Thanks 🙏🏻 Your words are indeed inspiring. In my field (academic science), it’s not that easy to separate work from a job because of the public funding and the constant need to justify that this funding is required.
Switching to self-employment isn’t a great idea due to the large institutional peer pressure (if you’re not part of some famos university/institute, you‘re worth nothing). This situation is one of the biggest sources of my anxiety. 😕
Academic science is indeed the victim of the nefarious relationship between funding and academic institutions.
Decentralized education and academic accreditation is one of my obsessions. Universities are corrupted since day one. The whole system was setup as a partnership between church and bourgeoisie, power and money. Power changed but the nasty relationships remains. Witches were burned because they were practicing medicine without the approval of the universities, without the academic accreditation. (Broom to keep their place clean, cat to get rid of the pests)
I truly believe that a decentralized education network can be implemented and that a protocol can sustain a collective aggregated academic accreditation process. I have developed a fair amount of ideas (a network spanning from introductory classes to research and startup funding, virtual and brick and mortar, with built in workplace recruitment tools) only to realize the magnitude of the task… but I was thinking dApps and tokens. Thinking relays, clients and custom NIPs is opening a new set of possibilities, with a lot of the work already being done.
The key component I am trying to tackle (conceptually) now is aggregated trustworthiness as it is key to the academic accreditation process. At lit review stage, looking for ways to turn the kind of interactions I foresee on the platform into quantitative data that could be processed to assess trustworthiness, then use the aggregation to rate teacher, tutors, assessors, locations, equipment providers, employers, aggregators…. and so on, and weigh the quality of the feedback they provide.
My problem is that my brain works quite well conceptually, but I am not the best at building 😅 I think I was the most effective when my work was mainly to be a brain and I had arms and legs that I could lead. 🤣
listen to Saifedean’s podcast on the topic of academia (episode 80) (thank you #[4] it was truly worth a listen)
Wow, sounds like a really interesting and challenging idea that you‘re working. To add my 50 cents to what you said, it’s not only education that requires trustworthiness. Modern science got stuck in what we call the „reproducibility crisis“, which is partially caused by the fundraising and publishing system we have. Meaning that high impact journals wouldn’t accept a solid piece of science, no matter how well done it is, and always prefer to publish a fancy study coming from a top research institute. In many cases the conclusions of these studies are not justified by data but are automatically believed by the reader based on, let’s say, coolness of the authors and the journal. => Publishers care less and less about whether or not the results of such studies can be verify or disproven independently. They just have to be believed by enough colleagues.
I know personally people having been banned from arXiv.org at the request of another entity. The game is all fucked.
Even young aspiring scientists end up gravitating towards popular ideas because they know that will help their career.
Pre internet, pre-prints (notes) were sent to relevant libraries (relays) and anyone could read, criticize, contact the author, be inspired… I think Nostr offers a perfect model for academic publishing initiatives.
Not using government money changes a whole lot of things, as explained in the podcast.
Let me expand a little on what I see as being the main problem. Peer-review is a weapon. It can be run for hire (many peer reviewed paper did not even have a methodology section, research on the matter shows) it can also be used ill intentionally to censor.
Again, Nostr offers the possibility of reimagining the peer review system. Filtering is absolutely needed, but the mechanism should be distributed and incorruptible.
Maybe a pre-print needs to pass many community layers before it can be considered a published article. Maybe here as well aggregated trustworthiness can play a role over time. Maybe a degree of randomization is needed.Maybe we should reconsider what a published paper is for….
Is it to achieve status via publication? Is it to meet quota and maintain position in a research center or university? Is it to serve the needs of the sponsor? (big pharma I am looking at you)
Or should a published paper be about moving forward collectively and advertise the people doing the work so that they can get funded? About helping fostering a spirit of collaboration where verification rewards the individual, the research and the collective effort.
The web was born out of the desire of collaboration amongst particle physicists. Tim and the people who helped him at CERN (even if he claims otherwise, nobody helped him and ooops the archive was lost and he needed to rebuild it manually) wanted to improve collaboration, decentralize research. But, everything was victim of governmental funding, and lack of belief.
The truth is that W3C is probably been hijacked by Google (possibly one of the reasons Tim left). The web is corrupted to the core… Nostr offers the potential of fixing that.
The idea of decetralized publishing (or better to say decoupled from greedy publishing houses like Springer) has been circulating in the science community for a while. arXiv and bioRxiv have solved many problems, but not all. There have been good attempts to decommercialize the scientific publishing business, for example, the eLife journal. But also eLife is slowly drifting to the conventional publishing scheme and has changed its publishing strategy and fees several times already.
The major problem here is how to verify a scientific publication. I very much like the analogy to #bitcoin mining where a network of clients (scientists) would submit their manuscripts (transactions) to publishing agencies (relays), with the latter initiating a decentralized review process (mining) and finally appending it to the global knowledge database (blockchain). But to me there seem to be two large obstacles:
(1) Who is going to validate those? In the bitcoin universe, you as a user don't need a specific expertise to validate bitcoin transactions or to solve cryptographic hashes to have a chance to win the block reward. Some computer knowledge is of course needed, but the validation/mining is done by soulless machines. And it's a very objective thing — no misunderstandings, no ambiguity. The question is then: How can we formulate a mathematical problem such that its solution corresponds to verifying a scientific claim? It’s absolutely nontrivial.
(2) How do we make this new publishing system self-sustained? Again, in the bitcoin universe, this is achieved by block rewards to the one solving the cryptographic puzzle correctly. Would the same scheme work in science? How do we ensure the system is not misused to mine rewards insead of validating scientific arguments?
All in all, the question that you raised has immense importance in my opinion. Despite (1) and (2), trying to approach this ideal is definitely worth working on it.
Tough questions my friend. But, as you mention worth exploring.
Indeed, decentralizing money is the easiest feat, it’s a fairly simple ledger with printing money and collecting fees as incentive; and it was not an easy feat.
That’s why I ponder so much on trustworthiness without really finding a solid answer.
For financial sustainability it is easier for me to think in the context of education as an industry or music and film distribution as I have a better grasp of how the end product can be sold, and then work backwards from there to imagine fair reward of added value into the human chain.
With research, funding in itself is the cause of the problem. So, I would need to better understand who already fund research, why, how do themselves get the money to do so and then offer them a way to continue to do so without corrupting the new process, but also consider what funding can look like when the non scientific community comes in contact with research goals, crowdfunding based on non scientific communication on the research, but with direct funding channel.
😂😂😂 The posts are getting longer and longer… Maybe it’s worth a whole podcast already 😂
Deal. I’m gearing to run a fortnightly (for now) podcast/nestcast titled “Don’t Mind Me, Just Snooping” mixing Nostr devs and normal plebs each episode. You’re listed for discussion on scientific publishing (first a pre recorded part with only you then a live section with the devs and possibly audience interaction). Deal?
Historical side note…
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
The information at the top of the page is inaccurate. This document was lost by Tim and he recovered it from someone at CERN he had originally sent it to. The man in question had received it after being promoted to head of his own team and had some seed funds at disposition, which he used to fund Tim.
I know this because I have browsed the very early web from the NexT computer Tim coded it from. Being too young and stupid to understand how historically significant it was.
The computer was accidentally thrown away…
