Let’s Publish Everything
The same thing is trying to happen in scientific publication that&#x27;s been happening in every other published medium: scarcity is gone. So why not embrace the abundance? Well if there&#x27;s any contrary case to be made, it&#x27;s that the explosion in quantity inevitably reduces the average quality. In the arts, low quality corresponds to that ineffable quality of <i>shittiness</i>. In news, it&#x27;s fakeness. In science, it&#x27;s irreproducibility. So what do you do? All the former built-in scarcity-based ways of filtering for quality went out the window along with the scarcity itself. You can no longer use the limited space on physical sheets of papyrus (or vinyl LP records, or celluloid) as an excuse to exclude things. So you need new ways of sorting out good quality work from the (suddenly vast) quantities of mediocre work. Seems like you&#x27;re doing pretty well if you&#x27;re lucky enough to have a whole new class of people step in to help with the filtering part. Unless of course you believe a scientific discovery is fundamentally the work of a person, an ego, rather than a fact that existed long before that particular person happened to discover it.<p>Democratization ends elitism; unfortunately elites sometimes really do consist of the best of a given thing. Especially newer elites. Every elite starts out as a meritocracy and ends up some kind of weird legacy-based cabal&#x2F;cartel that deserves to be overthrown (that&#x27;s the one you&#x27;re probably accustomed to thinking of when you hear the term &quot;elitism&quot;).