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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Why not? The idea that the only valid way to publish a scientific result is in a (so-called) peer-reviewed journal is a relic from 200 years ago when the scientific community was small enough to fit within the monkeysphere [1]. It is being clung to only because it is profitable for a small group of powerful academics and publishing houses, not because it has any actual merit in terms of the advancement of science. In fact, it's probably in no small measure responsible for contemporary replication crises. I'm as staunch an advocate of the scientific method as you will hope to find (I'm writing a book about it!) but IMHO traditional peer review is long past its sell-by date.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

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Because Discord is a proprietary glorified IRC SaaS; its contents are, by nature, ephemeral and under control of the vendor. I'd expect such links to rot very quickly.

Collaborating on Discord is fine. Important results, including citations backing them, should really be published or at least replicated in more durable medium that's less susceptible to link rot, and easier to archive. Today, that's PDFs in paper repositories, or even regular blog posts.

I don't see any reason why the original publication venue has to end up being the canonical reference. That's not even true for traditional peer-reviewed papers. Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them.

The right way to reference scientific publications is by URN [1], not URL. That makes the location irrelevant, as it should be.

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

> Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers? I haven't. I suspect that these are extremely rare and valuable collectors items and only trained archivists are even allowed to handle them.

I'm not sure that they're collector's items, but they're probably not in that many university libraries. For example, the University of Michigan library has a physical copy in its special collection, but my university's considerably smaller library does not. But that's just because of age: this is a 119-year-old paper; were it a little younger, say, about 70 years, it would be in my university's holdings. I think that's a considerably different order of magnitude of its lifetime from a Discord link that I'd be absolutely astounded to see last a decade, and that in practice will probably last much less time than that.

What difference does it make if the original lasts a year or a century? The original is irrelevant except for historical purposes. What matters from a scientific point of view is that the results withstand scrutiny, and that they are reliably replicated and accessible.

We discover new approaches to replication all the time. Have you never come across foundational papers and arguments that everyone loved at the time, but made big methodological mistakes that led to the wrong conclusion? Or worse, found a source everyone references based on yet other secondary sources, only to look at the original context to discover that everyone's been misquoting it for decades? That happens regularly.

In this case, Ligocki's presentation of the proofs in the blog post is really more rigorous than anything that went on in the Discord server. There's not some golden Truth in there that's being imperfectly mediated; it's just about the attribution. You might have more of a point for results originating from programmatic searches, but that's why the programs are all published outside of Discord, so their output can be replicated.

Sure, but I don't see what that has to do with the choice of publication venue. All of these things happen in traditional peer-review publications too.

> Have you ever seen an original physical copy of, say, Einstein's annus mirabilis papers

I was a grad student at the institute for theoretical physics in Heidelberg. It's famously housed in two old villas with little room for books, so all the walls in almost all rooms are lined with shelfs. In the office I shared with five other students, there was one shelf in it that was locked. The only one in the building. In it was one book from 1905 that had a different color than all the others.

That's the physical copy of the papers you mean. They had issues with theft so they had to have it replaced and then lock it. It probably wasn't even original though.

MySpace: 16 years (2003–2019) Friendster: 12 years (2002–2013) Google+: 8 years (2011–2019) Vine: 4 years (2013–2017) Orkut: 10 years (2004–2014) Path: 8 years (2010–2018) Yik Yak: 4 years (2013–2017) Meerkat: 2 years (2015–2017) Windows Live Messenger (MSN Messenger): 15 years (1999–2014) AIM (AOL Instant Messenger): 20 years (1997–2017) ICQ: Ongoing (since 1996) but significantly declined after the early 2000s Yahoo Messenger: 20 years (1998–2018) Bebo: 14 years (2005–2019, relaunched in 2021) Google Wave: 2 years (2009–2011) Ping (Apple): 2 years (2010–2012) Discord: 8 years (2015-)

so clearly discord is inherently different and here to stay forever! /s

feels like time is a circle sometimes ha

Even with services that lived over a decade, it's not clear whether messages were accessible for all that time. E.g. Google Talk/Meet/Whatever seemingly lost all messages before ~2013. Links to Facebook posts tend to die quickly, as both users and Meta itself seem to constantly play with privacy features. Etc.

