> Questionable methods get mass debated in public.
By people who don't know what they're talking about.
You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
What matters is the discovery of new things that are true, that we can do engineering with. Publication by youtube & arxiv doesn't have to be oriented at public consumption - it works just as well when it's by-researchers, for-researchers. Except without gatekeeping, people like McCalip can participate too. Who cares who's sitting on the sidelines? In post-peer-review, industry-funded academics rush a paper to a preprint server, a space engineer replicates it, and someone else figures out how to mass-produce it, and we get room-temp ambient-pressure superconductors, and we know we did because the engineering works.
This works just as well with less exciting tech, because the point is that we collaboratively learned how to build something.
Agreed. What I don't understand is the gatekeeping. Why would the actions of outsiders have any bearing on "real" research? Are they worried that grant money will get redirected toward shallower, more glamorous groups?
I think the gatekeeping is relevant because almost every time in recent years that the general completely unvetted, often actively ignorant public has gotten an in on the scientific/R&D process, it has been a disaster for the field.
NASA can't take risks and seriously innovate anymore because even intentional explosions will be passed off as failures, we all experienced the sheer madness of the covid years, similarly anything nuclear brings complete randos out of the woodworks claiming absurd things about its dangers.
Not having some amount of gatekeeping just lowers the bar too much and introduces so much more noise.
> Not having some amount of gatekeeping just lowers the bar too much and introduces so much more noise.
I can see how this would be a very controversial subject. Discouraging scientific participation? That's a tough pill to swallow without a lot of justification.
It isn't discouraging participation, it's requiring that you meet some minimum level of proficiency to be considered credible. Kind of like how you need to have some experience in programming to have any credibility when talking about how a programming language should be designed.
> it's requiring that you meet some minimum level of proficiency to be considered credible
That's not really the case though is it? Doubting someone's credibility would simply mean ignoring their results. But withholding information is something else entirely.
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, where did withholding information come into this?
When I mentioned gatekeeping I was specifically referring to how there's this formula that was kept secret since 1999. At some point the potential significance surely became apparent, and one of the only speculations I can come up with to justify that would be gatekeeping; keeping the information out of the hands of the filthy commoners for reasons.
Maybe it wasn't gatekeeping. If not I'd sure as heck like to know what it was.
In 1999, I was still a student in solid state physics, not far past my bachelor's degree, and happened to notice the publication of something that, to this day, I suspect might be (note, load bearing "might") a critical breakthrough for desalination. Nothing came of it. Nobody has published any follow-up for it. Nobody has done any research that would contradict it either. It's just sitting out there, unnoticed, decades later.
Was it withheld from the public? Eh... yes? Kind of? Because it was only ever published in a journal - probably Materials Letters, but this was a long time ago - that you would only have access to if you were a graduate (or ambitious undergraduate) student with plenty of time to read in a university library, or a specialist in the very narrow field that journal was for, somebody with a membership included subscription...
This isn't gatekeeping, this is, to be blunt, profit motivated hoarding by a handful of publishers in the academic journals business. And this is the thing that arXiv.org and other pre-print venues are actually having an impact on. I, for one, am strongly in favor of academic information being widely available. I'm not as much in favor of people who have not demonstrated their competencies in something that requires a great deal of both knowledge and skill feeling entitled to being given a platform for their (usually laughably clueless) proposals. If you've done enough work to have a tested hypothesis, that's different.
Ah, then I completely misunderstood you. Yeah I'm not in favor of outright withholding information.
However, what I think happened here is that they weren't able to work on it for a while, and if say, they didn't feel confident in their findings back in 1999 and only got around to being able to look at it again in 2017, it would make sense that their intent wasn't to gatekeep, it had just become one of those "we'll get around to testing it one day" type of projects everyone has. In this case it just potentially was a pretty massive thing to put off.
They didn't keep it, they simply did not work on it and only came back to it 20 years later (somebody posted a bit of history on the other thread currently on the front page, I'm on mobile so it takes to long to find it atm). They didn't know about it's superconducting properties either.
So no withholding information at all. But on a more general level if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster. The reason we do science is because we are trying to understand things just posting your random results would just give everyone information overload, because you would know what to focus on. Lk99 is actually a great example, the material would have completely been ignored by most (maybe even has been, not sure if they published about it previously?) if not for these recent results. Moreover because the results were published before the authors were confident about what they had, they have been subject to lots of ridicule and accusations of fraud. It might turn out alright in this case, but something like this can be career ending if it turns out to just be an experimental error.
> They didn't keep it, they simply did not work on it and only came back to it 20 years later (somebody posted a bit of history on the other thread currently on the front page, I'm on mobile so it takes to long to find it atm). They didn't know about it's superconducting properties either.
I really do hope it's something innocent like this.
> if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster.
I'm not sure it would be any worse than it already is. I don't see how we could achieve any more bombastic headlines than we already get.
My personal opinion/reaction likely isn't going to affect anyone's grant status. I'm just a random asshole. But there are less random assholes whose opinion might count. If someone sounding authoritative, but is just a random asshole like me, shits on this work on social media it might affect a group's grant status if it taints the opinion of someone holding the purse strings.
So I don't think asking about credentials or asking about references is gatekeeping. It's putting a statement into context. If I as a random asshole say "this isn't a superconductor" you as a reader should want to know where I'm getting that opinion from rather than just taking my statement at face value.
I'm not suggesting we give random people credibility: I'm suggesting that when we make potentially-enormous breakthroughs that maybe we shouldn't keep that information to ourselves for decades.
> You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
Does it mean that grant money are distributed by people who are unable to "assess most research"?
They say you don’t really understand something until you can teach it. I wonder to what extent “can I teach this to the general public, and do they care?” is an indicator of both understanding new results and also whether or not they really matter.
Of course, we’re often working on a tool to help make tools for other scientists, so that sort of thing is hard to explain to the general public, but ultimately it should terminate in some results that actually have obvious value to society in general.
By people who don't know what they're talking about.
You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.