Would be interested to hear from someone more involved in the life sciences the exact point when Nature magazine decided to chase that 'Psychology Today' clickbait money.
I think the problem stems from the inability for peer review to adequately test or reproduce papers before they are published. Which gives Nature and Science (which both make a large amount of money from their publishing practices) a lot of leeway to publish 'headline' based science. What bothers me, is that a lot of headline based papers paint a 'either or scenario' - or attempt to proove positives. When in reality, the scientific method can only disprove hypotheses. Only holistic second source papers (review articles) should make large claims; for instance, no single paper prooves the theory of evolution, but rather a large corpus of papers fail to disprove the theory.
An additional problem is accepting anything peer reviewed as valid because it was peer reviewed. Which is the driving force behind the peer review paywall - that peer reviewed artcles are somehow more valid then other forms of communication mediums. This implies that there exist somewhere, a publication format that is infalliable. And since retractions and fraud occur all the time in peer review, there are plenty of counter arguments to disproove this notion.
While this annoys me some, it will never be fixed. The number of 'scientists' that do not employ sound thinking and reason, will always out weigh the number of brilliant minds. There is a reason why almost all science can be traced back to five individuals (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein). These people reached a level of analytical thought that was unmatched. Surely we might be able to argue that they reached the low hanging fruits - but it was really their ability to not accept popular thought, and dismiss assumptions, and in most cases show a revered defiance towards establishments (Galileo especially) because they refused to not appeals to the fact (nullius in verba). So rather then spend a large amount of time to rid the world of bad publishing form - we should just accept it; and unfortunately most of us will never 'free our minds from the allegory of the cave'. And probably even more so for the groups that spend a large amount of advertising and headlines to convince others that they have reached this level of thought.
Wow - that comment got away from me fast; I really only intended to write the first two sentences, and just kept typing.
This list is a bit too short. Most of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics can't be attributed to any of them, and even then it only covers physics.
Einstein is one of the founders of quantum mechanics (1921 Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect). And Newton founded calculus - which procedes any ability to mathematically describe natural observations.
Moreover, saying newton "founded" calculus to mean that all theories that need "ability to mathematically describe natural observations" is same as crediting all theories to al-Khwarizmi because he "founded" algebra!
"Founder of quantum mechanics" - I didn't say founder. I said one of the founding members; Planck, de broglie, einstein, von Neumann. I don't see how quantum mechanics materializes without the foundation created by these thinkers.
> "list of only true scientists" I didn't say list of true scientists. And you inserted 'only' as if I made the claim that this list is comprehensive (i.e. these are the only scientists that ever existed). But rather these scientists paved the way for a lot of scientific advancement in the last two centuries.
Lastly, which this one is more my fault - I clearly didn't explain my thought. Newton's association with calculus was to refute your claim that he only had an influence in the field of physics (he was the Lucasian professor of mathematics after all).
Alternatively, your "quotation" of founded (twice) is smug; and condescending. Further, none of this tit for tat banter is contributing to anything of real or inherent value. Perhaps our time is suited better on something else?
I did not mean to blanket that other scientists do not contribute. And you might be right, my sentament was certainly fast paced and not perfectly thought out. I do go back and fourth on this idea. Sometimes I think that 90% of the science community could disspear and nothing substantial would be lost. Other times I think that that 90% largely contributed to the critical mass needed for a limited number of works to be celebrated over a long period of time. And provide many contributions that are not seen (apparently relativity was floating around in papers for almost a decade before einstein's 1905 paper).
> did not mean to be smug I might have been overly sensitive. I mistook the double use of 'founded' as an attempt to challenge my contextual understanding over the controversy of both calculus and alegbra (which I'm not expert on either topic by any stretch).
I certainly do not want you thinking that I do not appreciate any criticism of my arguments or opinions. I just felt the last comments of ours was going towards a path of 'who did what when', and 'what magnitude of work', etc...
Arxiv lets preprints be published. Would be cool if afterwards they'd have reviews from credentialed users.
I like pre-print services, and I wish they would go one step further and allow people to comment/critic the paper. This way, when you find a paper, you could see all associated thoughts and join the conversation. The really powerful idea behind pre-prints is that it would speed up academic publishing, by eliminating the ~6 month publication time.
The only problem with pre-prints (currently) is they are not widely accepted for academic tenure. With academic publishing being a multi-billion dollar industry, I'm kind of surprised there are not more tech startups working on this issue.
Maybe there is already a good source of experts on Quora or something. Or start a new site where experts are invited.
Yeah I think this would be a great idea. If you had the capture ability of sci-hub with the invite ability of quora to get experts to critic papers. Then add on-top of that some simple blog features like top highlight, sharing, subscribe to citation links, and comment/discussion (that matches HN's no counter productive comments/etc).
The large obstacle would be paywalls - like sci-hub; any attractive paper would be illegal to have on the service; if you simply pulled from pre-prints (arxiv; plos pre-print, etc..) you will probably lose academic disciplines that do not value these services (biology primarily comes to mind). On the other hand, CS would probably embrace it as a complement to their conference publishing culture.
Find me on http://qbix.com/about (click to email me)
Unless the author(s) of something on the arXiv is established, and the paper says something like "submitted to so-and-so journal", you should take everything in arXiv with heaps of salt.
This implies the broad sweep that anything that passes peer review is more valid than anything that does not. I do not feel comfortable with such an argument.