I really like your point (I'm one of bbchallenge maintainers). I think that Discord is close to optimal for us in the short term, but bad for the reasons you and other have mentioned mid/long term.

ICQ 1996- June 26th, 2024.

It’s shuttering.

To be fair, the responsibility for the replication crises is much trickier. It’s based on human motivations and poor science:

1. Outright fraud

2. Lack of independent verification of results before building up a body of work resulting in a bunch of garbage. Contributes to making #1 “easy”.

3. Financial pressures to publish or perish contributing to 1 & 2. If peer review didn’t exist you’d still something similar about producing “recognized” results. This is also probably why we haven’t done any major breakthroughs in particle physics which now has a much longer term thinking phase to come up with anything.

The biggest problem with peer review is actually the establishment of an orthodoxy which discourages itself being upended by controlling the career success of anyone who dare challenge it - you have to support the orthodoxy to get career success and you fail to get recognition if your idea challenges the peer reviewers ideas and careers. That being said, such pressures existed before, but at least you could try to build your own following and it was competing orthodoxies instead of a single one winning out.

> Financial pressures to publish or perish

But those only exist because of the current peer-review model. There is a huge non-linearity built in to the publication process that provides disproportionate rewards for conning a small number of people, fewer than half a dozen. That, combined with a presumption of trustworthiness, produces a perverse incentive for attempting such cons because they are very easy to pull off, much easier than actually doing good science.

The rewards come from the grant model which I forgot to mention and also has similar problems to peer review. The stipulation to publish is a secondary effect. If peer review didn’t exist there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field.

> there would still be pressure to show that you somehow convinced the leading experts in the field

And how do you tell who are the leading experts in the field?

It doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of ways. Tenure, those who get cited the most as contributing to other works, whoever manages to shmooze their way onto the grant review board, whoever has been doing “good” work in a space etc etc. If you think that peer review is the only way status is established, I’m afraid you’re failing to grok how humans work - we’re very status oriented and will come up with any mechanism to formalize and broadcast that status and academia and the scientific world is not immune from this.

> Tenure

And how do you think that gets decided?

> those who get cited the most

And how do you get cited without first getting published in a peer-reviewed publication?

> whoever manages to shmooze their way onto the grant review board

Do you think it's possible to do that without a publication record?

> whoever has been doing “good” work in a space

As decided by whom?

The point is that the current system is based on a small cadre of people assessing each other's work on the assumption that they are all competent and trustworthy. The bigger the community, the easier it becomes to game the system, and the bigger the incentives to do so, and so the less reliable traditional peer review becomes as a predictor of scientific quality. To say nothing of the sheer horrible inefficiency. It takes months to do something that should take days. If anything was ever ripe for disruption, it's peer review.

BTW, here is an example of what happens when someone actually sets out to game the system and is fairly good at it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODgYbmmgOss

> And how do you think that gets decided?

Tenure precedes peer review afaik which I think pretty obviously negates this question - humans established tenure somehow so whatever that mechanism was. Peer review as a concept is quite old (17th century) and what these guys did on discord is peer review and collaboration. I’m assuming you’re just using shorthand to refer to journal peer review which is the more recent phenomenon.

> And how do you get cited without first getting published in a peer-reviewed publication?

Citations exist independently of peer review. Not sure why you think you can’t have one without the other. Journals are certainly not the only source cited. For example, math I believe doesn’t even generally use journals and yet citations are going strong there.

> Do you think it's possible to do that without a publication record?

Possible? Of course. Pick 10 random bureaucrats and have them pick admissions at random. Good? Well, now you seem to be arguing the pro publication position as a way of coming up with a better review board. But anyway, yes obviously there are better ways of establishing a grant review board by trying to populate it with some amount of “freethinkers”).

Were agreed that the peer review system sucks for all sorts of reasons but we’re now very far afield from what I was trying to correct which is that the replication crises has many origins and isn’t just the fault of peer reviews. You’d have it even if journals and publish or perish weren’t a thing.

> Tenure precedes peer review afaik

Um, no. Tenure decisions turn largely on publication record, which turns on peer review.

> Citations exist independently of peer review

To cite something there has to be something to cite. It is of course possible to cite a non-peer-reviewed publication, but in academia this is heavily frowned upon. Non-peer-reviewed is generally considered synonymous with crackpottery.

