Peer Reviewed
The other day, in the interests of certain tax incentives, I wrote an academic paper. The work and the paper took me less than a day to complete, with the help of Claude and GPT.
I posted a summary on Reddit in the machine learning section because I have stumbled across an idea which could vastly improve the field and has many, many way of being exploited. My thinking was just to put the idea into people’s heads. And its worked.
But just the one guy, he got irate about my paper. He claims it isn’t up to academic standards. Its not but who cares? I have no incentive to actually get it peer reviewed; it sole purpose is to facilitate the spreading of a novel idea which has value.
It got me thinking, why don’t I have any interest in the peer review process?
Firstly, it takes forever and it bores me.
Secondly, its desigend to exclude outsiders, and I am definitely that in machine learning. So I would have to fight to get in, when I don’t give a shit.
Third, unlike for your academic, there’s no upside – I am not incentivised by my H-Index through any employment conditions. I am not a rat in a race.
Fourth, at its heart, academic science has a systematic, institutionalised habit of ignoring anything that fails to confirm what to we already “know”. Entire fields operate on the implicit rule that if your data doesn’t fit the narrative, it goes in the bin or the bottom drawer or the never-submitted folder.
Peer reviewers don’t replicate your findings; they scan for signals of ideological alignment, methodological rituals, and citation etiquette.
In real-time, the resistance to new and better ideas is out of this world, no much how much evidence is produced. I have experienced this first-hand
And yet, somehow, despite the bias, the filtering, the quiet burial of inconvenient data, science does make slow progress; painfully, like a drunk crawling uphill with a blindfold on. The good ideas survive because they keep working under pressure. The bad ones eventually fall over, though often not before a few careers have been built on them.
Not for me, Sherlock.
offshore westerly 