Aletho News

End All Formal Science Journals & Papers

By William M. Briggs | Statistician To The Stars! | June 21, 2023

Time to return to the beginning. End formal science papers and let scientists talk freely amongst themselves.

Here’s why.

Heard about the formal peer-reviewed paper “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases” by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior?

It was canceled.

Or, in science speak, retracted. Because why? Not because of any gross error. Because “activists” (i.e. true believers) hated it.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria is the kind of madness that for instance strikes classrooms full of girls, who, under the tutelage of a purple-haired “educator”, or even on their own, suddenly all “discover” they are boys.

Article says “Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA [adolescents and young adults] child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

Which is no surprise to any sane person. But truth is not a beloved entity in our Regime. So the paper had to go.

Even more amusing is that “Suzanna Diaz” is a fake name. Imagine. A scholar so frightened of other academics she, or he, had to use a nom de guerre. (There is no typo here.)

You can read all about the cancelling elsewhere. Which is one among many.

Now you and I, dear reader, have looked at hundreds of papers over the years, nearly all bad. Most with mistakes so egregious even Kamala Harris would blush at them. All of them committing scientific sins far in excess in any found in the Rapid Gender Madness paper. None of them have been retracted.

Indeed the opposite has been true. Those atrocious papers were used to forward the Regime line, in one way or another. Or to tout lousy theory, false ideas, wild over-certainties, and insane preposterousities.

All of these papers are held up, waved frenetically in our faces by hersterics and rulers who chant “Research shows we must trust The Science!”

End it. Formal publishing is not just useless, it’s downright harmful. And there is no need of it.

Science began with highly intelligent men writing letters to each other, and showing the copies around. A fine practice.

It kept the noise to a minimum. Formal publishing is now almost entirely noise. There are more than 8 million papers published a year now, a number going up and up and up. Nobody reads them. Why should they? They are almost all useless. Nearly all exist because, and only because, academics must publish or perish. Must.

If we eliminated formal publications, much of this persiflage would dry up, and our best and brightest would be able to concentrate on their own work, and not be harassed with “peer review” requests.

The only people who have respect for peer review are those who have never experienced it. As I always say, there is no surer enforcer of banal tepid watery content than peer review. Nothing better ensconces error and mandates Consensus. I cannot say it better than Alan Savory, who recognized peer review is academia and not science.

The hell with academia. We care about science, the search for truth about the world. Academia is no longer the best method to conduct this search. Academia is now more akin to journalism, which is the propagation of the party line.

What’s needed for intellectual progress, the late-great David Stove correctly told us, is leisure and a library. That leisure was available to the Founders. It is not so much available today, or is, but it is not cherished. We do have libraries, but they are crammed full of journals which are never read. Nor should be.

Do you know how much it costs a library to stock, in paper or electronic form, those journals? I’d tell you, but you might have a seizure. The sums are vast. Money pissed away. Money better spent on books.

Of course, you could subscribe yourself personally to these journals, each costing hundreds a year. But that’s asinine, since you’d never read any but a few of the papers. Which are anyway scattered across journals. And who is going to subscribe to a dozen or two journals? So you might buy individual copies of papers you want. But each ten- or twelve-page paper is ridiculously expensive.

Why do they cost anyway? Scientists do the writing, giving it free to the journals, who then charge for it. Scientists sign away their copyright to a publisher who squeeze scientists (through their employers) to read what they wrote! It’s even more bizarre when you consider the papers were almost all funded on the public dime. Academic journal publishing is a brilliantly evil system.

There is no longer any need for publishers. Dump them.

We now have places like the arxivs and their ilk. More should be encouraged. Scientists can write whatever they want, upload their work onto any of many systems, and anybody who wants can read the papers. True, these sites require maintenance fees, but their costs are orders of magnitude less than journals. (I put my work here on the blog, which is always free for readers.)

Enterprising editors can still cobble together their own newsletters or magazines of what they think is the best writing, paying their writers in some way.

Scientists, knowing their work would disappear in a flood of flotsam and jetsam could, like the Founders, communicate directly with each other, and can ignore the fluff. That happens now to a great extent in physics, with arxiv.

Nobody loses in this system. Except vampiric publishers.

Because of scientism, we have all become inveterate quantifiers. That’s why we have teenage-girl-inspired metrics like “h-indexes”, which track popularity. Yes. If you’ve never heard of these, they are exactly like counting “likes” on social media. You want to experience true cringe? Then listen to academics compare their paper metrics. Pathetic.

But the cry will naturally arise, “Now we’ve eliminated journals, how can we reward and rate how good scientists are?”

Sigh.

That call is the spirit of academia. Which must be crushed, extinguished, hounded from polite company. It is that spirit that canceled the Gender Insanity paper. Which, because it’s still there and can be read by all, is nothing more than a scarlet letter. Which exists only for midwits to snort at and congratulate themselves over. You read that retracted paper? How dare you.

End it all.

June 24, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular