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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

Yes they should. Academia and peer review is so corrupt, gamified, and poor quality that I’d literally trust capitalist parasites more than the current regime of “publish or perish” and citation cartels.

At least capitalists have something to fight over that’s worth fighting for (money). Academics will bitterly fight over the dumbest, least important shit. There’s a law about how the less something matters, the more political the fights over it will be.

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I am certainly not going to defend peer review and its inherent flaws. I am also not sure "capitalists" or the market is always as efficient as one might hope or think. But that aside, to my point above, if capitalists were to optimize "money" as you say, how would that fix publishing? Firstly, how would they ascribe a monetary value to Gower's 1998 and his other few papers that catapulted him to the Fields Medal? Are you saying these subject do not matter because no one is bidding for these papers? I fear we would not have published Heisenberg's early papers or the discovery of Penicillin if so. And over what horizon would "capitalists" optimize that monetary value (internal IRR)? Governments usually have to step in for long term IRR projects (e.g. the internet protocol's development was famously funded by DARPA and they keeping "deep learning" alive during the downturns as no one believed in short term returns ...). The UK water system or quite a few train services around the world bear witness to the fact that even in a "capitalist" society, some long term common benefits are hard to fund with short term IRR considerations even pension funds consider reasonable. Taking that observation to its perverse conclusion, if you believe in "capitalists" then you could argue that the current imperfect review system is a side effect of capitalist societies' long term research funding plan (universities, research grants, tax breaks for endowments, student grants, ...). I just think knowledge sharing is not always compatible with financial interests. And the former, to me, is the public good that academia should attain. But you get no argument from me that peer review is broken. I struggle to think, though, of a better system and doubt "money" is it, tbh.

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