Science writing should have three primary characteristics: precise, clear, and brief. It’s not clear to me that blogs as a medium necessarily detract from any of those three, and the one they are most likely to detract from (brief) is the one that seems least important.
I can imagine the argument that submitting to a journal forces one to be more precise and clear; but I can also imagine the argument that without actual interaction with your audience, you cannot be sure what is precise or clear.
Peer review seems better implemented by linking and post aggregation than by anonymous judging, and criticisms made in the open seem more likely to be influential. (I’ve read a number of papers where a seemingly throwaway comment, if you think about it, turns out to significantly change the result of the paper- and I don’t know how many people glossed over the comment without thinking about it. Starting a discussion on that point in threaded comments seems like a good solution to that.)
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future- it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- but at tremendous cost to the present (papers generally describe work done ~3 years ago; as Krugman puts it here, linked in the OP:
Partly this was because of the long lags — by the time my most successful (though by no means best) academic paper was actually published, in 1991, there were around 150 derivative papers that I knew of, and the target zone literature was running into diminishing returns.
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
We should distinguish communicating established science from creating new science and from checking new science by peers.
I am sure new internet tech like wikis, reddit or /. style comment systems, online version control, dropbox, etc. is helping people create better. Blogs seem great for communicating to laypeople, and marketing your stuff.
I think the dominant forces that establish peer review as a different process from what you envision are:
(a) academics function on a dual currency: $$$ and kudos, and guard kudos jealously
(b) there are personal rivalries within fields, but we still need to get work done
(c) quality peer review takes a long time, and people often view it as a chore
I am not aware of any problem w/ journals/peer review that internet tech conclusively solves, because all these problems are either social (can’t solve social problems w/ tech), or are due to the fact that proper peer review is hard and takes a long time. I reviewed a paper with a 50 page proof before.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
The only math blog I know of worth reading is Tao’s, and he’s a massive outlier. Same for CS and Aaronson.
LaTeX/web integration is horribly broken, and will be essentially forever.
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future—it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- at tremendous cost to the present
Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.
The narrow field I’m currently working in is almost two years old; if Krugman were right there wouldn’t be any published papers on it. Of course, there are around thirty or so.
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
They fix the journal publication lag problem, but not the draft writing problem, unless there are people uploading preprints with the hypotheses to experiments they haven’t run yet, or with current things they’re thinking about. (I know there are experiment registration systems in a handful of medical fields in order to cut down on the file drawer effect, and those seem like an okay example of this sort of thing, but I’m not aware of those in fields like physics or CS or so on.)
Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me.
Sure. But I’d rather optimize for generating knowledge quickly than for generating status in an orderly way, because I think it’ll be positive on net.
Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?
I think you’ll have to unpack this one for me, because I’m not sure what specifically you’re trying to imply and I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
No way, strongly disagree.
Science writing should have three primary characteristics: precise, clear, and brief. It’s not clear to me that blogs as a medium necessarily detract from any of those three, and the one they are most likely to detract from (brief) is the one that seems least important.
I can imagine the argument that submitting to a journal forces one to be more precise and clear; but I can also imagine the argument that without actual interaction with your audience, you cannot be sure what is precise or clear.
Peer review seems better implemented by linking and post aggregation than by anonymous judging, and criticisms made in the open seem more likely to be influential. (I’ve read a number of papers where a seemingly throwaway comment, if you think about it, turns out to significantly change the result of the paper- and I don’t know how many people glossed over the comment without thinking about it. Starting a discussion on that point in threaded comments seems like a good solution to that.)
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future- it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- but at tremendous cost to the present (papers generally describe work done ~3 years ago; as Krugman puts it here, linked in the OP:
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
We should distinguish communicating established science from creating new science and from checking new science by peers.
I am sure new internet tech like wikis, reddit or /. style comment systems, online version control, dropbox, etc. is helping people create better. Blogs seem great for communicating to laypeople, and marketing your stuff.
I think the dominant forces that establish peer review as a different process from what you envision are:
(a) academics function on a dual currency: $$$ and kudos, and guard kudos jealously
(b) there are personal rivalries within fields, but we still need to get work done
(c) quality peer review takes a long time, and people often view it as a chore
I am not aware of any problem w/ journals/peer review that internet tech conclusively solves, because all these problems are either social (can’t solve social problems w/ tech), or are due to the fact that proper peer review is hard and takes a long time. I reviewed a paper with a 50 page proof before.
Did you think about this for five minutes?
The only math blog I know of worth reading is Tao’s, and he’s a massive outlier. Same for CS and Aaronson.
LaTeX/web integration is horribly broken, and will be essentially forever.
Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.
The narrow field I’m currently working in is almost two years old; if Krugman were right there wouldn’t be any published papers on it. Of course, there are around thirty or so.
Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me. Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?
They fix the journal publication lag problem, but not the draft writing problem, unless there are people uploading preprints with the hypotheses to experiments they haven’t run yet, or with current things they’re thinking about. (I know there are experiment registration systems in a handful of medical fields in order to cut down on the file drawer effect, and those seem like an okay example of this sort of thing, but I’m not aware of those in fields like physics or CS or so on.)
Sure. But I’d rather optimize for generating knowledge quickly than for generating status in an orderly way, because I think it’ll be positive on net.
I think you’ll have to unpack this one for me, because I’m not sure what specifically you’re trying to imply and I don’t want to put words in your mouth.