Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

New technologies, cures for diseases, better policy, & understanding of the world in general come about through academic research. Academic research is facilitated by sharing of trustworthy, high signal to noise ratio knowledge among academics.

I am not questioning the value of scientific research. I am questioning the value of a system that limits access to publicly-funded research to a tiny few, incentivizes positive results + overstated conclusions, & appears to be producing less notable work at an increasing cost

I question the value of a great many terrible journals which exist solely to publish mediocre work, further fields that lack even superficial rigor, & generate citations to boost careers that may or may not even be pointed in the general direction of real questions

There are indeed some very mediocre things out there. There are also many very good things published and lots of good people who are doing interesting work that makes the world better.

Do you think that these people — the ones producing quality work, trying to avoid leaning too far into incentives that work against rigor & who are deeply invested in reducing barriers to entry for their fields — think this is a system that encourages beneficial norms?

They can all point to things that are broken, but in general appreciate the quality, ethical standards, and availability of the entire historical corpus of research.

Uh, yeah. I also appreciate “the entire historical corpus of research.” But like most of the scientists I hang out with, I think there are tremendous costs to career-making based on research outcomes & the extremely patchy & filtered availability of work in critical fields.

I would agree & have worked for years in better ways of getting research funding allocated, but I wouldn't characterize availability as extremely patchy.