← Back to context

Comment by im3w1l

20 hours ago

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

Nobody knows how another person will see something with their eyes.

What appears to be obvious and revolutionary to one person may not be so to all.

Review is precisely to protect against the importance and accuracy of a work being decided by the person who is most invested in it being so.

  • Whenever i sit down to read research, I remind myself of Lockheed Martin reading the USSR published research[0] on how electromagnetic waves scatter off of surfaces, and using that to fuel the initial stealth technology. The leading theory being that the USSR didn't recognize how brilliant and revolutionary ability these calculations were.

    Just because I can't see the immediate brilliance, doesn't mean it is not brilliant in it's own right.

    [0] - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-soviet-union-acci...

    • I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.

      Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.

    • There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls

  • Seeing as we are talking about it now, it seems like they were right that it is interesting to the public.

    I am not sure why you think social media attention needs to be gate kept.

"everyone" is overly constrained.

"The intended audience" is what is needed, and absolutely does require a middleman to publish it.

No blessing required.

  • Distribution is trivially easy these days. All publishing does is say "yup, this is some legit science alright". It's a stamp of approval. Blessed by the publisher. To get this blessing you have to fulfil a set of requirements ranging from promoting good science to "thats just how its done, thats how we always done it" to the whims of a particular reviewer. You play the game you get the prize. But if you don't need the prize then you don't need to play.