man, trust the science.

john_strinlai 8mo ago

>Pergamon Press in 1951 (coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father) perhaps a bit off-topic, but what is coincidental about this and/or what is the relevance of Ghislaine Maxwell here?

benterix 8mo ago
It's useless, but I'm ashamed to admit I found this tiny piece of trivia interesting.
- readthenotes1 8mo ago
  Like the paywall blocking many scientific arti6, perhaps it would be best if we released also the Epstein Files?
anonymars 8mo ago
I imagine it's the interesting peculiarity that the same people seem to crop up over and over and over again. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon or something, except it's like one or two degrees. As George Carlin said, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it" For example Donald Barr (father of twice-former US Attorney General Bill Barr) hiring college-dropout Jeffrey Epstein whilst headmaster at the elite Dalton School Additional fun facts about Donald Barr: he served in US intelligence during WWII, and wrote a sci-fi book featuring child sex slaves
- jl6 8mo ago
  Also the Epstein-Barr virus causes Mono, the clone of .NET, which was created by Bill Gates, known associate of Epstein, whose father was president of the Washington State Bar Association. And you know who else works in Washington? Join the dots, people.
  - Henchman21 8mo ago
    This might be my fav HN comment ever. Well done!
  - underlipton 8mo ago
    We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right, at which point we call them "right". And somewhere in between, if they manage to get a job, we call them "Simpsons writers."
    - weregiraffe 7mo ago
      >We call people who make connections like these "conspiracy theorists," until they're right They are never right, but boy do they love to pretend they are.
      - qsera 7mo ago
        They are never right, even when they are right; they are only right 50 years down the road....at which point no one cares..
tialaramex 8mo ago
Ghislaine's father (Robert Maxwell) was also a terrible person but for different reasons. Robert Maxwell was a crook, he used pension funds (supposed to be ring-fenced for the benefit of the pensioners) to prop up his companies, so, after his slightly mysterious death it was discovered that basically there's no money to pay people who've been assured of a pension when they retire. He was also very litigious. If you said he was a crook when he was alive you'd better hope you can prove it and that you have funding to stay in the fight until you do. So this means the sort of people who call out crooks were especially unhappy about Robert Maxwell because he was a crook and he might sue you if you pointed it out.
bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
I believe by saying it is coincidental they are saying there is probably no relevance, just an interesting piece of trivia, why put out this interesting piece of trivia? Because maybe someone will be able to make an argument of relevance.
- pocksuppet 8mo ago
  It's more than coincidental, but tangential to the point. It shows crime runs in families.
bartread 8mo ago
If you want to know more about the history of Pergamon Press there's a great Behind the Bastards episode on Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell's father) - who himself was a scumbag in a variety of ways that were entirely distinct from Ghislaine Maxwell's brand of scumbaggery - that covers this. Might even be a multipart episode - it's a while since I've listened to it, but I have a feeling it's at least a two parter.
pessimizer 8mo ago
"Coincidental" means random, with no causal connection being explicitly claimed. It just means that two things share some characteristic (such as being relatives.) The thing that is coincidental is that the person who founded the company being discussed is also the father of another person who current events have brought into prominence. It's why you would say something like "more than coincidental" if you were trying to make some causal claim, like one thing causing the other, or both things coming from the same cause. So, "What is coincidental about that?" is a weird question. It reads as a rhetorical claim of a causal connection through asking for a denial or a disproof of one.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- john_strinlai 8mo ago
  sorry. what is the relevance to the discussion about journals and peer review is my main question. if i randomly mentioned that your name appears to be an alternate spelling of a 3-band active EQ guitar pedal, coincidentally sharing all of the letters except one, in my reply to you, most people would be confused. that is how i felt when randomly reading "Ghislaine Maxwell" in this context of journals and peer review.
SimianSci 7mo ago
People have always been fascinated by where they might find monsters. This one so happens to be in our history, so many will find it noteworthy.

leoc 8mo ago

I'm not sure that the system was ever that near to perfection: for example, John Maddox of Nature didn't like the advent of pre-publication peer review, but that presumably had something to do with it limiting his discretion to approve and desk-reject whatever he wanted. But in any case it (like other aspects of the cozy interwar and then wartime scientific world) could surely never have survived the huge scaling-up that had already begun in the post-war era and created the pressure to switch to pre-publication peer reivew in the first place.

