Reminder that academia is fake and gay
(www.zerohedge.com)
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it's still a good idea in concept, but as implemented right now it's incredibly poor. as I've mentioned in other threads, the single biggest thing corrupting it is the current peer review system. the worth of a paper is not based on the ability to reproduce the findings, but rather its based on if a council of professors agree that the paper seems legit. this means the system inevitably falls to ideological capture.
There was a publisher that did an expose about this a few years back. There is no "council of professors" it's just the editor and 1-3 of his friends. In other words, it is the journalists peers, not even necessarily accredited scientists.
The entire system is a garbage lie.
dear God it's worse than I thought.
even if it was a counsel of actual professors, that system would still inevitably be compromised. it's a system almost designed for ideological capture.
Ask yourself this then.
What's wrong with the peer review system? Is it just that the wrong people are allowed to participate? I don't think that to be the case. While a lot of problems in our society are caused by insufficient gatekeeping this isn't one. It contributes yes but it's not the only problem.
The problem is the process at the conceptual level. Firstly that being skimmed over by other academics is valid testing, but secondly because this is something that used to be a fight and isn't. Why?
Because of guaranteed money. Used to be these academics had to actually air out their papers in the marketplace of ideas and win, or they'd be ignored. They used to have to compete for funding.
The problem is public education. The problem is taxation and the unlimited gravy train of suckling on the public teat. The problem is that we invented welfare for colleges by pretending that everyone really does have the right to an education.
I agree the problem is the process, but I do think peer review is the root of the issues. infinite public funding would be much less of a problem if reproducibility was the standard, because it's much harder to fake reproduction. reproducibility would create a much stronger foundation for evidence, which would bubble up no matter how the academic world is funded.
Reproducibility will never be the standard if there's no incentive to disprove the other people at the table.
Which there isn't if they don't have to fight for funding.
In general people are lazy. If they are allowed to stay comfortable they will stagnate. As much as liberals decry "work or die" it is a GOOD thing.