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Simply anticipating basic push backs from reviewers makes sure that you do a somewhat thorough job. Not 100% thorough and the reviews are sometimes frivolous an
by bonoboTP 7mo ago
Simply anticipating basic push backs from reviewers makes sure that you do a somewhat thorough job. Not 100% thorough and the reviews are sometimes frivolous and lazy and stupid. But just knowing that what you put out there has to pass the admittedly noisily gatekept gate of peer review overall improves papers in my estimation. There is also a negative side because people try to hide limitations and honest assessments and cherry pick and curate their tables more in anticipation of knee jerk reviewers but overall I think without any peer review, author culture would become much more lax and bombastic and generally trend toward engagement bait and social media attention optimized stuff.
The current balance where people wrote a paper with reviers in mind, upload it to Arxiv before the review concludes and keep it on Arxiv even if rejected is a nice balance. People get to form their own opinion on it but there is also enough self-imposed quality control on it just due to wanting it to pass peer review, that even if it doesn't pass peer review, it is still better than if people write it in a way that doesn't care or anticipate peer review. And this works because people are somewhat incentivized to get peer reviewed official publications too. But being rejected is not the end of the world either because people can already read it and build on it based on Arxiv.
- bjourne 7mo agoI really am not sure about that: https://biologue.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/05/Peer-Review-Nick-Kim-cartoon3-resize.jpg https://biologue.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/05... The problem is that "optimizing for peer-review" is not the same thing as optimizing for quality. E.g., I like to add a few tongue-in-cheeks to entertain the reader. But then I have to worry endlessly about anal-retentive reviewers who refuse to see the big picture.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoCurrently a kind of rule of thumb is that a PhD student can graduate after approximately 3 papers published in a good peer reviewed venue. If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.
- DANmode 7mo agoNo hard rule, no crisis. Maybe we can go back to very opinionated “true” academia, where there are institutional gatekeepers, but they mostly get it right on who to award (and not), vs the current game of “whoever plays ball with funding sources the best = the best academic”, which is obviously bullshit.
- vkou 7mo agoYou'll still need to convince the purseholders to pay you, and they'll want some objective metric to measure your output, and whatever metric they pick will be gamed.
- DANmode 7mo agoThe point of my comment was, in much earlier institutions of knowledge and excellence, the only transparent metric was whether or not they approved you.
- vkou 7mo agoThat ossifies intellectual monocultures, though. (Or, heaven forbid, if someone has a financial conflict of interest in the private sphere...)
- DANmode 7mo agoThe current solution doesn’t resist capture by capital either, and indeed we’re already left with all of the things claimed - the worst of both worlds, really.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoBut this is already how the purse holders operate. A big group of experts get together and vote on which grant proposals within a given category to fund. I think it comes down to how the system is structured and how many players there are. The more difficult it is for a small cult to capture control of the funding (or access to instrumentation or awarding of degrees or whatever) for a given area the less likely you are to end up with a monoculture. Assuming the majority of the funding continues to come from governments then you have a centralized point of leverage that can shape the system. So it should be possible to impose constraints that result in a system that actively prevents monocultures from developing.
- driftnode 7mo ago[dead]