RE: Some thoughts about STEM on Steem - bonus: a complete introduction to particle physics

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Personally I believe that immortalizing technical information on the blockchain where there's no censorship involved would result in the creation of a free library available for all internet users,

In physics, we have the arxiv for this. I would keep steem as a very good medium for communicating about science, but I won't use it for publishing actual research paper. You need something made explicitly for scientists (check scipost for instance) that is more controlled. Otherwise, how to distinguish the good from the bad? Who is deciding what is good and what is bad? Blog posts are one thing, but actual research is another thing.

PS: Thanks! I will fix it immediately!



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(Edited)

So . . . I would actually post research on Steemit!

Here's why.

;)

It would eventually go into journals when concise and sufficiently rigorous. Elegant. Formatted.

But there's nothing quite like a blockchain printing scientific papers on currency tokens to establish priority in an archived manner. Nobody throws away money. And therefore publish much, much earlier. Yes, earlier than even arXiv.

(I would not do this yet. There's too much spam on Steem at the moment. But we'll see. The front end is being forked by several groups. And there will be no trending page. Then competition from EOS will occur. All very good. When there's no competition everybody gets the worst product at the highest price.)

Publish a good result in journals which have consistent quality and impact. No rush at this point. A well organized, deep, clear, concise paper. One that others will actually read.

Circulate it to get feedback on possible flaws in arguments even before submitting it. That usually takes over a month. If one don't care how many read it or not, it would just go to arXiv exclusively. Not both arXiv and a journal.

It would in that last case possibly be very long. Longer than it has to be.

Conciseness takes time. Pascal apologized long ago that he could not make his letter shorter. He had insufficient time to do that.

Suppose authors could do both? Game changer. Here's why.

What means consistent? Journals where I or the representative consumer of the content reads at least several of the papers in each issue. Like a restaurant with a star. The next two stars, two out of a possible three, are for consistency of the food, of that good food that gave it the first star.

Problem? Solution?

Some of these journals are behind a paywall. Not accessible even to most academics, especially in Europe, where many institutions cannot afford to subscribe to all publishers. That costs millions, and that can be used for other things.

And that is not easy to change. The libraries which purchase the journals are not the end users.

When the consumer of the good and the one who pays for the good are not the same entity, there exists an above threshold number institutions worldwide will continue to buy these journals. Even if all scientists switch. I'm thinking about the United States. The single largest market. It's an above threshold minority. (We'll talk about why that matters so much later.)

The institutions subsidize open access for their faculties and students in such journals where there is desire and initiative. So the incentives to switch to an entirely new platform for a further sufficiently great minority (in this case a majority) of scientists, especially the young and untentured, and early in their career hence poor, not receiving high salaries or having other streams of income, are not yet sufficiently great.

A typical queried data point will declare: Yes, yes! They too want open transparent systems! And having said that, they'll do nothing, submit nothing using the new technology.

What is required is a new use case. A new value proposition for individuals to transition en masse. New algorithms for example that maximize consistency beyond that offered by current platforms.

So what was that about a sufficient minority? I mentioned that why?

Once a sufficient minority transitions, all will transition. Because as Nassim Taleb pointed out again with the minority rule in his latest book, if As will consume Ns or Ms, but Bs will consume only Ms, when scaling up production for a larger population, there are significant economies of scale in producing only Ms. So long as Bs are a sufficiently large minority. Assuming this would not be the case was a major error in the otherwise good post by @dan from two years back.

Let's talk about acceptance models for new technologies. In publishing and in general.

Publishing a partial result on public platforms, possibly anonymously is a win in the sense of providing scientists with a way to transition to open and free platforms by intentionally boosting the reputation of the platforms before they being publishing on it generally. Make it academically necessary to read not just paywall journals. Don't give the competition options. That's one of the things arXiv has done beautifully. Think like arXiv; think strategically, I suggest.

There needs to be a use case in the space, a communications amplifier, that is missing from old sector publishing technology, to get the above threshold minority to switch to the new sector publishing technology.

