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posicStages 1-6: https://www.facebook.com/posic/posts/1233127970035368
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Stage 0: Let the government finance science. With more money flowing into research, wonderful discoveries will be made, which will fuel economic growth. There are so many talented people out there. Scientific research needs to be democratized.
Stage 1: Doing substantial research is hard. It takes years before it is ripe. People need to feed their families. People need to settle and get tenure, just to be able to marry and have a family, to begin with. For this, researchers need to have publications. Even not-so-substantial results have good uses. Let us encourage young people to write up and attempt to publish all the marginally novel ideas that come to their minds.
Stage 2: The field is overwhelmed with mediocre research and publications devoid of substance. The journals' editors and reviewers are overwhelmed, too. Most of the submissions they have to evaluate aren't wrong, but simply uninteresting. The reviewers cannot go into every detail, but it is important that the claimed results should present a certain degree of interest. Papers that are not deemed interesting enough are rejected and the authors are advised to submit to lesser journals.
Stage 3: The editors and reviewers are still overwhelmed, but they feel a bit better now that they have resigned to judging papers on the basis of the degree of interest of their claimed results, as opposed to them being simply correct. After all, most papers they encounter are largely correct, but not up to the quality level required for their journal. Evaluating the paper's quality as compared to the level of the journal is the reviewer's main task. Thankfully, this does not require going into the paper's every detail, and an overall impression is largely sufficient.
Stage 4: As editors and reviewers gradually loose touch with the substance of what they are publishing, submitting poorly thought-out or outright wrong papers with superficially novel and attractively-looking claims emerges as a not-so-bad strategy for obtaining tenure at the less prestigious departments. Good chances are, after all, that no one will ever read you paper carefully enough to spot mistakes.
Stage 5: Not reading other people's papers carefully has never been an obstacle to referring to them, and the reviewers are even much less inclined than the authors to concern themselves with correctness of the results from other papers cited in the paper under review. Mistakes proliferate and accumulate.
Stage 6: The sociologists of science and other postmodernist humanities departments are happy to discover that the so-called exact sciences have been finally proven to be as wrong as literary critics. Truth does not exist anywhere, even in math. Or, rather, it exists only as a matter of convention, meaning, of course, a convention between people who had enough power to get whatever was convenient to them at a particular moment in time accepted as the truth by the society at large. The death of math is now serving a greater good, in the sense of people being led to realize that the time has come to agree on entirely different conventions as to what is true and what is false.
***
Stage 0: Let the government finance science. With more money flowing into research, wonderful discoveries will be made, which will fuel economic growth. There are so many talented people out there. Scientific research needs to be democratized.
Stage 1: Doing substantial research is hard. It takes years before it is ripe. People need to feed their families. People need to settle and get tenure, just to be able to marry and have a family, to begin with. For this, researchers need to have publications. Even not-so-substantial results have good uses. Let us encourage young people to write up and attempt to publish all the marginally novel ideas that come to their minds.
Stage 2: The field is overwhelmed with mediocre research and publications devoid of substance. The journals' editors and reviewers are overwhelmed, too. Most of the submissions they have to evaluate aren't wrong, but simply uninteresting. The reviewers cannot go into every detail, but it is important that the claimed results should present a certain degree of interest. Papers that are not deemed interesting enough are rejected and the authors are advised to submit to lesser journals.
Stage 3: The editors and reviewers are still overwhelmed, but they feel a bit better now that they have resigned to judging papers on the basis of the degree of interest of their claimed results, as opposed to them being simply correct. After all, most papers they encounter are largely correct, but not up to the quality level required for their journal. Evaluating the paper's quality as compared to the level of the journal is the reviewer's main task. Thankfully, this does not require going into the paper's every detail, and an overall impression is largely sufficient.
Stage 4: As editors and reviewers gradually loose touch with the substance of what they are publishing, submitting poorly thought-out or outright wrong papers with superficially novel and attractively-looking claims emerges as a not-so-bad strategy for obtaining tenure at the less prestigious departments. Good chances are, after all, that no one will ever read you paper carefully enough to spot mistakes.
Stage 5: Not reading other people's papers carefully has never been an obstacle to referring to them, and the reviewers are even much less inclined than the authors to concern themselves with correctness of the results from other papers cited in the paper under review. Mistakes proliferate and accumulate.
Stage 6: The sociologists of science and other postmodernist humanities departments are happy to discover that the so-called exact sciences have been finally proven to be as wrong as literary critics. Truth does not exist anywhere, even in math. Or, rather, it exists only as a matter of convention, meaning, of course, a convention between people who had enough power to get whatever was convenient to them at a particular moment in time accepted as the truth by the society at large. The death of math is now serving a greater good, in the sense of people being led to realize that the time has come to agree on entirely different conventions as to what is true and what is false.
