Comment by harry8

8 hours ago

Here, many if not most qualify as peers.

It should be unsurprising if comments here, made in public, capable of being challenged are far higher quality than official "peer review" which has really become a bit of a joke. Has been for quite a long time, to be fair. (And unsurprising if not, it's a web forum).

Peer reviewed and published means precisely excrement in a world where papers are not retracted and failures to replicate are refused publication by the "prestigious" "peer-reviewed" journals that published the original.

Intelligent, reasoned, knowledgeable review going back and forth with the author in public makes "peer review" seem just as silly as it usually is. Review by peer professor's indentured servants aka PhD students is often actually higher quality, if wildly dishonest and quite frankly disgraceful.

We now live in a world where LLMs can produce papers. Actual research is a little more interesting, with or without LLM. The journal peer review system doesn't seem to be helping.

I am not against some kind of "public review" and I really like arxiv.org. But I do not see it as a replacement for a peer review. It may start after a peer review when the paper is published, which IMHO should almost always be in an Open Access way.

For AI, the borders seem to have blurred a bit between academic scientists (e.g. at universities) and external scientists at companies or even private people). The problem with the latter is that it is much harder to enforce good scientific practice. Think only about the time it takes to write the state of the art of an ordinary conference paper.

I am also a bit drawn between giving everyone the chance to contribute to research and ensuring good scientific practice. Just writing down your latest ideas and successes is not the same as writing a scientific paper that shows the research in the context of past research and needs, for instance, to be much more mathematically rigorous.

Peer review and scrutiny out in the public is more valuable than only done by a couple of paid guys from a journal.

It's fairly basic. For a work published on a public platform, the same guys paid by the journal can also review it if they so choose to in addition to those people in the public who were not paid by anyone.