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Comment by golemotron | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing that none of the commenters so far seem to acknowledge that competition for prestige is one of the forces that fuels research. Take that away people will be less aggressive about pursuing and investing their time in valuable areas of inquiry.

There are downsides to competition but there are considerable upsides also. The bet we make in our culture is that the upsides outweigh the downsides, and based on history it seems to be true.

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Based on history we can observe that we do make scientific progress, but you don't have the data to claim that it is true that the upsides outweigh the downsides. The downsides could very well outweigh the upsides but still allow for progress. What's meaningful is to compare vs an actual prestigeless system and see which is more effective -- does the search for prestige outweigh the corruption?

How could you test a prestige less system properly?

By finding an existing system that shares common properties with the academic system but in which there is no competition for prestige.

I don't know, maybe documentation writing? Or classified papers?

I think making publications anonymous when initially published and add names later would work.

If the publication includes source code, must the copyright information be scrubbed?

If the publication concerns a software project, can the publication link to where to get the source code, on a site with the authors' names? Or is the program name and/or author names also be anonymized?

there's been work on writing stylometry, namely detecting authors by style of writing. Now academic papers might be a combination of enough authors that the results are not easily classifiable, but still, just stripping author names is not enough.

You can also tell quite a bit based upon the citations. I've been able to guess at who was the original author based on how the paper was written/structured and the citations.

You can also guess who writes reviews. There was this one guy who got pissed off at me at a conference for nonchalantly discussing who I thought the reviewers on our paper were... whatever man, it's my review now.

It would probably be infeasible to judge every single paper purely on its merits. Reputation may be an imperfect proxy for merit, but it's certainly not worthless.

In any event, this argument is there and needs to be taken seriously.

> It would probably be infeasible to judge every single paper purely on its merits.

I thought that was the point of peer reviewing them.

Peer review isn't such an efficient process. There is lots of evidence of this.

Prestige from whom though? Many of these researchers are chasing money first, knowledge second (as they should). And, they know that the big money will pay them orders of magnitudes more if they're 'Prestigious'.

It's the same reason why my RSS feed is more likely filled with junk articles today than it was 5 years ago. It's a game of quantity as much as quality.

The researchers are chasing grants and funding to be able to carry out research.

You don't go into research if money is your motivating factor - there are plenty of easier ways to earn a living.

Neuromancer fan I see :)

> You don't go into research if money is your motivating factor - there are plenty of easier ways to earn a living.

Seconded. Just made the switch to industry a couple of months ago and I'm making twice as much for half the hours. Academia is looking more and more like slave labour to me these days.

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