I would love to see a video overviewing the whole system of academia, with notes on some of the places in which this kind of capitalization of research causes problems. I think there's plenty of videos on specific problems within academia, but I haven't seen many that sort of lay out the whole system, from bachelor's programs, to peer review, to international conferences, to tenure, etc etc. Obviously this is a huge topic, but I think a general video could be a great intro to those who didn't spend their whole career in this industry.

Have you seen good criticism of Veritasium? His name is a little ironic given how much capital he has.

@@coboroughVeritasium, i.e., “element of truth”. I’m missing the irony.

The video lacks a proper introduction. It just starts talking about Elsevier, as if everyone knows who they are. If you expect your audience to know who they are, you’re targeting a narrow audience. To be honest, I stopped watching after 1-2 minutes because you failed to communicate what the video is supposed to be about and why I should care about it. Great content immediately engages the audience. This, on the other hand, confuses the audience.

TL;DR Pin this comment, might leave more feedback when not tired. I haven't watched the video yet. Honestly I disliked it and then fucked off to go do whatever else til I felt like I should probably come back and actually make sure you were a dumbass, based on another comment here you aren't and we're in agreement and I judged too quickly, disliked removed and will watch now. Like StripedJacket said in the comment I mentioned the packaging (as you put it) is a bit off. The video "Neurodiversity: "Fancy word for all of humanity"" is what really put me over the edge since I have both Autism and ADHD and it seemed like you were against that model of thinking, but again briefly reading the comments seems like you're in support of it. I'm very tired at the moment and I'd love to give better feedback but I can't form a cohesive statement that makes the point I'm trying without maybe having a double meaning. ANYWAYS, I'd pin this comment man. If you want feedback, pin it so everyone knows. I had to scroll well below the video to see this, but it shows that you're very open to feedback and discussion. In my opinion that makes you a better creator (and person honestly) than most, and if you pinned this comment it would allow you to show that, as well as get more feedback and discussion. The words that I just typed definitely don't make sense.

Don't hold your breath.

I'd argue it's happening right now, and that it's not a good thing at all. So many clickbaity articles come from half-assed studies that haven't been peer-reviewed but are already available on the web.

I'm not in the scientific community and this is a genuine question. Why can you and your colleagues not create a web site where anyone can publish or read any paper with a comments section as peer review? It seems simple enough. I don't understand.

KZfaq for science or science KZfaq... SciTube. Yeah

​@@benchapple1583 Bc they would loose the boogeyman to blame instead of addressing the primary factors at the heart of the issue.... Government monopolization of the academic marketplace via... 1) the treasury's tit 2) legal codes that favor big firms that can leverage size and access to litigious services to lobby and bully lesser competition out of bissiness, while also strictly enforcing patent and copyright codes that highly restrict competitive and marketplace access to innovation, not just on an overly broad basis, but also for inordinate periods of time into the future.

What exactly scares you and why?

What corruption can you see at an undergraduate level lol

@@Pomegrante460-- maybe judoisoww meant by "science degree" something other than an American bachelor's degree.

@@declup possibly

@judoisoww said "charlatans and cranks can point out this obvious problem and use it as a way to discredit legitimate science" You see GENERALIZED CORRUPTION but you worry about discredit of legitimate science It's like catholics watching their church rotting everywhere but worried about what the atheists will say That's why scientism is catholicism of science

They could even publish everything they want. I have seen many papiers criticised in the comment section on Academia and the more controversial take the more likely somebody is to criticise it. And these kinds of discussions would be quite beneficial - either somebody will see what not to do, or they will come up with idea how to check/write this papier better.

In any field, there will be a certain number of journals with a good reputation. Peer-review isn't perfect, but you can be fairly confident that work published in a high-quality journal will have been through a rigorous peer review process. If publishing is decentralised and devolved to universities, the number of publishers suddenly explodes, and gauging the reputation of a publisher becomes practically impossible. It's very easy to say that we should be judging papers purely on their individual merits, but any professional scientist knows that it's practically impossible to devote the hours required to carefully consider every paper published in a field. This would have been possible several decades ago when the volume of research that was published was manageable, but that isn't the case in 2024. Having reputable academic gatekeepers is a practical necessity in academia (even if we might wish it wasn't), and this would be unmanageable if we got rid of journals because suddenly, rather than tracking the reputation of 10-20 journals, we have to track the reputation of hundreds or thousands of university publishers. Additionally, if, as you suggest, universities become general-purpose academic publishers, each university would need sufficient editorial expertise to gauge the quality of research across all research disciplines. This is unrealistic. An alternative would be pooling resources (e.g. rather than all universities publishing research in field X, 10-20 universities agree to do this)... but now you're in the exact position you started with, you've just shifted who owns the journal. Journals are necessary for modern science to work. Rather than trying to get rid of journals or peer-review, we need to promote non-profit journals owned and run by academic societies.

