141–150 of 181 posts
The next logical step in "publish or perish". Get rid of p-o-p and this problem will also largely disappear. I know managers and administrators want a simple metric, but there is no simple metric for research.
This is a side effect of academia never taking open accessibility to papers and journals seriously. If all these papers were not gatekept by journals, it would be trivially easy to validate at least the existence of cited papers and quotes.
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It is trivially easy to validate the existence of a cited paper.
I'm sympathetic to the idea: we should have an open, publicly queryable citation graph. Google scholar could very easily offer this at marginal cost near zero, but they won't.
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"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.
The problem is that everyone imagines some sort of just and fair arbiter of these things, when the reality is all of the social scoring and consequences and reputations rarely actually stem from one’s actions, and far more often stem from how much money someone has put in someone’s pocket, who someone knows, the color of someone’s skin, or what’s between someone’s legs. Until we’re actually serious about treating peo…
In my experience, this viewpoint is most strong in people whose actions are the most direct cause of their social issues. Almost always these people strongly refuse to admit that their actions should or are under their control. At which point others start to avoid them.
There are large scale social stratifications due to various things however individuals live in a very wide band in my experience. Some make choices that put them at the top of that band and others make choices that put them at the bottom.
Let's take two of your examples:
> how much money someone has put in someone’s pocket
> who someone knows
Careers choices directly lead to having higher income and more money. Socializing and putting effort into building a social network gives you more people to know. Both are to a decent degree under someone's control and based on their actions. You claiming otherwise is exactly proving my point on people wanting an excuse for their poor historical actions.
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People react negatively to this, because they fear a dystopian society of the sort we've seen in plenty of movies, and rightfully so. But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero con…
this reminds me of an episode of the TV show. the Orville that I recently watched where they stumbled upon a planet that had the social credit scoring system and everybody had little badges with literal upvote and down vote buttons on them. and when your grandma buys you ice cream and you're a little kid you say thank you and you hit the upvote button and she likes you even more because you hit the upvote button then…
At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…
AI is simply going to bury it as a useful system. What will grow from the ashes will be something much more dynamic, where verifiable data is the gold and the conclusions and associated details will persist only as the human-level translation.
At this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are…
> because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences
A low acceptance rate is unhealthy, especially in conferences (1 round of review). Papers just get recycled to the next conference, which, as is easy to model, creates an exponential feedback loop. It doesn't explain all the papers submitted, but it sure can explain a lot. Too much rejection is like shooting yourself in the foot.
Not to mention that it's just easy to reject works. All works are flawed, especially works that are in less mature domains. I see plenty a paper get rejected for lack of money. "Not enough experiments" is an common critique that's used inappropriately (along with the highly subjective "not novel enough" one) because it's fine to always want more but no lab has infinite funding. It is used lazily. The question shouldn't be about if your favorite benchmark is used, it should be if there isn't enough evidence to support the hypothesis or not. A mature domain where thousands of people work in it, yeah, that needs stronger evidence. A niche domain where dozens of people work in? Not as many required. Rejecting them ultimately slows down the progress of science because you require any new idea to outperform mature ideas. Ironically killing novelty as no one is going to, or even could (publish or perish), spend all the time and money to mature a niche all on their own.
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Isn’t China doing something like this ? Wonder if it could degrade to something worse than the status quo where reputations are falsely tarnished by competitors purely as a weapon to get ahead…
The "Chinese social credit" system is vastly overblown. I'm living here (China, Beijing and Jiangsu) now, and there are exactly two cases in the past eight months where the "social credit" system has had any impact at all: - To open "take first pay after" vending machines. These are vending machines which are basically big locked fridges; if your credit score is high enough, you can open the machines, take whatever d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People react negatively to this, because they fear a dystopian society of the sort we've seen in plenty of movies, and rightfully so. But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero con…
this reminds me of an episode of the TV show. the Orville that I recently watched where they stumbled upon a planet that had the social credit scoring system and everybody had little badges with literal upvote and down vote buttons on them. and when your grandma buys you ice cream and you're a little kid you say thank you and you hit the upvote button and she likes you even more because you hit the upvote button then…
In general you can already get this by asking and taking feedback from others. I've seen a lot more people shoot or ignore the messenger in those cases then actually take the feedback. Everyone is the hero of their own story.