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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

For giving away a million bucks, you get to gatekeep however you choose.

But no, peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal is a fairly normal standard.

And just to spell it out, since it looks like HackerNews is flooded by people who are new to science these days: even if a result doesn't come with a price, scholarly peer review is the norm across all of science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review

This is a good reminder for the generation grown up in the era of trust-me-bro benchmarks.

Being normal doesn't necessarily mean it isn't gatekeeping- gatekeeping is also quite "normal" in many cases.

That being said, I think there needs to be some standard, and peer review seems like the best we have come up with. But is the current status quo for scientific publication the best we can do? I think that is an open question and we should be able to openly discuss alternatives.

"Is it the best we can do?" is a completely different question from "given that it's the current standard, should it be applied to this new claim that is happening now?"

The whole "reputable" marker is where it gets into "True Scotsman" territory

and the whole "publishing papers" thing gets called out as a racket even on HN now and then

with many videos against it by former "academia" people on YouTube.

The sooner AI brings down such archaic customs into a gibbering pile of protesting rubble, the better innit?

Depends. What replaces it? Does that replacement do better at keeping false claims out, or worse? Does it do better at letting true claims through, or worse?

One thing's for certain: True and false should not depend on convincing people.

Instead of a committee of subject matter experts they should use a more rigorous and trustworthy standard, like passing the solution to ChatGPT with the prompt "did this win?"

Real true or false - which I define as correspondence (or lack thereof) with reality - does not depend on convincing people. Reality does not change when people become convinced; ideas correspond to reality whether people are convinced or not.

But perceived truth and falsehood depend on convincing people - either convincing them one by one, or else convincing some gatekeeper, whose word will convince those who accept the gatekeeper.

So if an AI proves something but ""rEpUtAbLe"" papers refuse to publish it just on grounds of it being AI, does that make it not true?

You know in the past women (and other marginalized people) weren't allowed to publish scientific papers for the majority of human history?

Is this how you want your "truth" to be?

If so then man, no sympathy; these institutions deserve to be broken down. Let them spaz on the floor and throw tantrums all they want.

... marginalized people ...

... spaz on the floor ...

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