assaddayinh 8mo ago
[dead]
pdfernhout 8mo ago
A deeper issue from the post-war era and science according to Dr. David Goostein, then vice-provost of Caltech from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240213233731/https://www.its.c... "The crises that face science [from the ending of exponential growth in science funding after the Cold War period] are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists. The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common. Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science. Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face. We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past. ..." The paper may have a point in that the internet makes possible a certain scale of deception via paper mills and brokers and such -- but the motivation to use the internet that way comes from the growing financial pressures that Dr. Goodstein identified.

throwaway27448 8mo ago

> coincidentally founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father A crazy world we live in where Robert Maxwell's daughter is more notorious than he is.

LarsDu88 8mo ago
Fun fact, he almost got the worldwide console rights to Tetris back in the 80s, and tried going to Soviet officials to get those rights. To the point he's the antagonist of a recent "Tetris" movie that came out.
- throwaway27448 8mo ago
  This is a fun fact, thank you.
lovich 8mo ago
Never knew of the guy but what a terrible sounding person from his Wikipedia at least. Shit apple doesn’t fall far from the shit tree I guess.

butILoveLife 8mo ago

>scientists focused on quality not quantity. I know a PhD professor doing post doc or something, and he accepted a scientific study just because it was published in Nature. He didn't look at methodology or data. From that point forward, I have never really respected Academia. They seem like bottom floor scientists who never truly understood the scientific method. It helped that a year later Ivys had their cheating scandals, fake data, and academia wide replication crisis.

fc417fc802 8mo ago
When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? People are constantly filtering everything based on heuristics. The important thing is to know how deep to look in any given situation. Hopefully the person you're referring to is proficient at that. Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job.
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  > When I read something in a textbook I blindly believe it, depending on the broader context and the textbook in question. Is that a bad thing? It is if what you read is factually incorrect, yes. For example, I have read in a textbook that the tongue has very specific regions for taste. This is patently false. > Keep in mind that research scientists need to keep abreast of far more developments than any human could possibly study in detail. Also that 50% of people are below average at their job. So, we should probably just discount half of what we read from research scientists as "bad at their job" and not pay much attention to it? Which half? Why are you defending corruption?
  - cyberax 8mo ago
    The problem is that you can't just verify everything yourself. You likely have your own deadlines, and/or you want to do something more interesting than replicating statistical tests from a random paper.

underlipton 8mo ago

Some "fun" reading on the subject of Mr. Maxwell: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/red-lines tl;dr He is the bridge that uncomfortably links Biden's former Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to Jeffrey Epstein and Mossad. Hence, *gestures at the last couple of weeks and years*. Dude was just, like, Fraud Central, apparently.

canjobear 8mo ago

Peer review existed before 1951 in the US at least. See for example Einstein’s reaction to negative reviews when he tried to publish in Physical Review in 1935 https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-think-of-peer-review/ https://paeditorial.co.uk/post/albert-einstein-what-did-he-t...

jayde2767 8mo ago

I wish you had highlighted or bolded "cartel", which is exactly how those industry players act.

DoctorOetker 8mo ago

100% this. What is currently called "peer review" didn't exist back then, back then the meaning of "peer review" was just the back and forth happening in the open academic literature. Note the inevitable lack of finality in the original concept of peer review, a discussion in the scientific community could go on for 100's of years before being finally resolved. The current concept of "peer review" is closer to the concept of a delegation of some opaque ministry of truth composed of some opaquely selected experts (who often truly intend well) to settle in a short duration the finality. Some measurements or experiments or questions to be settled can be very actionable and provide highly accurate results, others require much longer gathering of data to draw a clear picture. The modern concept of "peer review" tries to sell the idea of almost immediate finality, like an economic transaction. In reality it is selling just the illusion, and creating lots of victims ranging from truth, individuals, departments institutions, or even entire fields (think of the replication crisis in psychology) along with any patients or others they treat.

ArchieScrivener 8mo ago

Hey man, trust the science.