You raise an interesting issue. If we can accept that substantive scientists vary in their involvement in self-marketing, does the degree one engages in popular self-marketing affect the kind of attention one receives? And the validity of criticism within that attention set?
Related to your point, if Wolfram hadn’t had the history he did, would Hacker News general suspicious reaction still be present? And would his status affect our perceptions of validity of the criticism.
Granted, what drew me to this thought was the recent treatment of Eric Weinstein, an occasional podcast collaborator (if hostile) of Stephen Wolfram. I won’t rehash it all here, but a critic of Weinstein who is trained in physics countered him in writing. Then when Weinstein moved onto another area, the critic submitted another arxiv piece attacking his second product (an econ talk given in Chicago).
Now, I don’t think much of Weinstein, but the critic’s second attack created doubt about the motives of his first. Was this a defense of science, or a serial attacker obsessed with Eric Weinstein?
Circling back, I think these issue will inevitably arise when a person is actively self marketing their contribution to science, whatever its quality.
The tossout of “open science” and “open tools” without any explanation is a red flag. Translation: “we’re looking for people who might be convinced to work for free if we promise to give some shit away”. Open science is tantamount to Facebook w/data theft for anyone involved at a sub-professional level of name recognition.
This would and should be terrifying to any mid-career academic. The last thing needed is a complicated solution that solves no direct problem, YET offers plenty of "metrics" that one can attach all sorts of labels to, like "popularity".
Can you imagine some of the minds on academic Twitter holding a poll on article popularity? <SHUDDER> Leave science to the foul-tempered misanthropes, I say! j/k
I had a similar reaction. When you combine this concept with some of the fringe open science silliness, you are essentially telling scholars (what and how) they must share, AND (what and how) they are prohibited from sharing, leaving what is essentially a forced path:
"PDFs are prohibited, especially shared in private. All data, hypotheses, references, tables, code, must be presented in formats that are conducive to steali ^H^H^H^H replication and fostering a global science ethos of sharing."
"Authors who obey will have a beautiful platinum star printed next to their author nameplate. Extra star opportunities will exist for authors who announce their papers on Twitter with required levels of irony, hipness and verve!"
The phenomena are related, though. One could argue that the social sciences, with greater latitude in definitions of measurement and thresholds for statistical significance, had been building sand castles for decades. Eventually, the entire rotten edifice will collapse.
In contrast, the greater restrictions of theory and measurement in physical science didn’t easily allow researchers to do pointless hand-waving that looked good. In some sense, the “crisis” in physics is less embarassing, as it is simply theorists bumping into limits enforced by reality. They didn’t make it up as they went along.
I’m also doubtful the lauded “open science” movement will accomplish anything besides the mass transfer of intellectual property to centralized data platforms, to be mined by replication specialists.
I’m biased, admittedly, after watching an APA zoom conference on the advantages and wonders of open science, and why researchers should join in. The lead presenter’s #1 reason to join open science was “that I didn’t lose my data anymore, it was all nicely and neatly centralized on the OSF server.”
True, but whatever mechanism takes its place must contend with the fact that users vary in the extent they: 1) actively think of the larger community vs. themselves as a member; and 2) derive individual esteem from it.
As an example, the karma system at Reddit looks fine on paper relative to #1, but #2 is what created the phenomenon of meandering threads full of single phrase bad puns. The users are converging on a local maximum gain of esteem via upvotes, per unit of effort as measured by post length.
At least no games with underlying dynamics you would like to share, and I say that with a grin.
The discussion of moderation policies and topics in posting usually derive from a shared understanding of a forum as a group of people, rather than a trajectory where current community opinions in turn, create the future community.
There is also the origins of Hacker News as Startup News, which immediately creates a covariance constraint between seniority and topic. The only way this dynamism can be managed is having temporal aspects (e.g., boundaries, limits on accelerationism toward specific topics), included in moderating policies.
I can understand why Amazon would have strict thresholds on this content, as it seems like an easy target for abuse.
If I'm reading you correctly, you were a bike enthusiast who made a helpful website for decoding tire SKUs. Does the affiliate program give you commissions on items that sell through your account webpage? Were you selling tires / an Amazon affiliate before?
It just seems like an odd thing to monetize, but I admire your entrepreneurial spirit!
Related to your point, if Wolfram hadn’t had the history he did, would Hacker News general suspicious reaction still be present? And would his status affect our perceptions of validity of the criticism.
Granted, what drew me to this thought was the recent treatment of Eric Weinstein, an occasional podcast collaborator (if hostile) of Stephen Wolfram. I won’t rehash it all here, but a critic of Weinstein who is trained in physics countered him in writing. Then when Weinstein moved onto another area, the critic submitted another arxiv piece attacking his second product (an econ talk given in Chicago).
Now, I don’t think much of Weinstein, but the critic’s second attack created doubt about the motives of his first. Was this a defense of science, or a serial attacker obsessed with Eric Weinstein?
Circling back, I think these issue will inevitably arise when a person is actively self marketing their contribution to science, whatever its quality.