[an_cap]

An excellent career retrospective by John Hopfield - https://pni.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf321/files/docu...

"As an Academy member I could publish such a paper without any review (this is no longer true, a sad commentary on aspects of science publishing and the promotion of originality)."

[kkylin]

National Academy members still get to pick the reviewers (if they choose to go that route rather than regular submisssion), and the review is not blind. The reviews themselves are not public, but the identities of the reviewers are made public once the paper is out. So members can't just say whatever sh*t they want (and you can imagine some do), but still a highly unusual process.

[kkylin]

Too late now to edit my original comment, but I should have added that I was talking very specifically about the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (as was Hopfield).

[DrillShopper]

Yeah, fuck peer review!/s

[ajkjk]

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless.

One of the really refreshing things about reading older research is how there used to be all these papers which are just stray thoughts that this or that scientist had, sometimes just a few paragraphs of response to some other paper, or a random mathematical observation that might mean nothing. It feels very healthy. Of course there were far fewer scientists then; if this was allowed today it might be just too crowded to be useful; back then everyone mostly knew about everyone else and it was more based on reputation. But dang it must have been in a nice to have such an unrestricted flow of ideas.

Today the notion of a paper is that it is at least ostensibly "correct" and able to be used as a source of truth: cited in other papers, maybe referred to in policy or legal settings, etc. But it seems like this wasn't always the case, at least in physics and math which are the fields I've spent a lot of time on. From reading old papers you get the impression that they really used to be more about just sharing ideas, and that people wouldn't publish a bad paper because it would be embarrassing to do so, rather than because it was double- and triple-checked by reviewers.

[naasking]

Yes, but non-sarcastically.