In general I approve of the impulse to copy social technology from functional parts of society, but I really don’t think contemporary academia should be copied by default. Frankly I think this site has a much healthier epistemic environment than you see in most academic communities that study similar subjects. For example, a random LW post with >75 points is *much* less likely to have an embarrassingly obvious crippling flaw in its core argument, compared to a random study in a peer-reviewed psychology journal.
Anonymous reviews in particular strike me as a terrible idea. Bureaucratic “peer review” in its current form is relatively recent for academia, and some of academia’s most productive periods were eras where critiques came with names attached, e.g. the physicists of the early 20th century, or the Republic of Letters. I don’t think the era of Elsevier journals with anonymous reviewers is an improvement—too much unaccountable bureaucracy, too much room for hidden politicking, not enough of the purifying fire of public argument.
If someone is worried about repercussions, which I doubt happens very often, then I think a better solution is to use a new pseudonym. (This isn’t the reason I posted my critique of an FHI paper under the “David Hornbein” pseudonym rather than under my real name, but it remains a proof of possibility.)
Some of these ideas seem worth adopting on their merits, maybe with minor tweaks, but I don’t think we should adopt anything *because* it’s what academics do.
In general I approve of the impulse to copy social technology from functional parts of society, but I really don’t think contemporary academia should be copied by default. Frankly I think this site has a much healthier epistemic environment than you see in most academic communities that study similar subjects. For example, a random LW post with >75 points is *much* less likely to have an embarrassingly obvious crippling flaw in its core argument, compared to a random study in a peer-reviewed psychology journal.
Anonymous reviews in particular strike me as a terrible idea. Bureaucratic “peer review” in its current form is relatively recent for academia, and some of academia’s most productive periods were eras where critiques came with names attached, e.g. the physicists of the early 20th century, or the Republic of Letters. I don’t think the era of Elsevier journals with anonymous reviewers is an improvement—too much unaccountable bureaucracy, too much room for hidden politicking, not enough of the purifying fire of public argument.
If someone is worried about repercussions, which I doubt happens very often, then I think a better solution is to use a new pseudonym. (This isn’t the reason I posted my critique of an FHI paper under the “David Hornbein” pseudonym rather than under my real name, but it remains a proof of possibility.)
Some of these ideas seem worth adopting on their merits, maybe with minor tweaks, but I don’t think we should adopt anything *because* it’s what academics do.