> Pick 10 random bureaucrats

I meant do you think it's possible to "shmooze [your] way onto the grant review board" without a publication record in the real world, not some counterfactual world where you have stacked the deck.

> the replication crises has many origins and isn’t just the fault of peer reviews

I didn't say it was just the fault of peer review. What I said was that peer review was "probably in no small measure responsible for [the] replication crises", and I stand by that.

Ok, so what you seem to have said in this thread is that the system today is a huge contributor to the replication crisis but any suggestion that things could be done differently is met with an endless barrage of questions and resistance that no, it had to be done this way. So your complaint is that there’s a system at all instead of anarchy? Really not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Maybe re-reading my original comment will help clarify: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456188

Not really no. I suggested that you can decouple tenure (1900s) from modern peer review (1970s). Citations aren't an issue when publishing (you can publish anywhere) a result but are maybe more of an issue when you have a collaborative body of work (e.g. closer to open-source software development). But even still you can have citations (e.g. the citation using the Discord channel). For some reason you seemed to take the position that citations are inextractable from peer review. The grant mechanism is definitely a problem because of how it interacts with university funding, but the grant selection mechanism can evolve to be closer to how entrepreneurs work in the business market (which has its own pluses and minuses). What I suggested though is that even if you completely remove the modern peer review system, you'll still be left with the replication crises because. You've seem to have taken issue both with the suggestion that peer review is removable from academia and completely failed to engage with the issues that have nothing to do with peer review.

1. Issues around funding are a higher order problem with peer review only being a symptom at best (if at all). For example, Sabine talks about the issues and focuses on grants and spends 0 time on modern peer review.

2. Fraud didn't come into being because of peer review but grows with funding. The more funding the bigger the problem. Conversely the less funding the more likely proportionally the research is fraudulent or of poor quality because there's a smaller community checking the work. We know that the more funding we spend, the more research activity a field experiences. We don't have good ways to sift out fraud proactively - it takes disproportionately more work to root out fraud and bad science than it is to publish that & reap the rewards. This is true beyond academia - it's easier to spew BS than it is to explain the truth.

3. Not registering for null results has nothing to do with peer review. It's more just "hey I did this work and I'm not going to get rewarded so I'm not going to bother spending the work to publish the null result". That exists independent of the modern peer review system & even publish/perish is ancillary to this - a null result amounts to "failure" emotionally and that can be hard to deal with. That's why there's systems now to mandate pre-registration of the experiment - so that meta analysis can determine whether or not a result has actually been replicated enough to reduce the risk of p-hacking.

4. The replication crises for particle physics is a stark example how peer review is not really contributing as much. There's two schools of thought. The first is that we just follow the math and use data to refine which mathematical model to pick. The second is that we need to come up with better philosophical underpinnings for what the math is telling us. For now the first school is winning in terms of funding dollars (& results), but it's really hard to determine a priori which path is actually the one we should be following. Moreover, the orthodoxy exists independent of the peer review system (& even independent of grant proposals).

> Not really no.

Well, then I don't know what to tell you. My point is that the contemporary peer review process is still operating under constraints that date back to the pre-internet age, and so that process could probably stand to be improved, and using the web might be part of that, and so the presence of a discord link as a citation is not necessarily something to lament. It might be part of the solution rather than the problem.

> > Tenure precedes peer review afaik

> Um, no. Tenure decisions turn largely on publication record, which turns on peer review.

I'm pretty sure your parent meant that the concept of tenure precedes the concept of peer review. However, this too seems to be false, according to the repository of truth, Wikipedia, which says that:

> The first record of an editorial pre-publication peer-review is from 1665 by Henry Oldenburg, the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society at the Royal Society of London.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review) but:

> Tenure was introduced into American universities in the early 1900s in part to prevent the arbitrary dismissal of faculty members who expressed unpopular views.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_tenure).

> I'm pretty sure your parent meant that the concept of tenure precedes the concept of peer review.

Even if that were true, what does the historical development of these institutions have to do with the claim that contemporary peer review is responsible for the contemporary replication crisis?

Yeah I obviously am taking about the peer reviewed journal not peer review as a concept (which is how this discussion started). ~~But it does look like tenure is after journals not before.~~ Correction: peer review as we know of began in the mid 1970s, so tenure precedes the modern peer review system.

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