patrick.net

You can tell a lot about a man's true abilities, by the way he either endorses or rejects AI's abilities.
When I see professional types, singing the praises of how AI makes their work easier and goes on about how much they love it.
They aren't anyone that I would want servicing my needs.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/dieing-academic-research-budgets

Then there’s the peer review process itself, which relies on volunteer labour from other scientists, who may spend weeks carefully reading and debating various grant proposals and deciding behind closed doors which proposal is meritorious enough to award money to. Naturally, the answer to that question is always: the proposals that show the greatest likelihood of success, meaning in practice, the proposals that operate firmly within the bounds of established paradigms. Bold, exploratory proposals tend not to make it.

The peer review system is worth dwelling on for a while, because it is a direct consequence of the grant system, and it is a source of many evils. Not only are grants awarded on the basis of peer review, but grantees are expected to publish in peer-reviewed journals. It was this financial pressure from the NSF that turned peer review into a universal, mandatory practice after WWII. Previously, publication in a journal was at the sole discretion of the journal’s editor, as in any other periodical. Scientific disputes were fought entirely in the open, with refutations and counter-refutations being published for anyone who cared to read them, sometimes even debated on stage in front of live audiences. Public debates don’t happen any more; as they like to say, the science is settled. Now, disputes take place behind closed doors, with one of the parties – the anonymous referees – wielding the power to prevent publication or funding of the other.

The stated purpose of peer review is to prevent both malinvestment of the public treasury in lunatic ideas, and to serve as an error correction system to ensure that the scientific literature remains relatively pristine. These intentions are noble, but misguided; moreover, the system has utterly failed to achieve its nominal purpose. Don’t just take my word for it – I’m not the only one to recognize that the vast parallel experiment of peer review has been stupendously expensive in time and money, demonstrably unsuccessful, and indeed hideously counterproductive. This article sums up the problems and failings admirably:

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

Critics of peer review sometimes paint a picture of mendacious scholars throwing scientific ethics to the wind and abusing their positions as anonymous referees to prevent funding or publication of research that upsets their personal applecart, or even just to punish their personal enemies, and while that happens more often than people like to think, in general the problem is much more subtle than conscious malevolence. The reviewer is naturally cast into the role of critic. This is an intensely conservative frame of mind, in which one becomes pedantically alert for even the most trivial error. Since scientists themselves understand this dynamic quite well, it incentivizes them to be as careful as possible when submitting a document; the result is that most reviewers find little to complain about beyond typos, missing references, undersized fonts in figure labels, or insufficiently detailed explanations of standard methodologies. It is quite rare to be asked to review a paper that is entirely wrong ... and it is far more rare to be asked to review a paper that could change the basis of one’s entire field.

Paradigmatic breakthroughs, when they first emerge, are frequently somewhat underdeveloped. The kind of creative genius that tends to give birth to such works is also a type who is liable to overlook little details, focused as they are on the broad outlines of a shiny new big picture. Sometimes those details really do kill the idea – not every eureka is genuine – but it also happens that the genius gets the gestalt entirely correct, despite being embarrassingly wrong in many of the details, or having gaps in the model that are initially unfilled, or are even flatly contradicted by established science. ...

Were Galileo alive today and operating in a similarly cavalier fashion, there’s no question that he’d find himself unable to publish in peer-reviewed journals, unable to get funding from peer-reviewed grant agencies, and as a result very unlikely to find employment at anywhere so prestigious as the University of Pisa. He would be considered a crank.

How many unfunded, unpublished cranks are there, who are actually Galileos? There surely aren’t that many – most schizos really are just schizos – but there are probably a few, and those few could have a dramatic impact when their ideas work out. They don’t, because the peer review system lays like a soggy smothering blanket across the whole of every field, extinguishing the creative fire by dissuading scientists from colouring outside the lines and boldly going where no mind has gone before.

It's a caste system of bribery, lobbying and favoritism to ruling economic forces. The hypothetical gate keepers are captured and are just another group of well paid errand boys.

There is no more testing of medicines beyond direct advertising and profit projections, with the relevant kickbacks to the politicians and peer reviewers. Of course, there is the disguised insidious poisoning of products and medicines for the Gates/Rockefeller democide engines.

My wife and I watched an old British detective show that had advertising (sneaking relentlessly into cable which used to sell itself on having NO advertising).

Every ad was a pharma ad. Some of the medicines didn't even much explain what they were supposed to do. The imagery was the stock in trade of delighted usual and customary and hypomanic (commonly) minorities and people living the twenty million dollar lifestyle in antiseptic suburban joy, engaging in meaningful artistic hobbies and pursuits, having wonderful family dinners in upscale homes, walking with big smiles in sun dappled, safe, uncrowded parks, hiking in pristine landscapes, happy bubbling clean, well groomed, well behaved children bursting out of doors of wonderful homes etc. etc. you get the picture.

Beneath all of this joyous pharma stage happiness ran chyrons of multiple disastrous, dangerous, hideous and crippling potential side effects in small print. The world ends in a coca cola smile.

Ceffer, your command of English is amazing.