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Comment by bergenty | Hacker News Reader

That’s what we want in society right? Perks for doing hard work and then being recognized for it. That’s what “street cred” is. Maintaining a reputation is hard work and the fast pass and acknowledgment from the broader society is your reward.

As in this person has more than proved himself, let’s not vet him as much.

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This is literally how one of the biggest scandals in academic publishing occurred[1], so... no? Maybe it's a nice way to treat experts when asking them for their opinion, they are experts after all, but we absolutely don't want to give celebrities more leeway than unknowns in research papers where new claims are being made. You better have done the work properly, again, and again, and again. No free passes, no blind trust.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel

In this case it looks like his good reputation was falsified from the start? They were unable to prove misconduct in his dissertation only because the data had been destroyed. So consistently missing his misconduct would be more to blame here than riding on a reputation.

But that ignores the years prior where he had enough reputation to be scrutinized less, which lets him publish more, which made him more famous, which got him scrutinized less, allowing him to keep publishing, boosting his reputation, [etc].

Right up to the very end, this man was able to publish like a celebrity because no on questioned it because he was famous. So let's not bake that into the process: scrutinize all papers equally. Experts don't get a free pass, if they have new claims to make, those claims are just as "I don't believe you yet" as anyone else's.

No. You get gatekeeping and laziness and stale group think and unstated quid pro quo and discrimination. It's worse science.

A famous name getting the same paper published easier is a failure of peer review. The whole point of science is that ideas and evidence stands on its own merit. Not celebrity or seniority or power or any other axis that doesn't matter.

Linus Pauling won _two Nobel prizes_. He also, particularly in later life, got into weird quackery.

You don’t want to go on reputation.

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