Libb

And adults alike.

Had not the USA been short on eggs lately, that would not happen with guns… or did I misunderstood the country you were referring to? ;)

For any US-refugee still hesitating to jump continent… A lot of Europe also comes with

• Great (and affordable) food, no obligation anymore to eat that over-processed shit so many shops in the US dare call food.
• Great (and affordable) healthcare,
• Decent housing,
• Much better (and affordable) public transit.
• Not all as great as they once used to be, we can still offer you quite a few great schools to educate your kids, a lot of them not being that expensive either.
• Also, no matter where in the EU, quite a few Europeans will happily speak English with you, at least if you show you’re not too afraid yourself to start learning our own native languages ;)

Haven’t many people experienced that? It’s called scrolling on social media, right?

non-paywalled: https://unwall.app/www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01113-7?error=cookies_not_supported&code=dbe0a3a5-b3e0-438e-9dcb-0900af57920c (no endorsement of the service)

Is that the new McCarthyism? Once again, 100% proudly made in the USA.

What a fucked country. A country I used to admire and respect so much when I was young.

Whatever you say. Have a great day.

That’s a lot of words (and even more negativity) to not say precisely where and how you consider that comment has failed to meet your requirements. For someone asking for clarity, I thought that could be worth considering. Why not show the kind of useful answer you’re expecting, or at least show precisely where that comment has missed the point?

And, nope, if you’re wondering, this not an attempt at trolling you: there is not enough of us around here, so instead of spitting towards one another face, maybe explaining why one feels… disappointed could help change what may need to be changed?

Beside the handful of real absolute morons/racists/haters (we have similar people in the EU too, they are far from being exclusive to Britain), I consider this an impressive scam that went somewhat completely wrong.

Those promoting Brexit never intended to really leave the EU, that was a mean to grab more power by manipulating the… lesser informed population, and they were indeed quite surprised the day those people, and then a few more with them, actually voted for that Brexit scam. Making them the proud leader of something that was probably never meant to happen. Hence their absolute lack of preparation for it and the shit show that followed for years.

It’s also a demonstration of why a failing public educative system is fatal to a working democracy. Uneducated citizen can’t vote with their brains, only with their guts. And we all know that what usually comes out of guts is not ideas, right?

Something we can also witness happening in the USA, quite obviously, but also in most countries in the EU even in my dear own France. Sadly.

Maybe UK citizen have not yet realized how badly they screwed themselves with Brexit, and they need a second shot of an even sadder reality? Or maybe they’ve just given up already?

If I may: don’t you think you’re trying a bit too hard to be right? If one ‘good’ idea happens to not be that good, one should be fine with it being disposed of: (good) ideas are cheap.

If we rewarded people for high value work, and incentivised cranking out garbage, then we would get more high value work.

That is a big ‘if’, one that won’t go away in the system as it is because, like you said:

Right now, the vast vast majority of published academic work is absolute garbage that no one will ever care about.

Whole careers have been and are built upon the system working as it is, and the system itself feeds on that: it needs large volumes of content. Resistance to any change will be… huge, to say the least, and that is even if any real change ever manages to reach a significant level.

My 2 cents, regarding the issue you’re wishing to fix, as an outsider myself (and what follow is just that: an outsider mere opinion, that anyone is welcome to contradict).

The issue lies not much in the quality, or its absence, of the work that is being published than in the work being published to begin with. Allow me to explain.

The low quality of the work, and the sheer volume of it, should be considered symptoms of a much larger issue which is the way the scientific publishing business works and the way scientific careers are being made through publications. Symptoms are not the issue they’re (healthy or useful) warning signs of a real problem.

It is the imperative to produce content that is the issue, here. Not that is bad instead of it maybe, possibly being good.

Also, next to the imperative of publishing, don’t forget the very closely linked second imperative that is so often overlooked: reading it. Researchers are expected to be reading that endlessly and quickly growing volume of work in their respective fields, that is the very purpose of the system make it possible for people to propose content for their peers to read and criticize (and to profit from) it. If nobody can write that much work, nobody can read it either.

There is another issue that I won’t discuss here because I think it becomes a lot more… complex and difficult to peacefully discuss it: the interest some groups of people may have in ‘drowning the fish’ in order to push their own ideologies, whatever they can be: saturate the space with garbage/noise. I would consider this as important as What I just mentioned. Back to it.

Scientific publications have been turned into an industry, of scientific writers and readers.

And like most industries they aim for lowering their production cost while maximizing their margins.

So, they mass produce a type of content that, until very recently and unlike most other industrially produced shit, could not be automated and relied on ‘man-power’, man-made content. Content that was written by actual people and that was read (validated) by other people. But they wanted it fast and in always larger volume which is not compatible with ‘man-made’ quality work, in any field.

That mere ‘expectation’ to be quickly and constantly publishing/reading content, that alone was more than enough to push towards a lessening in the quality of both the writer’s and the reader’s work (and also in a lot of disenchantment from those ‘workers’ but that would deserve a debate in itself). And that was enough to create a vicious circle, making it worse as the system keep feeding on itself: always more volume always less… pertinence. Which leads to our present situation.

That is: us witnessing the process moving away from those human workers towards AI-workers or ‘AI-augmented’ or ‘assisted’ workers, as one prefers, that are much cheaper and are also a lot less capable of producing quality anything but so much more capable of producing in large volumes. And that is all that really matters to that industry and its workers: the amount of work that is being produced, not the quality.

Remove the imperative to produce content for people to be able to make a scientific career (worthy or not that should not matter in a system that does not focus on producing at any cost, as low quality products will simply never matter and never spread) to try to make a career and you may have a chance to solve the issue and to maybe salvage the system. Maybe. But then, by removing that need to produce content that your peers will use to judge the significance of your contributions to the field, you instantly create another issue: who will decide who is worthy (or not worthy) to be considered a scientific and to make a career? There is no simple solution.

This is such a tragedy. And not just in the USA :(

It would be tailored/devised towards being quotable by other researchers in that field, not as being worthy per se.

Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work.

We’re in a system that encourages publishing at all cost as much works as possible, with your system the system would encourage publishing quotation worthy work at all cost and as often as possible. Not sure to see how this would improve the mess we’re in?

As far as I understand it, the website controls what and how content is shared through RSS. So, RSS is not considered a way to archive content.

ON my blog for example, I have yet to figure out how to share the full content of the posts through RSS (I’m not that much of geek and, well, I just can’t figure out how to ask my website generator, Hugo, to do that). So, for the time being all what my readers have access to is the summary and I don’t think they can force change that and access the whole post through RSS.

Curious to see if anyone as more info on your question.

The sad thing is that it is not just a US thing. Most Western countries I can think of, for the last 40 years or so, have managed to ruin their educative systems, making sure younger generations become less and less capable when not plain dumber.

Here in France, I would vote for any party pledging to make it its priority to reform back our educative system to, say, its pre-80s state and promising to keep at bay those assholes (and their moronic ideas) who are still ruining it with each of their new reforms.

Sweden figured that out already

I wonder how long my own country, France, will take to wake up from that high tech-venerating educative system nightmare?

Good question. For a similar reason people keep using corporate-owned social media, I suppose?

Very unexpected take(s). Just ordered his 2 previous books, pre-ordered the 3rd one.

Maybe check your wallet too? I’m quite gifted ;)