Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles
I&#x27;m surprised that so many of the comments seem to attack the claims in the post along the dimension of &quot;well, anyone can write a blog post.&quot; I think as a community HN would staunchly advocate that the recipe for building great companies or software is an almost radical devotion to reducing any and all barriers to entry, except in this domain somehow people feel that the rigidity and exclusivity which journals provide somehow lead to the betterment of science. Makes me think about pg&#x27;s &quot;what you can&#x27;t say&quot; post.<p>There is short shrift given to the distortion that gets introduced in order to &quot;get published&quot;. The &quot;file drawer&quot; effect is very real, and it gives us a very skewed view of what the actual scientific work being done really is; p-hacking and other statistical trickery are table stakes to anyone trying to survive in the academic world, as being published is a key metric to success yet it is surprisingly orthogonal to being right. As Brian Nosek&#x27;s &quot;reproducibility project&quot; is uncovering, there is a non-trivial amount of &quot;science&quot; out there that is pure garbage, and much of it was produced in order to &quot;get published.&quot;<p>In a world where &quot;random hackers&quot; can write twitter bots to parse scientific papers and uncover obvious mathematical flaws (which sometimes invalidate central claims of the paper), I don&#x27;t understand how we aren&#x27;t immediately gravitating to standards which promote more and more openness.<p>Lastly, the biggest issue we have to address is the fact that notoriety is now the chief indicator of success, and not genuine scientific discovery. In college I had world-famous faculty who have made a career, fortune, and placed themselves well on the spotlight on the backs of research which was later completely reversed -- and not in the way &quot;science is supposed to work&quot; sense, but rather in the &quot;you purposefully fudged the math&quot; sense. And yet there was virtually no reputational damage done to their career. Worse yet, I think it is clear that this lack of ethics actually is a direct cause of the success they enjoy today. Given that these are pressures faced by all in the academic community, true openness is the one avenue we have to counteract this sort of thing, and hopefully enterprising individuals come along and find a way to make &quot;truth-seeking&quot; reputation something researchers care about.