The future of science, the Internet, and all things: The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.

Some things should not have been democratized. Silicon Valley assumes that removing restrictions on information brings freedom, but reality shows that was naïve.

▲

honeycrispy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You shouldn't just assume that the inverse would be free from fraud. The incentives for fraud still apply even when the system is not democratized.

▲

gjsman-1000 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Except with AI, a fraudulent gatekept world would still be a smaller percentage of fraud than what is coming. Infinite scale fraud.

The soviets may have rigged a few studies; but the democratized world now faces almost all studies being rigged.

	▲	honeycrispy 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it'd be a different form of fraud that would be much harder to discredit. Think sugar industry blaming fat for health issues. More of that.

▲

niam 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Library of Babel comparison is too fatalistic imo, even granting that it's maybe just an extreme example. The real world doesn't quite resemble a closed system with no metadata. We can still establish chains of trust.

Whether or not people will build resilient chains is another story, contingent on whether the strength of that chain actually matters to people. It probably doesn't for a lot of people. Boo. But inasmuch as I care, I feel I ought to be free to try and derive a strong signal through the noise.

▲

leoc 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In what way was it was democratised? We're not talking about Substacks and YouTube channels here, we're not even talking about arXiv preprints and the like, we're talking about peer-reviewed journal publications, and that system remains gated in much the same way that it was in the 1980s when it comes to trying to publish in it. If anything this system is the poster child for top-down gatekeeping by the recognised authorities, and it's precisely the value of that official recognition that makes people so desperate to break into it. The major changes seem to have been the easy availability of author publication lists and the advent of publication metrics, not things which have been or were ever meant to be particularly democratising for would-be authors; and an increase in the number of people playing the game, driven to a large extent by increasing participation from developing countries, and hopefully not many people would have the gall to argue for a ban on developing-country participation.

▲

rdevilla 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tearing down gatekeeping (i.e. "high standards") in pursuit of maximal inclusivity is just another way of saying "regression to the mean."

The gate has been removed from the signal chain, and now the noise floor is at infinity.

	▲	qsera 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There is a saying in my native language that goes something like "If you mix poison and milk, the milk will turn poisonous, instead of poison becoming milk (aka beneficial)". I guess, to convert it into this context, we can say that if you mix the high minded and infantile (which I think is what Internet and social media did), the high minded becomes infantile, instead of the other way around.
	▲	convolvatron 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		there is no 'sin of maximal inclusivity here', the gate is broken, but primarily because it was largely an honor system before, and no one has the motivation or resources to really dig into a lot of these papers. in no sense was it corrupted by the desire to include a larger population in journal publications.