A tension here: academia is increasingly awful as a career. That drives away many of the best researchers. Reforms that add to the suffering risk making a bad situation even worse.
Currently, reviewing papers is unpaid scut-work. Not surprising not everyone does it well.
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If peer review has reputational risk—it will be public knowledge if you recommend accepting a deliberately bad paper—many people may decline the job. (Though, successful detection of a hoax should look good on your CV!)
Publishers might have to pay reviewers…2 replies 3 retweets 37 likesShow this thread -

… and the total number of papers published might drop precipitously if reviewers were more reluctant to recommend publication.
That would be good. Everyone agrees there’s WAY too much stuff published under the current system. A 90% reduction would be great.4 replies 3 retweets 57 likesShow this thread -

I’d suggest that every PhD student be required to perform at least one attempt at Sokaling as a graduation requirement.
Learning what should count as unacceptably bad research is a critical part of learning how to do it well. And of spotting the difference in the lit.3 replies 12 retweets 65 likesShow this thread -

Initially, everyone would go for low-hanging fruit in Sokaling attempts: the easiest ways to get nonsense past reviewers.
Reviewers would quickly catch on to the simplest tricks… then subtler errors.
And I hope this would lead to a virtuous upward spiral of quality.2 replies 3 retweets 45 likesShow this thread -

Three questions:
𝔸) Would this make academia more adversarial, and thereby even more awful?
𝔹) Can a system develop that is adequately resistant to gaming (Goodhart’s Law)?
ℂ) Is it realistic to imagine something like this could actually happen?6 replies 6 retweets 54 likesShow this thread -

I’d love to hear your opinions about 𝔸 & 𝔹 !
As for ℂ — the crisis in academia is now obvious to all. Things cannot go on as they are. Unusual action becomes possible in extremis.
Recent dramatic process reforms in social psychology are startling, and inspiring.9 replies 5 retweets 42 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Meaningness
This reminds me of the blind injection of fake gravitational wave signals in LIGO. For them, a small cabal in the collaboration does the dirty work. In my subfield, big shot groups would have to divert energy from competing with each other to do this.
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Replying to @rwpeterson
I haven’t heard about that (with LIGO)! Can you say more?
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Replying to @Meaningness @rwpeterson
This post was good on it iirc https://stuver.blogspot.com/2011/03/big-dog-in-envelope.html?spref=tw …
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Both of these are really interesting. Reminded again of the insight that experimental big physics is basically all calibration.
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