May be the above is something sufficiently many others would like to do as a transition to something blockchain social media based peer review and publishing. Like to PEvO, as we discussed yesterday.

Otherwise we find, as Richard Gabriel argued in the above link, that we get the improvement, by the market of products and ideas, but at the slowest possible rate. Everything faster requires strategy. Such as a significant use additional case.

Alan Kay argues that plain paper copying by Xerox was more expensive than competing technologies, but it was a communication amplifier and it was easier. So it won. Air travel is still costs more per unit distance than trains in most cases, but it's more convenient in the sense of faster. So people fly.

Returning to the original question: ``In physics, we have the arxiv for this. I would keep steem as a very good medium for communicating about science, but I won't use it for publishing actual research paper. You need something made explicitly for scientists that is more controlled. Otherwise, how to distinguish the good from the bad? Who is deciding what is good and what is bad?''

I said I would. Many in the computer science and mathematics community do that.

The reader must learn to distinguish good from bad. We have waaay too many blind cites in science, researchers reading the abstract or conclusions and assuming the result is valid. This usually creates a broken telephone effect, and confusion results and gets cited.

When anyone references a monograph or a chapter or a paper need to read the whole paper, the whole chapter, the whole book. (That's not currently solved by Steem, as currently most posts have # Reads < # Votes. Maybe improving front ends and competition from EOS will assist.)

Nicolas Rashevsky said it long ago, there's no royal road, no shortcuts in science. Where a paper is published is not sufficient to trust papers. Especially those with technical content. Given twigging and overspecialization, which means the referee is most likely not quite an expert either.

(https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20114445)

Every scientific paper must be carefully read by everyone who wishes to cite it. No shortcuts exist.

Deeper feedbacks are needed. The reviews made public, and reviews made of reviews. And so on. The result is a fixed point called accuracy. The reviewers would have higher dimensional reputations, several values associated with their account. Regarding the results of each of these feedbacks.

There must be no dominant strategy that incentives gaming the system.

Journals are not there to vouch for the truth of all they publish. That is impossible. Results get falsified all the time. Indeed falsification of existing literature is the most notable result and reason to publish.

Publications are filters. Rather they direct attention given the vast ocean of publications, most of them either redundant or irrelevant or obviously rubbish. The readers get consistent high quality work, and they must then read all the arguments, all the evidence, and judge the paper anyway.

Clifford Truesdell also famously wrote the same in a rather acerbic and witty collection of essays.

The solution is to get a lot of open peer review. Papers might even be anonymous. The system must survive even anonymity as a stress test.

I particularly like what Behavioral and brain sciences does. I also like what Annals of mathematics does.

But it should be larger scale, open, free, transparent, and rapid. Everything cited must be read by everyone who cites it. Whatever system makes that happen will be a game changer. The quality as consistency of the journal or platform will be way up there. And more people will want to publish there, more departments will reward publishing there.

Some of my suggestions. High consistency would within a year result in a large impact. And the platform can go from there.

Update. Made this long comment into a post.

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What a long comment! Thanks a lot for bringing this here,

Unfortunately I have not that much time to answer deeply, but let' see that I partially agree. I come from a field where everything is public, can be open access by selecting the right journals and even for free, so... Even all papers are freely available on the arxiv. So my problems are somehow slightly different :)

By the way, everything is open access in particle physics thanks to the Scoap3 initiative where institutes from all over the world pay for it. This is not optimal, but already better than nothing.

But of course, this is not the case for any other field different from particle physics and solution must be built. I hope to be able to witness this in my lifetime.

If I have well understood, you would like to have a kind of steem-based platform like the arxiv (but maybe with different rules on how the tokens are attributed; this is the reputation thing the pevo people are after). But then why not simply the arxiv. I don't really understand the need for the token. Why is not an arxiv-like version enough?

Okay, the weak spot of the arxiv is the referral system that is not existent. Then we have scipost. I actually don't see what we should have in addition to this? Scipost includes mostly everything that you mentioned.

Maybe competitors (like pevo)? But the idea is the best so far, IMO. I still don't see where and how the tokens enter the game, but well... to be discussed.

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