alt Hacker NewsI assume hep = high energy physics in this context. PI = professor who received a government grant.
Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.
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But peer review (circa 1965-2010[1]) is just the prior iteration of the problem[2]; the wave of crap[3] produced by publish or perish (crica 1950-present[4]). Rejecting papers by outsiders is irrelevant; the problem is we want to determine which papers are good/interesting/worth considering out of the fire hose of bilge, and, though we were already arguably failing at this, the problem just got harder.
(I say arguably, because there is always the old "try it yourself and see if it actually works" trick, but nobody seems to be fond of this; it smacks of "do your own research" and we're lazy monkeys at heart, who would much rather copy off of someone else's homework.)
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&ye...
[2] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
[3] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
[4] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+per...
Peer review isn’t the issue here. His comments are about Arxiv, which is a preprint server. Essentially anyone can publish a preprint. There’s no peer or other review involved.
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.
I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.
[1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf
Kinda. PI is principal investigator and usually they’re a professor with a grant (the grant being the thing they are the principal of investigating). That part is right. But they’re not really directly in the review loop. For some fields where things are small enough that folks can recognize style such as it exists, you could see reviewers passing over unfamiliar work and promoting familiar work. That was not the issue.
The issue was that it still was kind of hard to produce crappy mid rate papers, so you kind of needed the infrastructure of a small lab to do that. Now you don’t. The success rate for those mediocre papers produced by grad students and postdocs will go way down. It is possible that will cease to be a useful signal for those early career researchers.