AcademicWritingHandicapPrinciple

ThoughtStorms Wiki

AcademicWriting is a kind of HandicapPrinciple

A flawed-proxy for quality. But one we relied on. So what now?

My tweet: https://twitter.com/interstar/status/1595550998755418114

The point is that we've been using 'demonstrable ability to write an academic looking paper' as a proxy for 'knows what they are doing, and are committed to the institution of academia'.
It's an imperfect, somewhat game-able signal. But it's kinda worked.
But now... it's suddenly gonna be possible for any idiot to cook-up a superficially plausible looking academic paper, to say anything you like, in a few minutes, without any real scientific understanding or long-term commitment.
How are the institutions of peer-review etc.going to be able to adapt to keep up with the coming fire-hose of disinformation sprayed at them?
And if they can't, what happens to academia as an epistemic institution?