After Credentials

I wish the measurement system was more accurate for science. Counting publications is not just mislead, but the root of a great evil: pollutes information sources with redundant or highly speculative information, i.e. papers published just to tell the measurement-obsessed bureaucrats that a given researcher still exists.

I wish we could just work quietly, sharing information informally with our peers over internet and at meetings, and only publish when ready, even if this means publishing every 10 years.

this very aptly describes "small-world Networks" which are ubiquitous in societal/biological/information centric complex systems.

It's the tribe reflected in the organization of smallworld networks: many small, high clustered groups working together, yet connected to any random person in any given subgroup within 6 degrees of separation or less.

How? The distance between any two separate nodes ("people") is much lower on average than you'd think, mostly because of "shortcuts" or giant hubs in the network to which two distant regions can both connect. This is a huge advantage, because the increased information throughput becomes so much greater, bringing great opportunities. (For example, when you desperately need a date for the prom, you ask the girl with the most friends on Facebook to set you up.)

with the internet's advent, the most gigantic hub in history now offers the possibility of a "perfect ad-hoc group", be it a tribe of hackers building an experimental project, a band of economic analysts parsing through financial data, or any group of like-minded people engaged in any endeavour.

What i'm saying is, exponential growth of smaller groups isboth dynamically driving AND benefiting from the spread of the Internet. So... it is inevitable.

How do we deal with this?

It's impractical and inadvisable to "just measure performance" for all kinds of medical practitioners, for example. And credentials can be used to determine factors other than just "performance", like trustworthiness.