On: Incentives in Academic Research

[toomim]

We can be more specific than "the incentives are wrong in Academia", because we know what the incentive is: it's peer-review.

The problem is that today's peer review, while better than nothing, is far from a perfect judge of research quality. If peer-review was a perfect judge of research quality, there would be no incentive problem. The incentives would be aligned.

I happen to be working on an improvement to peer review. An early prototype can be viewed at https://peeryview.org/about. Holler at me if you're also working on this problem!

[t0mpr1c3 → toomim]

I don't think peer review is the only problem, or even the main problem, and is not directly related to the misalignment of incentives.

We can tweak the process, but for better or worse peer review (in various forms) has been the principle metric of quality since the enlightenment.

[t0mpr1c3 → t0mpr1c3]

Some suggestions for peer reviewers, from someone at the front line: https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2026/08/acceleration-of-arms-r...