I sort of agree with you, but this sounds like a temporary solution, eventually this will give power to universities, and like academic journals, they will exploit it, especially since I imagine only top universities would have good reliability, like would you trust something published by some random university from a tiny island in the pacific? of by Harvard or the like? you'll create the same issue, just that now it won't be publishers per say, but universities

As someone who has worked in publishing this would be a stop-gap measure. The bit people often miss about publishing is that it's not "just" publishing, but administration, as well as legal, work that needs to be done. For every paper we would handle, at least three admin were needed, plus legal if anything happened to challenge the paper. The amount of time publishers have to spend defending papers they have published, just because someone makes a claim that then turns out to be false, is staggering. There are instances, albeit rarely, where people challenge papers as a means of stopping that paper from getting published only to then publish a paper in that same topic themselves, essentially using the case as a means of stopping rivals publishing ahead of them. Of course, for paper mills etc. that is a different kettle of fish and they take that very seriously. If universities wanted to publish, they would need more admin and legal staff to take the brunt of the work, and then also that leads to pay, HR etc. If they are not charging people for viewing papers they publish (ie. Subscription model) or the academics that publish with them (ie. OA model) then they are also not making any money to cover the additional costs of these teams. This increased cost is one of the reasons publishers need money, and why they collapse very quickly if they simply don't get enough papers through the door.

There are some efforts to create new, independent journals. I am so happy this is finally happening, like when the editors of Neuroimage stepped down in protest and started a new journal. There are also more and more journals in other fields that have very low or no fees but have been started by up-and-coming-prominent-enough-to-matter figures in the field. And I am so, so deeply grateful to every single one of them and will take on as much reviewing as I can afford to do for their journals! When I was doing my PhD and got that first shock looking at article processing costs and open access fees, a professor told me "well, we cannot do anything either, it is what it is." He was at the very top of his career and one of the most influential researchers in the field. Nobody looks at his grant applications and sees a lack of Elsevier journals and thinks "my, my, no grant for you this year." That's just not something he needs to be concerned about, yet this weird need to publish in "prestigious" journals and get interviewed a couple of times more on TV (to then loudly complain about lack of time due to all the interviews) is still there. But if none of the people who already have all the power and recognition do anything, who will?

That's a great quote! thanks!

Yeah, but the problem is that to get funding or because university or institute you are working require you to publish in a peer reviewed journal to prove you are "working"

@@Max-nr1xf If a university or institute needs external validation for an application to fund some research, why does that institution exist and who runs it? Moreover, it seems to me that the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated.

I'm a biology student. While many bigger labs/publications tend to go on bioRxiv before review, it's not frowned upon to skip it. The impression I get (having also put a few papers on there) is that it's a good way to get your data out there as early as possible. It's very common to reanalyze or combine large molecular datasets, so the sooner you get your data publicly available, the sooner you'll have citations rolling in (sometimes even before it's published). Plus, it helps to not get scooped... One interesting thing I've found is that some people never actually publish their papers; they'll just keep them on the archive. Seems especially common with bioinformatic tools. The code is available for anyone to view and scrutinize, so it's not super necessary to have peer review on it, unless you're including newly generated data.

@@tolep 'the widespread use of some synthetic index is sufficient proof that science as a profession is drastically overpopulated' or that we spend far too little money for scientist to work in peace.

@@adapienkowska2605 To work in peace? Work in peace at the expense of the taxpayer who is not supposed to ask any questions? The system is corrupt, generates low returns and has no meaningful quality control, and your proposal is to throw even more money into it? Did I understand correctly?

