by bonoboTP | 2025-09-29 14:13:36+00:00
The exponential scaling messes with the previous more honor-based gentleman-like reputation-based everyone-knows-everyone situation. That model has its own problems but different. Today it's more cutthroat, grind-competitive and nobody has proper incentives.

It's like working long years in a family-sized company vs job hopping between megacorps.

The actual science takes the backseat. Nobody has time to just think, you must pump out the next paper and somehow get it through peer review. As a reviewer, you don't get much out of reviewing. It used to be exciting to look at new developments from across the field in ones review stack. Today it's mostly filled with the nth resubmission of something by someone in anxious hurry to just produce something to tick a box. There is no cost to just submitting massive amounts of papers. Anyway, so it's not fun as a reviewer either, you get no reward for it and you take time away from your own research. So people now have to be forced to review in order to submit. These forced reviews do as good a job as you expect. The better case is if they are just disinterested. The worse is if they feel you are a dangerous competitor. Or they only try to assess whether you toiled "hard enough" to deserve the badge of a published paper. Intellectual curiosity etc. have taken the back seat. LLMs just make it all worse.

Nobody is truly incenticized to change this. It's a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation. Just extract as much as you can, and fight like in a war.

It's also like moving from a small village where everyone knows everyone to a big metropolis. People are all just in transit there, they want to take as much as possible before moving on. Wider impacts don't matter. Publish a bunch of stuff then get a well paying job. Who cares that these papers are not quite that scientifically valuable? Nobody reads it anyway. In 6 months it's obsolete either way. But in the meantime it increased the citation count of the PI, the department can put it into their annual report, use the numbers for rankings and for applying for state funding, the numbers look good when talking to the minister of education, it can be also pushed in press releases to do PR for the university which increases public reputation etc. The conferences rise on the impact tables because of the immense cross-citation numbers etc. The more papers, the more citations, the higher the impact factor. And this prestige then moves on to the editors, area chairs etc. and it looks good on a CV.

It mirrors a lot of other social developments where time horizons have shrunk, trust is lower, incentives are perverse and nobody quite likes how it is but nobody has unilateral power to change things in the face of institutional inertia.

Organizing activity at such scale is a hard problem. Especially because research is very decentralized by tradition. It's largely independent groups of 10-20 people centered around one main senior scientist. The network between these is informal. It's very different than megacorps. Megacorps can go sclerotic with admin bloat and paralyzed by middle manager layers. But in the distributed model, there is minimal coordination, it's an undifferentiated soup of these tiny groups, each holding on to their similar ideas and rushing to publish first.

Unfortunately, research is not like factory production, even if bureaucrats and bean counters would wish so. Simply throwing more people at it can make negative impact, analogous to the mythical man-month.