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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

> What problem are you trying solve?

I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics", a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature.

In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.

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Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into.

The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too.

Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.

> The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions

I think you've got it backwards. First make the good tools, then stop using the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then people are happy to stop using whitelists.

Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are already at good institutions!)

> The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions

Firing people to either develop tools or have a terrible situation on their hands doesn't necessarily mean they would develop those tools.

If you push someone into water, it forces them to either swim or drown, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they swim.

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