I don't know, this whole 'marketplace of ideas' thing is still very popular in politics and media (perhaps not academia; but what does academia count for in a neoliberal world?)
I'll tell you first hand, my advisor who is among those top 100, accretes citations like a black hole because he/she is famous, sits on committees (at uni and a national lab), speaks in front of Congress etc etc etc. and thus gets invited to be a coauthor on a billion papers a year (and not because of his/her brilliance).
Also if you think program committees and reviewers don't know who wrote a paper when the same group has been submitting to the same top conference every year for over a decade then I have a bridge to sell you.
Getting to speak on a conference is easier than publishing in a periodic.
This is because people form trapped priors and so some scientific advances come "one funeral at a time", but it's equally dangerous to think that science won't or cannot form clear consensus on observable, factual matters or that if there isn't always meritocracy, then there must be none.
Science is the only reason we can even have this conversation right now, after all.
Eg Douglas Prasher did nobel prize winning work but couldn’t stay in academia.
Virginijus Siksnys did nobel prize work but never got the nobel prize.
The list goes on at the nobel prize level, so just consider the people who fall through the cracks for first class work, but not nobel prize level.
This whole thread is a cesspool of bait and switch and moving of goalposts surrounding the idea of meritocracy. Has the Hacker News community always been so dogmatic about such topics, or is this a recent trend I’m observing in the last few years?
I don’t know what kind of goalposts you’re thinking about, but doing nobel prize work but not being able to have a career in science is evidence that people fall through the cracks of this supposed meritocratic structure.
The comment of mine you were replying to describes an example of the moving of goal posts; conflating the merit of the issuing of accolades with the merit of recognition of work allows one to fallaciously reject the notion of merit altogether if one of these definitions of merit fails. Yet clearly, they are not the same thing.
For what it's worth, meritocracy is not a topic that I have a concrete stance on (yet). However, the top comments for this topic lacks nuance, and resorts to the kind of motte and bailey arguments I remarked about earlier. Imagine trying to have a productive conversation about anti-corruption, only to get remarks like "anti-corruption has failed with respect to my specific conception of anti-corruption in some specific scenario, therefore anti-corruption as a whole is a terrible goal or ideal". Given how broad the notion of "anti-corruption" can be, someone's specific conception of it in some scenario doesn't (necessarily) represent every conception or instantiation of the notion of anti-corruption. It's in this broadness where nuance can be found, and unfortunately, I don't find that in the top comments.
Given the huge technological advances of even just the past few decades, that's a pretty hard sell.
Try quoting my first paragraph instead
>>“Maybe from a far it seems that it is a meritocracy but there are documented examples of people falling through the cracks.”
Some nuance in the discussion would be appreciated.
I'm not here trying to refute the idea that sometimes people get passed over undeservedly, I'm refuting the all too common idea that this means that meritocracy is binary and anyone ever getting passed over means that merit doesn't exist and cannot be recognized.
If you don't hold that idea then good, we don't have to argue.
The Church is not a country and never was? And Galileo was forced to recant then spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Church defeated him.
> Science is meritocratic in the sense that even the small guy has a chance of fighting the machine as eventually things need to be defended on their technical merits
Nobody who has followed the shenanigans of scientific institutions in the last decade believes this anymore, sorry. Modern science consists of credentialed charlatans plying entirely fraudulent claims and those being accepted, over and over, with no end in sight, and everyone who tries to point out the problems in The Science end up being cancelled or burning out because the employers of said charlatans are the modern Church. They simply do not care if their people tell the truth or not.
Using Galileo as the standard of the suppression of free thought is sorta painting the Church as overzealously standing up for good science, not highlighting the Church as an enemy of truth.
1. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd... 2. https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/galileo%E2%80%99s-gr...
The Papal states were literally a country, although surely not the largest in Europe. Galileo did not live there but rather in the Duchy of Florence (later Grand Duchy of Tuscany); however, as a Catholic he could still be tried by the Inquisition, which was essentially the Interpol of heresy.
Which is why it is especially important to have different expectations regarding newer science with little data and testing. But that's still where all the active research is going to happen.