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Comment by OakNinja | Hacker News Reader

This is just Sturgeon’s law. If you would reduce the number of students by an order of magnitude you’d still end up with 90% junk papers.

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If you look at the beginning of XX century, university education was much less accessible with much fewer participants, and the results were much more impressive than today across all disciplines

There was also a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit in most fields, because we basically didn't have the technology before, or simply didn't bother to look.

But someone needed to realise it's a low-hanging fruit in the first place. By the end of the XIX century the general agreement was that physics was pretty much done, we are now just polishing the details.

There's a ton of low hanging fruit now - more than ever. Every question answered raises multiple new questions. If there is a lack of opportunity to answer interesting questions, it is certainly not because the questions aren't there.

If you have 10 papers and 9 are shit that's an afternoons worth of work. If you have 10,000 and 9,000 are shit that's three years.

Instead of 1 reviewer, have 10; also, don't we benefit as a society when everyone is more highly educated? Sure, we have a ways to go before we get there, namely with regards to resistance to disinformation training and including more resistance to populism / fascism in the curriculum so that we have a chance to build better and more equal societies.

The fact you couldn't get the math right on how many reviewers we'd need for the situation to not get worse kinda makes my point better than I could.

I think he meant number of reviewers per paper? Not total of reviewers.

BTW, I do think a highly educated society should give everyone capability to review or at minimum distinguish good papers

Sorry, I wish I could blame my callused fingers and the touchscreen, but I didn't stop to do the math, because that's not the point I was addressing.

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