What has happened down here is the winds have changed

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research.

This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress.

Of course if we don’t really care about research progress, or students learning, or medical effectiveness, etc., if what we mainly care about is just affiliating with the most impressive folks, well then all this isn’t much of a problem. But if we do care about these things, then unthinkingly presuming that the most prestigious people are the best to tell us how to do things, that can go very very wrong."

The winds may have changed, but landscape erodes very slowly…

[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...

And I agree with the author that it shouldn't.

A good point is made about the arguments for releasing study findings in blogs, where discussions can be had in comments and perhaps the content of the blog amended as needed.

I definitely think that the old way of publishing studies needs to change. They need to allow discussion. Those that publish the studies and those that read them need to critique and possibly conclusions be amended. And to get this to happen at an intellectual level, students and others in academia and research should be funded more by taxes and possibly be required to do critiques and duplicate other studies to some extent.

For too long we've assumed the bodies of accumulated knowledge in the sciences to be fact without dispute; that's not science. Science is all about finding models that work and gathering data and trying to draw conclusions from it. Science was never meant to be about facts; it is all about understanding. Though some understanding may be innate, much of human understanding comes from experience. While we can build upon previous "knowledge", time over time we've seen what we held to be science fact proven false, e.g. earth is flat -> it's round but the sun goes around it -> it goes around the sun, and flies spontaneous generate from feces -> flies lay eggs in feces. If we'd never allow criticism, we'd never have progressed.

Science should be about keeping an open mind and accepting there is much we don't know, even if you believe and have faith in something. Einstein believed in God, and Hawking is an atheist. Both are scientists, and both have had theories proven and disproven. We are human, and we must continually strive for understanding knowing some ideas may be right, some may be wrong, and that ideas will change.

They should welcome online trolling, abuse, and personal attacks? That is what Fiske criticizes in her article, not serious criticism and debate, which she explicitly welcomes and encourages.

She doesn't say rapid feedback is bad. She says online personal attacks and abuse are bad.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...

The Motte is that we should condemn personal attacks, trolling, and abuse. This is completely uncontroversial and nobody sane would disagree.

The Bailey is that criticism made outside of the peer review process is somehow terrorism, which is so ludicrous that ones reaction should involve spirited laughter.