mrcsd

Surely burning witches to improve the weather is exactly an example of metric use gone awry? To your point though, it is exceedingly common to know we are better at something without a clear metric. It is not controversial to suggest that someone may be better now at communicating than they were as a child, even though there is no clear way to define this.

This is a fair point, but for the layperson who cannot distinguish between the 30% of papers that are bad and the remaining 70% it may as well be a denunciation of all science, since they themselves perhaps cannot tell the difference.

While papers remain the main standard by which science is communicated maybe there is a place for those in the scientific community that do know to be more vocal about which papers are worth reading.