Is “gate keeping” a new toy for ai bros or something? Peer review has a purpose… You guys should try to understand systems before you celebrate their death.
Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.
Is that ok?
So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?
To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.
Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.
In a post-AI world there’s a mountain of high quality work being published by people who actually know what’s going on. You can probably make a discovery with chatgpt right now, but why should someone who’s got a ton of things to do already read your article? You’re free to put it online, but why should you be free to force someone to read something?
Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
But aren't you literally just proving what I'm saying? The original argument was that everyone should have to post through peer reviewed journals, I said that is probably gatekeeping too far, and your response above just confirms my suspicions.
> Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.
I probably agree with you, except I have never and am not criticising mathematicians. I am only saying that there are quite a lot of reports around that the academic world is fierce and that sometimes there are high barriers to getting something recognised.
No idea if it is true or not, but my personal opinion is that it isn't going to matter much in the future. If it exists, then people will work around any gatekeeping.