Fraud—invented facts—are a different problem from nonsense. In science, publishing a paper based on false, made-up data would not generally count. Either you use real data and give a bogus interpretation, or you describe a worthless data-collection process (with fake data).
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This proposal is not nice. Unfortunately, it is too late for nice. Many-to-most academic fields run on a go-along-to-get-along basis, and now have large negative net value as a result.
Some fields should simply end. I suggested that for nutrition:https://meaningness.com/nutrition-resigns …1 reply 11 retweets 81 likesShow this thread -
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.1 reply 8 retweets 51 likesShow this thread -

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 -
Replying to @Meaningness
Something that we greatly need is a compression of current knowledge. Exposition is way undervalued. Much current literature is scattered, poorly written, poorly organized. Many of these people doing mediocre research could be writing good exposition - easier and still valuable
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Replying to @FateOfTwist_ @Meaningness
In philosophy, eg. write Aristotle in modern language and style, collect arguments and elaboration related to him over the millennia; rewrite Heidegger. In math, simplify, make more conceptual, give structural characterizations with category theory, universal properties
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Replying to @FateOfTwist_
This would be so great! Although… I think you may have to be even smarter to explain a field well than to engage in it.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Depends on the level. Cutting edge research? Need to be very smart. Graduate level math? Just ask around what everyone's intuitions, examples, analogies, strategies and methods are, do exercises, prove main theorems for yourself, do computations, then synthesize
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Replying to @FateOfTwist_ @Meaningness
There are still huge areas of graduate level math (even some undergrad!) that lots of people know where there isn't really a single book or the best (only) book on the subject is poor quality
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I hope you work on this! Very valuable
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Replying to @Meaningness @FateOfTwist_
When I was closer in time to my degree I tried to do this with some undergraduate maths that I felt was taught in a way that minimized the chances of understanding and maximized the chances of hating it. Unfortunately, doing so is a lot of fairly unrewarding work.
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(I agree that it's very valuable, there's just a sadly large gap between valuable and rewarded)
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