this sounds like the science equivalent of how search engines lead to the creation of content farms. citation scores are to spam science as pagerank is to wikihow?
Imagine going through life with a high-tech spam filter from the future that can filter out wikihow and boring science. Impossible to build, I suspect, but that would be the life.
Or a science equivalent to what money and market competition does with all human ventures. You need more and faster than your competitors to progress, else you'll fall into obscurity. "First to publish" is isomorphic to "first to market". If you treat research as a videogame, citations fit perfectly as an in-game currency.
That is to say, it's an example of a general problem of optimizing short-term metrics, which are a decent proxy of the actual goal up to a point.
Science could definitely use a spam filter. Journals unfortunately do a poor way of being one; they're thoroughly gamed, the same way Google is via SEO.
Nothing about markets magically solves the problem that if it's hard to evaluate quality, there will be junk masquerading as quality.
I would love a browser addon that auto-filters out quora, wikihow, w3schools, techcrunch, etc...
None of those garbage sites are what I'm looking for, ever. I think that, amusingly, filtering out the top 5% of best SEO optimized sites would make results much better.
reevaluating our social attitudes towards 'trust in experts' will be an aftermath of the covid crisis, and it may bleed into search & social media as well -- is there value in 'peer-reviewed everything'?
(for some definition of peer)
more that we'll ask a lot of questions about it. when are we trusting them, when should we, are governing bodies making proper space for experts
I think most people in their personal lives don't have access to good expert advisors, maybe outside medicine & car mechanics, maybe not even there
the distracting stuff is ultimately low value
we've cranked up the gain on spam -- spam is our culture's moai
Happily it's available now and it's called intuition. If something is boring then avoid; if something is exciting then pursue.
Problems being that it's purely anecdotal and you have to know and trust yourself. If you're too attracted to prestige, money or job security then it's going to return a distorted signal. Which is why organised science is now bureaucratic and slow despite the fact that there are more scientists than ever before.