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Comment by ThereIsNoWorry | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely a systemic problem. A problem that will not be changed or solved within our lifetimes, that's for sure.

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> A problem that will not be changed or solved within our lifetimes

Honestly, I don't like opinions like this. That's just passing off the work that needs to be done to fix these problems. It wasn't even a hundred years ago when people published more in the open and the publish or perish paradigm didn't exist. The latter is a relatively tool, and collapsed because Goodhart's Law.

We can make the changes, but not with defeatist attitudes.

Fair point. I was just thinking that one sensible change could be to publish everything without significant constraints on open platforms. Then, in some way, the community and some moderate moderation would basically decide which papers and researchers get "famous". In the best case, that would result in more true "breakthroughs", but reflecting about how social media works (incentives to constantly push narratives, hype and simple "truths" that explain complex world issues) at the moment, that seems a bit too optimistic. That's why I peddled back to "not solvable within our lifetimes". Who knows. I'd like to do research, but if I go into academia I'd be immensely constrained and would have no freedom what to work on. The only viable option is to become sufficiently wealthy to fund myself and my ideas. Would be nice, even if a tiny bit unrealistic.

There's a double edged sword here. Currently CVPR has a social media ban that is extremely strict. I've definitely been seeing Twitter act differently than it normally does around this so we'll see if it works. But why this matters here is that there's an incredibly strong correlation between the popularity of the lab, the amount of eyes that can read the preprint (with authors names), and acceptance at top conferences (i.e. CVPR). I often say that double blind only exists for small fries. But even still, big labs will get more likes from twitter accounts that post arxiv papers. There are plenty of means to bypass this social media ban.

But even from this experiment we can see that there are people actively trying the fix the situation. Likely naive, but something is better than nothing. I wish there would be more push for ACs and Meta Reviewers having the highest standards, but this is where we are.

I am totally for us abandoning journals and conferences and just publishing to arxiv and open review. This is exactly what I would do if I was independently wealthy and could research without the constraints that I am in. But we also need to recognize the issues with this and that popularity and outreach ability greatly affect perceptions of quality of the paper. That this is not meritocratic.

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