81–90 of 319 posts
I'm surprised that there are still non double blind publications that count for tenure cases. This does explain some of the recent and embarrassing [lack of] retractions of Nature papers though.
We have to come to terms with this. Academia was bought and paid for long ago and the money was used to build an incredibly broken and overly political bureaucratic engine of scholarly and scientific work that doesn't get anywhere near as much peer-review scrutiny as it should and commands far more respect in politics and legal proceedings than we should allow. Universities and experts are the best we can do sometime…
This was my impression of most of my professors years ago too, especially as we saw so many quit for high paying engineering jobs at companies year to year — the ones who stayed aren’t in it for the money
I suspect it’s the same at the top: most senior administrators I bet would make more in senior Fortune 500 jobs
We have to come to terms with this. Academia was bought and paid for long ago and the money was used to build an incredibly broken and overly political bureaucratic engine of scholarly and scientific work that doesn't get anywhere near as much peer-review scrutiny as it should and commands far more respect in politics and legal proceedings than we should allow. Universities and experts are the best we can do sometime…
This reminds me of a bias I saw on Quora, where some popular contributor gets tons of upvotes by fans regardless of whether their answer is any good or not (often you have to dig deep into the comments to find out that it's not a good answer). (I should qualify that I don't know if it's still that way; I started using it when it was first launched and then quit 6-7 years ago once it started turning into a fanboi and…
There was a study some time back where they set folks up in groups, then had them listen and vote on bands / music. Each group trended towards catapulting a single band / musician, but it always just depended on which one in the group got the momentum first. I wish I could find the study again but it's hard to google for. Pretty eye opening.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want a review to be truly double blind, you have to start censoring the paper -- things like "in previous work [1-10] we showed..." makes it obvious who the authors are even if you remove the names from the top of the paper.
There are some computer science conferences that do this. If you cite your prior work, you are supposed to blank out the names in the citation and then attach an anonomyzed version of the prior work so that the reviewers can reference it if necessary. If the paper is accepted, you de-anonomyze the citation in the camera ready version.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to find astonishing about academics (like most of humanity) being vulnerable to reputation biases in their reasoning. As in, that would be the null hypothesis. It would be astonishing if most academics overcame it. EDIT: apparently, the size of the effect (factor of six more likely to be accepted if it came from a Nobel Prizewinner) is larger than anticipated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer review is not supposed to be a Twitter popularity contest so these numbers are indeed astonishing.
Yet most non-economists would have predicted exactly this. If it's astonishing to you, well, perhaps you've had the misfortune to learn to think like an economist (ie. poorly & very muddy about normative vs actual).
Every paper Albert Einstein submitted to anonymous peer review was rejected. (he had only one peer anonymous reviewed paper and it had an error)
". Albert Einstein only had one anonymous peer review in his career — and the paper was rejected2. This happened in 1936."
How is just one paper submitted anonymously being rejected an indication of a trend?
Elon Musk tweets something stupid and it gets discussed. You or I do it and it's ignored. Celebrity is a thing, nothing odd going on
Is anyone surprised by this?