This seems like a very odd response given the fact of the replication crisis, the many cases of scientific knowledge being forgotten for decades after being discovered, the rise of false or inaccurate (and sometimes quite harmful!) models, etc.
I think that (in many, or most, scientific fields) people often don’t build on the good content, and don’t forget about the bad content; often, the reverse happens. It’s true that it’s “very rarely published that [bad papers/proofs are] unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals”! But this is, actually, very bad, and is a huge reason why more and more scientific fields are being revealed to be full of un-replicable nonsense, egregious mistakes, and even outright fraud! The filtering mechanisms we have are actually quite poor.
The “papers in scientific journals” example / case study seems to me to yield clear, strong support for my view.
It’s very worthwhile to understand the ways in which academia has died over the last 60 years or so, and part of it definitely involves failures in the journal system. But the axis of public criticism in journals doesn’t seem at all to have been what changed in the last 60 years? Insofar as you think that’s a primary reason, you seem to be explaining a change by pointing to a variable that has not changed.
In replying to your proposed norms, it’s not odd to point out that the very mechanism of labeling everything that’s bad as bad and ensuring we have common knowledge of it, was not remotely present when science was at its most productive — when Turing was inventing his machines, or when Crick & Watson were discovering the structure of DNA. In fact it seems to have been actively opposed in the journal system, because you do not get zero criticism without active optimization for it. That is why it seems to me to be strong evidence against the system you propose.
There may be a system that works via criticizing everything bad in public, but when science was most successful it did not, and instead seems to me to be based around the system I describe (a lot of submissions and high reward for success, little punishment for failure).
This seems like a very odd response given the fact of the replication crisis, the many cases of scientific knowledge being forgotten for decades after being discovered, the rise of false or inaccurate (and sometimes quite harmful!) models, etc.
I think that (in many, or most, scientific fields) people often don’t build on the good content, and don’t forget about the bad content; often, the reverse happens. It’s true that it’s “very rarely published that [bad papers/proofs are] unhelpful or wrong or even criticized in the journals”! But this is, actually, very bad, and is a huge reason why more and more scientific fields are being revealed to be full of un-replicable nonsense, egregious mistakes, and even outright fraud! The filtering mechanisms we have are actually quite poor.
The “papers in scientific journals” example / case study seems to me to yield clear, strong support for my view.
It’s very worthwhile to understand the ways in which academia has died over the last 60 years or so, and part of it definitely involves failures in the journal system. But the axis of public criticism in journals doesn’t seem at all to have been what changed in the last 60 years? Insofar as you think that’s a primary reason, you seem to be explaining a change by pointing to a variable that has not changed.
In replying to your proposed norms, it’s not odd to point out that the very mechanism of labeling everything that’s bad as bad and ensuring we have common knowledge of it, was not remotely present when science was at its most productive — when Turing was inventing his machines, or when Crick & Watson were discovering the structure of DNA. In fact it seems to have been actively opposed in the journal system, because you do not get zero criticism without active optimization for it. That is why it seems to me to be strong evidence against the system you propose.
There may be a system that works via criticizing everything bad in public, but when science was most successful it did not, and instead seems to me to be based around the system I describe (a lot of submissions and high reward for success, little punishment for failure).