I obviously could be wrong, but I thought that retractions were reserved for genuine failings of the scientist, like data manipulation or incorrect analysis. I am under the impression that if you correctly do a study and analysis, and it supports your hypothesis, but then it turns out that hypothesis is untrue, that won’t result in a retraction, because it is part of the process, as you said. Your second point I do agree with, especially with so much misinformation and disinformation around, we gotta stay up to date 😅

yeah i work at a journal, retractions are specifically for scientific misconduct/bad research, so it would constitute a failing as a scientist. it's not considered a normal part of the scientific process

@@fredgoodyer4907-- but the idea, though, is important enough, right? OctagonalSquare used the word "retraction", but OS was probably pointing to the lack of balance in science publishing: only hypothesis confirmations are given any attention, whereas most scientific results, still valuable evidence, reject their corresponding hypotheses. Negative results (or OS's so-called "retractions") and sensational headline-grabbing results should be treated much more similarly than they are.

You said this at the end of the video, seems great that the thinking is clear, but the solution isn't

There is no 'solution' due to the complexity of the issue in my view. There are things we can do but it requires a collective effort - hence culture shift. Unless you disagree?

@@Danny.Hatcher Definitely agree, but as research culture is heavily biased towards high rank researchers, their action that will actually change the status quo

The Earth is not a globe. It's a shame that peasants are much smarter than "intellectuals".

Wow, thanks!

Innovation at fucking over the rest of us

@@MagDrag123 - Thats the rich peoples favorite tool. They are buying the f*king machine and enjoying the show. like kids playing GTA V

It’s wild y’all say this when you’re freely commenting on a free website, probably on a device that has chips that are some of the most complex things to ever exist. Capitalism isn’t perfect, but better than the other shit

​​@@mharley3791 I wonder who developed the key innovations of the worldwide web, social media, and public knowledge bases (like Wikipedia). Maybe if we look into the history, we'll discover whether capitalists did that initial work... Or if they just enclosed the best parts of the internet AFTER all the real work was done. Look into 'digital enclosure', the history of indymedia and twitter, and basically anyone from the early internet. They're still around and giving interviews

@@mharley3791cope

Yes, the 'packaging' of videos is something I am working on. Brining attention to topics that tend to fall on deaf ears has been a challenge, sometimes at the cost of topic clarity.

Good work! And good luck continuing it. Part of this is the tragedy of government support. Post WWII support for students has enabled many many students to get post high school educations -- and America's miracle economy, like Japan's is probably more a result of the high level of literacy and numeracy in the population than it is of supposed "free" enterprise. The down side is that massive injections of government money, Fulbright Scholarships and a thousand other assists to higher education, lead to huge increases of prices. The Elementary and Secondary Education Acts, for instance, made possible the infestation of the land with teachers' assistants; this may be nice for the egos of teachers but there is no evidence that it leads t any long-term improvement in students' outcomes. America's land grant colleges, state universities, and perhaps its top fifty or eighty private uiversities are among the world's best educational institutions. Sadly, though, government assistnace makes possible the proliferation of hundreds of worthless colleges. Scientific publishing? Pari passu.

That is my thinking 😁

You can submit it to a pre-print server if there is one for your field of study. Then you can communicate your research through KZfaq.

need a third party that specializes in weeding out false papers, invalid conclusions, inadequate test controls, etc. and gives stamps of approval to good papers. Costs the scientists nothing. They could start by verifying or refuting the most cited papers first and work down the list. Create a stigma against using papers that do not get teh stamp of approval. problem, is that too will eventually become corrupted.

In my opinion, science has got to results oriented. Good science is just asking questions about the world, testing them, reporting the results, no matter what they are. Who asks the best questions often just comes down to luck. The results should not dictate good science.

@@Myself-xg5fu nope, nobody is forced to use it. Nobody stops you from using a report. you clearly don't understand what I'm suggesting. but if it is objectively found to be false and is detailed why it's false in a report, then you choosing to rely upon a false report at that point is your problem. just don't expect anyone to take seriously a report proven to be false, nor the person who cites it.

Yeah , like i'm pretty sure one of the pillars of Science is the scientific method , which is based in replicability

That hasn't been my experience with AI research. Are there notable examples of unreproducible CS papers? Or are you just referring to a perception of such?

@@thebrianbeale CS is math, it's results are always reproducible. They probably are talking about more practical research, like papers you can find on SIGGRAPH and whatnot. But I'm not sure if those are nor peer-reviewed or not. And probably are not trash due to the very fact of them being practical.

