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Writers read their contemporaries working on similar things much less that readers interested in the same subject and with similar levels of reading volume. It’s a sort of driving blind spot effect where you can’t quite see the car one carlength behind you to your left
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Your own writing gets in the way just like your own car gets in the way. You have to work 3x harder to access the work of blindspot contemporaries. Like use mirrors, go through contortions etc. They’re too close and in awkward alignment with your cognitive coordinate system.
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This is why peer review is in some ways a very compromised mechanism and only works in special conditions, such as existence of a methodological consensus.
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Peer review is actually a very special mechanism that needs significant institutional engineering to sustain in an effective condition, by institutions prone to corruption and distortionary tendencies, kinda like markets (“laissez-faire was planned, planning was not” — Polyani)
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It is interesting that blogosphere did *not* naturally evolve a peer-review type mechanism, which tells you how artificial that is. It instead evolved a competitive sympathetic citation race (ie virality) as the marker of memetic potency, a cousin of truth just like peer review.
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Cf my old threadstack on independent research, I’m now coming at it from a methodological angle, thinking in terms of what it would take to form effective collaborations among wannabe-indies, perhaps using the affordances of tools like .
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Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it. twitter.com/vgr/status/119…
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It is easy to underestimate the importance of the toolchains and media. But a lot about academic research can be explained by the fact that it’s conducted in PDF units, woven together by citation indices and one of the shadiest publishing industries on the planet cc
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But you can’t “fix” the academic publishing Death Star industry (there’s dozens of exposes and histories out there) and that’s an uninteresting project anyway since it’s just taking sides in the hostage-academics vs captors Stockholm syndrome game. I don’t care about either.
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I’m interested in extending what’s working well about blogging and it’s descendants (microblogging, threadoblogging, webboblogging....)
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The lesson of 30 years of tech development of web native media is that you cannot start from abstract values about knowledge (“epistemically virtue ethics”?) or imitation of failing incumbent systems (Gall’s law). You have to build on what actually works.
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This is medium-message co-evolution. The question is not “how can we do academic style or old republic-if-letters/invisible college type research using web technologies?” The question is: “what kind of research works particularly well on hypertex media?”
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Building on what works inevitably means challenging epistemic-ethics dogmas. Doctrines like logical positivism and falsificationidm didn’t arise from nowhere or from noble platonic considerations. They are consequences of print technology and university style scholarship.
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