Qualia Soup, a rationalist and a skilled You Tube jockey

Thanks for listing these examples! They indeed seem to provide counterexamples to the trend of increasing bureaucratization and credentialism, though I must note that they are all several decades old.

True. I thought about acknowledging this in my post, but decided it didn't make much difference because (1) their age would be partly explained by availability bias, because younger scientists are less well-known just because they haven't been around as long, and (2) if I move the bureaucratic cutoff date forward from the early 20th century to the mid-1980s, I find your point of view less credible, because science was already much more oriented around credentials & peer review by then than it was c. 1905.

Still, my list of anecdotal examples is no stronger evidence than taw's. Really, one would have to do a systematic survey of author affiliations in published papers or something to be sure of an actual trend, but I can't be bothered.

However, more importantly, my main point is that bureaucratization tends to have the same negative effect on science as on any other field of human endeavor. The number one tendency in every bureaucracy is that things should be done in such a way that everyone can cover his ass and avoid any personal responsibility no matter what happens.

That's endemic in bureaucracies (or at least all those I've had to deal with!), but I'd expect incentives for arse-covering in any system where people feel a need to protect their image, and that includes honour-and-rep social networks too.

In contrast, productive work always requires personal responsibility: someone must accept the blame if things go wrong, or otherwise there is no incentive to do things right, unless people are driven by sheer personal enthusiasm.

This seems like a fairly impoverished view of motivation to me. What about professionalism: a simple wish to do one's job well, whether one has particular enthusiasm for it or not? There must be people with PhDs out there who dragged themselves through the PhD process and got worthwhile results through sheer force of will rather than special enthusiasm for their project; I'd be amazed if there weren't professional scientists out there fitting that description too. There are probably other motivations too that I can't think of off-the-cuff.

But the modern peer-review system absolves everyone of responsibility -- everyone involved has his little piece of bureaucratic duty, and no matter what happens, there is no personal responsibility at all.

Again, though, I don't see why the lack of personal responsibility (which I think is a slight exaggeration) is unique to bureaucratic science. There's no intrinsic reason why journals where, say, the editor glances over a paper themselves and informally shows it to a few friends before deciding whether or not to publish (instead of soliciting formal peer reviews from experts) would be better in this respect.

Some supposedly "scientific" features of the present system are in fact the height of ass-covering perversity, like for example the "double-blind" peer-review -- how on Earth can you be an expert capable of reviewing a novel research paper, but unable to figure out who the authors are from the content of the paper?

It's certainly possible if the authors aren't already established workers in the expert's field. If I submitted an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics paper to an econometrics/ecology/history/statistics journal with real double-blind review, I'd bet a lot of money that the reviewer(s) couldn't guess who I was! But yes, double-blind (and single-blind) review's often trivial to get around.

So, at the end of the day, I don't see any advantage that the present heavily bureaucratized system might have over the old system that was based on honor and reputation. In my view, the present system functions well only insofar as in many fields, the top people are still driven by enthusiasm and sense of honor and doing their best to keep their field sound.

But surely this is inevitable in any system of science, as long as science is run by people? Regardless of the system used for accepting diamonds and rejecting turds, as long as people are doing the judging, the quality of what's published hinges on the competence & motivations of whoever's running the show, bureaucracy or not.

But this is despite the bureaucratizing tendencies, not thanks to them.

I suspect those tendencies make little difference either way, overall.

In fields where the personal enthusiasm of prominent insiders hasn't been strong enough to keep bureaucratically backed pseudoscience at bay, the mainstream work has long since degenerated into sheer nonsense.

What I think's happening here is that you see poor science that's backed by parts of the establishment, and you're inferring that because the establishment is bureaucratic, bureaucracy's to blame for the poor science. But I doubt the chosen social structure is the root cause. I'd expect similar sections of rot in an Einstein-era honour-based system.

What do you think of peer review vs. crowd-sourcing?

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