Comment by speak_plainly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by speak_plainly | Hacker News Reader

It's way past due that the university system reevaluates their relationship with journals and the pressures to pump out papers.

Tying professors and researchers careers to the volume of papers they churn out is silly. The result is the antithesis of quality.

Public money is often driving most research but then the results are thrown into an antiquated pay-walled for-profit journal system.

The entire peer review system is rife with issues, from like low-level corruption (like the 'blind' reviewer asking for references in exchange for publishing) to no one even reading the paper.

When some major technology like ChatGPT comes along it's usually a good time to get back to basics while strengthening the foundation through modernization.

I think maybe the problem with academics is that the fundamental paradigm we use to think about scientific contributions is broken. That is, the genius myth, the idea of the lone contributor with the eureka moment that hasn't occurred to anyone else, and so forth and so on. So to stand out, you have to start grasping at all these secondary indicators of skill or contribution or whatever, which leads to everyone doing it, which leads to this runaway process. If you have a bunch of people who don't differ that much, but are incentivized to look like they do, what do you think is going to happen?

It's like Goodheart's law applied to an entire swath of indicators for an entire sector of society.

It's interesting but I think Goodheart's law sort of implies that the metric being gamed is being gamed because there isn't an alternative? Sometimes that might be because what's trying to be measured is difficult to measure, but one possibility is that it's difficult to measure because it doesn't really exist as it's assumed to be.

I'm not trying to say academics are idiots or something like that, if anything the opposite. People in general are just a lot smarter than — or at least don't differ as much — our current dominant schema for scientific contributions recognize.

Also there can be so much elitism, "old boys networks" and general arbitrariness under veneers of "scientific objectivity".

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