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Comment by onhn | Hacker News Reader

"You can upload your research and publish it on the open web. Members of the community will be able to vote on your research to raise its visibility."

Oh dear.

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How would you set it up? The decentralized world doesn't really have a great system for curation at this point (unless you can point to a counterexample!), and so I'm in favor of any sort of playing around with decentralized voting/curation until we find something that seems to be working well.

Start from the objective of first do no harm. Voting systems may eventually be gamed to distort results, so eliminate the voting system. Instead rely on ad-hoc personal networks to disseminate signal about quality papers out-of-band. Don’t assume you have to systematize everything.

Voting (as was bore out in many examples including digg.com and elsewhere) becomes a mob rule situation and variation of tyranny of the commons without a novelty algorithm in addition to total votes. If you just go by totals, it will be easily gamified and rendered useless as a metric.

The standard and most effective form of curation in science is the reference list at the end of a paper.

But usually you just read everything that is relevant to your research interests from the daily arxiv posting.

A perfect system? No, but think about how people must have felt about Wikipedia on launch.

Love this idea.

Actually I don't think science has democratic nature. Yes we do somehow do that as a theory would still need to be accepted widely. But in reality one person can have the correct idea while all others disagree. Still this person is doing it right.

I believe science is a democratic process. If someone has the correct idea but communicates it poorly, so poorly that others in the field disagree, then this person is doing it wrong. (Thinking specifically of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Mochizuki )

The participation ought to be democratic in the sense of being open to everyone to participate. But, you can't do a vote and use it to decide who is right. Deep down we know that being right or wrong is independent from the scientific consensus. Mochizuki may be interacting with the scientific community in the wrong way, but it has no bearing on whether his theory is correct.

The consensus itself has some democratic features, but it's weighed by prestige and adherence to the current paradigm. I think Kuhn described its mechanism pretty well. It's far easier to convince people of a wrong result if you follow the established paradigm, than convince people of something right if you go against it. What really saves science from being pure dogma is that there are paradigm shifts, revolutions in which the scientific consensus change.

All and all it is a non trivial problem. You have at the very least have to attach some kind of form of reputation system into the verification process. Even with that you will still have the "misunderstood genius" issue, or the "excellent reputation professor" that everyone trust without (enough) verification.

But at least there’s be a system for other researchers to record “failed to replicate” that could give a channel to critique reputable professors that’s not controlled by the same professors (as they often can in journals).

Scientific consensus is democratic in nature (even though votes are not distributed evenly). The ideal is that through reproducible experiments and application of the scientific method the scientific consensus moves to increasingly accurate models of reality over time. But obviously the speed at which that happens varies, and some right ideas took annoyingly long to get accepted into scientific consensus.

Sure the right answer will eventually prevail but the process is much worse than we like to admit. Many breakthrough advances were outright rejected by contemporary peers when first proposed.

"Fermi first submitted his "tentative" theory of beta decay to the prestigious science journal Nature, which rejected it "because it contained speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader." Nature later admitted the rejection to be one of the great editorial blunders in its history. ... Fermi found the initial rejection of the paper so troubling that he decided to take some time off from theoretical physics, and do only experimental physics" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%27s_interaction

Using Wikipedia as an example of a seemingly naïve idea that was ultimately proven to work is a pretty bad argument that completely ignores how Wikipedia operates at the moment.

It's routinely used for propagating smears:

https://odysee.com/@AlisonMorrow:6/how-wikipedia-decides-if-...

Even one of its co-founders says it's failing as an accurate source of information:

https://odysee.com/@TimcastIRL:8/former-founder-of-wikipedia...

Just like Jaron Lanier predicted in 2006:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...

I never understood why so many technologists vehemently defend a website that was obviously prone to a form of "regulatory capture" and groupthink.

Larry Sanger has made something of a career out of being "the cofounder of Wikipedia who thinks it's getting it all wrong". There's a point at which the latest iteration of his criticism ceases to be a stop-the-presses newsworthy event.

Sanger wrote a great set of essays, largely based on the lecture notes of courses he taught as an academic, that seeded Wikipedia with a load of freely licensed content that kickstarted the whole enterprise. It's quite possible that without this initial burst of momentum, Wikipedia would have failed. For that he has earned and will never lose recognition. But the negative part of his critique of Wikipedia is not more searching than that Wikipedia editors perform on themselves without his help, and his series of suggestions for positive alternatives have lost credibility because his ideas never work.

I still pay attention to what Sanger says, but not with a high expectation that what he says will be exceptionally insightful.

In all my experience using wikipedia it has been successful at providing facts and accurate references.

I don't mean to attack the speaker here, but that former cofounder of wikipedia you just cited... isn't he an extremist neo-conservative? Why did he leave wikipedia in the first place? What are his proposed solutions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA0l1JXhLaI&t=19s

Sounds amazing to me

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