Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.
What is worrisome about this development, and corollary actions like the hiring of a CEO with a $300,000/year salary, is that the essentially independent and community based platform will disappear. The ArXiv exists because mathematicians and physicists, and later computer scientists and engineers, posted there, freely, their work, with minimal attention to licensing and other commercial aspects. It has thrived because it required no peer review and made interesting things accessible quickly to whomever cared to read them.
A setup as a US-based "non-profit" is worrisome, if only because 300K is an obscene salary even in a for-profit setting. That the US-based posters can't see this is evidence of the basic problem which is that the US, both left and right, has been taken over by a neoliberal feudal antidemocratic nativist mindset that is anathema to the sort of free interchange of ideas that underlay the ArXiv's development in the hands of mathematicians and physicists now swept aside and ignored by machine learning grifters and technicians who program computers.
As a US based academic, I have to say when I saw the salary I immediately gawked. I think it's not americans but silicon valley-ites and tech bros on here who have lived with inflated salary/net worth that think it's just a middle of the road salary. As I regularly interact with friends in engineering who make like $200k + benefits ($), and I wonder why I don't jump ship to that weird land.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No.
The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues your paper automatically gets a certain amount of reputation depending on the venue.
> Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't
We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that.
Ideally such a system would individually for each paper provide a multi-dimensional score that was reputable. How can those be calculated in a manner such that they're reputable? Who knows; that exercise is left for the reader.
In practice "well it got published in Nature" makes for a pretty decent spam filter followed by metrics such as how many times it's been cited since publication, checking that the people citing it are independent authors who actually built directly on top of the work, and checking how many of such citing authors are from a different field.
> We require a method of filtering such that a given researcher doesn't have to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper he comes across because there simply isn't enough time in the day for that.
We do require such a method. Isn't that what AI is for? Strictly working as a filter. You still need to personally vet in excruciating detail every paper you rely on for your work.
Maybe. I think that's still experimental and far too resource intensive to do on an individual basis. However an intensive LLM review performed by a centralized service once per paper as a sort of independent literature watchdog would likely be of value. I haven't heard of such a thing yet though.
PageRank was a decent solution for websites. Can't we treat citations as a graph, calculate per-author and per-paper trustworthiness scores, update when a paper gets retracted, and mix in a dash of HN-style community upvotes/downvotes and openly-viewable commentary and Q&A by a community of experts and nonexperts alike?
Of course we could! My tongue in cheek "exercise is left for the reader" comment was meant to convey that it's deceptively simple.
Just one example off the top of my head. How do you handle negative citations? For example a reputable author citing a known incorrect paper to refute it. You need more metadata than we currently have available.
tl;dr just draw the rest of the fucking owl.
Upvotes, downvotes, and commentary? That's extremely complicated. Long term data persistence? Moderation? Real names? Verification of lab affiliations? Who sets the rules? How do you cope with jurisdictional boundaries and related censorship requirements? The scientific literature is fundamentally an open and above all international collaboration. Any sort of closed, centralized, or proprietary implementation is likely to be a nonstarter.
Thus if your goal is a universal system then I'm fairly certain you need to solve the decentralized social networking problem as a more or less hard prerequisite to solving the decentralized scientific literature review problem. This is because you need to solve all the same problems but now with a much higher standard for data retention and replication.
Very topically I assume you'd need a federated protocol. It would need to be formally standardized. It would need a good story for data replication and archival which pretty much rules out ActivityPub and ATProto as they currently stand so you're back to the drawing board.
A nontrivial part of the above likely involves also solving the decentralized petname system problem that GNS attempts to address.
I think a fully generalized scoring or ranking system is exceedingly unlikely to be a realistic undertaking. There's no problem with isolated private venues (ie journals) we just need to rethink how they work. Services such as arxiv provide a DOI so there's nothing stopping "journals" that are actually nothing more than lightweight review platforms that don't actually host any papers themselves from being built.
> Upvotes, downvotes, and commentary? That's extremely complicated.
No, it is not. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Zenodo is centralized, and that is fine. A system hosted by CERN would be universal enough for most purposes.
The truth is, most papers cannot stand on their own, they need a reputable venue. While it is difficult to get into Nature, it is much more difficult to actually contribute something substantial to science. That's why we don't have a system like that.
I think you've misunderstood me. Did you read my final paragraph? I was agreeing with what you wrote there - that simply rethinking how centralized journals operate could accomplish the majority of the goal while sidestepping most of the complexity.
That said, I disagree that papers require a centralized venue in any fundamental sense. They currently need such a venue because we don't have a better process for vetting and filtering them at scale. The issue is that decentralizing such a process in an acceptable manner is a monstrously complicated prospect.
Sure. In that case I guess I'm just waiting for a couple of college kids in a garage to start a website that actually uses it for its intended purpose, so that we can finally deprecate PrestigiousPrivateJournalRank.
It was not awarded because that paper is on arxiv. That paper could have been printed and sent out by mail. Or posted on 4chan. etc. It just so happens to be it was on arxiv which made no difference to anything.
so there's an unconditionally correct answer (it's also equal to abs(x) for x>0), and then there is an answer that is only correct for half the domain, which requires an additional assumption.
Not in general. As people have pointed out elsewhere, it's true if x is real. That isn't always a helpful assumption. (When x is real you can plug that assumption into Mathematica. Then Mathematica should agree with you.)
But consider sqrt(i) = sqrt(exp(i\pi/2)). That's exp(i\pi/4). Your rule would give 1 as the answer. It's not helpful for a serious math system to give that answer to this problem.
The analysis isn't great. In particular, they say "this is a three-factor test, two of the factors are in favor, one is against, two is more than one, so Tile is fine". Normally you'd expect some kind of analysis of how much weight each factor contributes.
That said, they do also say this:
> we determine that Appellees received inquiry notice of the Oct. 2023 Terms. Evaluating whether inquiry notice has been established is, however, always a “fact-intensive analysis,” Godun v. JustAnswer LLC, 135 F.4th 699, 710 (9th Cir. 2025), and we do not hold that notice by mass email establishes inquiry notice in every case.
So the HN headline is misleading at best.
(They also note that, while they should consider how normal internet users behave, they can't do this because "there is very little empirical evidence regarding" the question. So they substitute a discussion of how reasonable they find Tile's actions in the abstract.)
In this example you're actually just being polite. You are not calling out a person publicly, you're transmitting a course-correction through their manager that allows the person who knows you best to communicate the correction the best way AND it allows the corpo to take the blame for being vague and uninformative.
Sure, direct, cold, concrete, public data is "best" in the objective sense, but people's feelings and pride matter, and any attempt to wave that away is just naive.
Early in my career I tried very hard to "be concrete, cold, and direct" because that's what I thought a good communicator would do. It was seen as attacking to anyone below me and confusing to anyone above me. I was naive and I suffered for it.
I definitely agree with what you're saying here where these words actually do mean something, but it's completely opaque to those outside the "know". I also have found that there's not any better way to express information to those in the group than in this coded language, even if it makes completely no sense to me.
I wish younger me understood that the way I'm being perceived is the only important thing, not choosing the "best" words to technically describe a situation
Schedule a meeting with the people you are directing it to then.
Blathering vague garbage execu-speak in a large meeting, even if it is some hare brained attempt to send "coded messages", is usually just some self-important charlatan bloviating and trying to sound intelligent and important to everybody else. And it is never effective communication.
or even best possible outcomes for the shareholders. cuz most of this coded BS is to make some executive's life easier, not to keep the board happy.
if they had a concrete plan they'd say it, and coded signals are only for certain audiences, who in most cases may not be most people, most shareholders, or more employees.
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