by godelski | 2025-09-24 23:38:25+00:00
> Philosophy doesn't have any ROI.

Maybe don't generalize then? *Especially* on a tech forum?

I'm going to back lemonwaterlime here. The truth of the matter is that even as scientists we aren't very good at predicting what technology or research will be impactful. There's a laundry list of ground breaking research and technologies that have failed to be funded or rejected. This includes mRNA research as well as many Nobel prize winning research. It's so common there's multiple cliches describing the phenomena!

It's pretty simple to see why lemonwaterlime's claim has merit: you can't cause paradigm shifts by maintaining the current paradigm.

I'm sure there's another aspect that you see in your own field: momentum. When winning awards is used as merit for winning more awards then you create a feedback loop that reinforces a narrowing of ideas. This is especially problematic when journals and conferences measure their quality by their rejection rates. One CANNOT determine quality or impact factor via a rejection rate. I left my PhD with a distaste for academia because I cannot fathom how so many researchers evaluate works comparatively and with so little care (as if it is an unproductive task that simply needs to be completed rather than the seriousness it deserves). You can only evaluate a work by its own validity, not by your personal belief if it is more impactful or not than your imagination of the quality of other submissions. It is insane and self-destructive. Reviewers should not be incentivized to reject works, but rather to write meaningful comments to improve works. It's far too easy to criticize a work, and in the current system metareviewers and ACs are biased to scrutinize rejects far less than accepts. I'm sorry, it just isn't working.

Here's all you can do in reviewing. For a grant, paper, or whatever

Objective: - Contains factual errors - Contains writing errors Subjective: - The validity of the work - The impact of the work - Properly communicated to the intended audience - Contains the appropriate citations - Is sufficient quality for the prestige of the venue/award

When I review papers I will accept a paper if:

- It is void of *major* factual errors (that I am aware of) - Is sufficiently communicated that I believe a junior level grad student would be able to replicate (maybe with some effort) - It is not plagiarized

My beliefs about impact and how incremental the work is only affect how strongly I will accept a work. Regardless of accept or reject I write lengthy reviews, because my job is to help the authors make their paper the best it can be. I've even received reviewer awards at top venues for this, but let's be real, those awards are effectively meaningless.

> Skepticism requires a decent number of skeptics who try to show that you're wrong.

Yes, but this *CANNOT* be done meaningfully through review. It can only be done through replication efforts. Something we not only fail to incentivize in the current ecosystem, but actively discourage. It is absolutely bonkers that we discourage what is fundamentally the cornerstone of science (you are not claiming philosophy is science, are you?). It is also ludicrous that we actively discourage publishing negative results. There's so much time and money wasted in what could be resolved through better communication.

> Generally, science lives off skepticism.

This is incorrect and only encourages the anti-science crowd.

Science lives off of replication and the free exploration of ideas. Will you have failures and fund ideas that turn out to be wrong? Of course! What scientist isn't aware of the extreme difficulty of pushing the frontier of human knowledge? Even in the current system we have an absurdly large amount of fraud and an unacceptable failure rate for replication. The system only encourages these things. While we don't want to encourage futile pursuits, let's be real, if you've made it to the level of a PhD you are quite in tune with the nuances of the field and should have a fairly good intuition of what problems need to be resolved. If you do not, you really should not have been awarded your doctorate.

Our efforts to reduce waste only serves as a modern day cobra effect. I'm sorry, fundamental research is just inherently risky. But when it succeeds it can have profound impacts across the globe. I'd argue that the invention of a single topic has created magnitudes more value (in varying senses of the word) than all our failures combined. Would you not think that alone, Calculus produces trillions of dollars a year in value and aids in saving millions of lives a year? Or take the more recent mRNA results. How many failures, crackpots, and "waste" does this single success offset? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

Mind you, Katalin Karikó is one of those "crackpots" you refer to. How many true crackpots are willing to allow in order to ensure such false negatives may succeed? Or inversely, how many high impact falsely labeled crackpots are we willing to sacrifice in order to ensure we do not misallocate funds to the crazies? I'm sure you've thought about countless variations of this question...