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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

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> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected

This isnt a new thing though.

Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression.

David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this.

Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).

Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...

Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.

Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.

Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.

Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!

You had grad students? Ha, we would'a killed for grad students. Our work was reviewed by two trained pigeons and a dead salmon. And we liked it!

For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc.

But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.

Status quo changes at the speed of snail.

Usually when people die and vacate their seats of power in society.

Or by trillions - the peer review process will no doubt continue, its continued importance maybe in question.

"For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to [...]including practices such as peer review"

Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...

> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected

This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?

In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.

Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.

Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.

No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly.

I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.

You can always send a short polite email to hn@ycombinator.com with corrections you can't make yourself

I did, thanks for the suggestion.

> good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true

In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.

Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:

One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.

[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...

I mean at a top or middle ranked journal. There are tons of predatory journals that will publish anything

Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.

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