@@thebrianbeale oh, man, there is an entire list of them, starting with any paper where they claim performance gains on secret datasets only. And if you try the same method on an open dataset, it turns out that there is no improvement. For a famous example, look at the Microsoft Phi-2 paper. they released model weights which is nice, but not the method of getting such weights, nor the dataset, nor a method of generating the dataset. Hence, the result is not reproducible. This is truly common. Then there are all the papers that claim to come with a github repo, but when you follow the link the repo is empty or says "the code will be released later" and of course, it never gets released. But you will be prevented from trying to reimplement their method because they might just release the code next week.

To test if the results are reproducible is its own challenge

Are you sure most are free? My research is in applied cryptography as well but the majority of the research papers from renowned publishing houses ( like the IEEE, and Elsevier) publish peer-reviewed articles with the same written methodology. Most often these algorithms are often duplicated with a minor twist.

Yup...

@@Danny.Hatcher Disgusting

needlessly cryptic language is more often than not sign that the author is a charlatan

Because academics' entire career is dependent on the amount and quality of publications they have produced. In a perfect world that measurement will be directly tied to the quality and quantity of the research they produce, but in reality this is, as detailed in the video, measured by how many citations they get through the H-index and similar. Publishing in high-impacting journals becomes the most obvious move to gain higher citations, thus keeping journals alive as gate keepers. If we were to get rid of journals as gate keepers, the culture of valuing an academic's worth and ability mainly through the citations their publications get needs to be changed first, or that citations need to somehow be decoupled from the journal they publish in.

Thank you. A share is always appreciated 😉

Thank you very much!

I'm not sure what you mean? LaTeX is simply a document preparation system. There needs to be a bunch of citations, since all science builds on the work of research. Finally the "language you publish in" if you are referring to English or other languages, I don't see how that makes a difference. If you are referring to the use of field specific language and terms, then that is also necessary, since having to explain all these terms would take op more space than the actual content.

Thank you. Yes, in 2024 I am putting my face in videos to try and limit those issues 😁

To try and avoid any legal situation by 'spreading' it's use.

@@Danny.Hatcher a tragic example of the chilling effect. I am not a lawyer, so I can’t say anything about possible liability, but I highly doubt you would experience any legal issues (and really hope not).

Just read through all of your comments across the videos. Thank you and I have made note of each for further thinking on my part. I wish I could spend the time responding to every comment on KZfaq but there isn't the time in the day 😁

Nonsense. That's not how science works. What's the point of keeping your discoveries secret?

​@@davidhoward4715I can think about consulting companies and AI developers as one example.

@@davidhoward4715 You keep your job and status as the one who can resolve the problem. If the guys under you know what you know, they don't need you anymore, do they? Some people want to help the world; some people want to help themselves. The world is made up of humans, not saints.

@@davidhoward4715 So nobody knows you're a liar. They probably mean paywalled articles though.

Thanks for the feedback. How would you package the video? Derek's video on 'good' clickbait comes to mind...

@@Danny.Hatcher It sure worked because I clicked the thumbnail, and it was a great summary about the state of science publishing. My experience was for the first one-two minutes, I just tried to verify whether this is the same content or not with the one from Veritasium. Thankfully it is not. I just hope that all the clips you used is under a fair use agreement. it would be sad if the video is takedown due to copyright violation.

I am yes 😁

Packaging is part of the process I am trying to figure out....

😂 necessity is the greatest pressure there is, and an anarchist is an expert at lying to themselves. In true anarchy, there is no hierarchy to determine legitimate science without confirming it yourself, so there is no body of knowledge you can trust. (Your own experiments are likewise unconfirmed by others)

@@thebrianbeale there is no structural hierarchy in modern science either. Research is certified by peer review. Cooperation still exists -- I'm not an Individualist Anarchist. I'm a social anarchist. Basically a communist. Where people live in communes and take decisions communally. Science would obviously be something done seriously. And in a digital age, multiple communes could add to the same body of work -- precisely how science worked for a long time.

Great point! I am not curious 🤔

It is his argument that I built the video from.

His main claims are at the end of the video. Yes, my packaging is questionable.

(This is not an anti-science comment.)

Yes. I didn't want to show it to avoid any legal stuff 😁

How would it be less likely, I wonder? Do you understand that an effort of typing a copy is not comparable to the effort of doing actual research?

There should be a source.

It sure makes it harder for people to tell the difference pseudoscience and real science. I wonder if we would have fewer people thinking climate change isn't real, because the science isn't accessible to them.

A good ethical question - it depends 😅

Yes, I have heard that feedback. I used his argument to build the video but didn't express that well.