First we need to understand what we want to solve. The attention economy and PR war goes on just as much on the open internet. E.g. people only reading papers from big shots, MIT, Stanford, Harvard labs etc.

The problem is way deeper than just academia. Such as, is there fairness in the world deep down, is mass-produced excellence possible? Does individual greatness actually exist or is it all just a power play?

Overall, the quality of science is extremely difficult to measure, precisely because it operates on the border of the unknown and because people try their best to appear the best possible. Science is difficult to understand and is often far removed from the here and now, and may only bear fruit decades down the line. It's hard to judge for the same reason that antelopes are hard to catch for cheetahs: competition (mainly the antelope vs antelope type).

In the end, science has only been this mass product for a few decades. Before that it was mostly a pastime of weird nerdy aristocrats or people paid by aristocrats for showoff purposes. Or church people with too much time on their hands.

In reality, from the top down view it's a huge gamble. You try to get good people to do their honest best and then see what happens. Then at the end there will be some breakthroughs. But only a few every few years in each field. However, this does not satisfy the participants. I toiled away as well, but the reward is only paid to the lucky one. So everyone tries to be the lucky one, which perversely pushes everyone to take fewer risks, making the collective likelihood of a breakthrough lower, but their own expected reward better.

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My grandfather used to recite the story of a farmer who had three pigs. Every morning he'd throw two apples in their confinement. He'd then grab a big stick and beat the one that didn't get any apple: why didn't it try harder?

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My prediction is that as with all signaling spirals and treadmill effects, there will be something new to aspire to, to tell the wheat from the chaff, a signal that's harder to fake. It's a constant race. You demonstrate your fitness by being adaptive to how the system changes. Overall the "quality" of people obviously doesn't change over time, it's just that the competent/powerful drive the criteria to their benefit.

As academia/publishing etc. is now flooded with "the plebs", "the elite" will move on and will perhaps use other criteria.

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Now, going back to assuming this is about the object-level science itself. Where to find the best science? You cannot do this in general. You have to educate yourself and dive in yourself. You try to learn how to judge people's character and try to listen to and digest the assessment of those you trust.

There's no other way, gather experience and become "better" yourself. Use the cognitive resources of your brain to try and outsmart your opponent: the writer of the piece of text you are reading. This cannot be standardized/metrificated in a simple way (outside human-level AGI). If your organization does not put in the cognitive power of extensively processing the content of a particular research and critically examining the motivations behind it etc., there is no way to judge it. Then you're back to credentials. Did it come from a highly cited person? Is this person endorsed by other big shots, where the "seed big shots" are the researchers at the historically most prestigious institutions.

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Currently, to find interesting research I personally use Github recommendations, Google Scholar alerts watching for citations of landmark papers (good indicators for progress in niches) and authors. A well-curated Twitter-feed is also useful, as is arxiv-sanity. In the end, I have to make up my mind if it's good work or not, and as everyone I don't have infinite cognitive resources. So I make snap judgements based on paper gestalt, affiliations, plausibility, result tables, etc. If it clears this bar, I dive in more. Over time, you learn to trust some smart people and can follow them online and see what they say and recommend. And continuously learn and grind your brain. Cognitive work cannot be spared, just like you cannot spare physical exhaustion in sport competitions.