What's Wrong with Academia and Peer Review

An email from a postdoc colleague working in academia in the UK

I wanted to write an article on gatekeeping in academia, as information siloing seems to be a big problem not only in the private sector and within governments, but also at the highest levels of academic institutions distorted by financial incentives and a resistance towards progress and research. In fact, one recent review by Ridha Horchani finds that editors are more likely to send for review - and ultimately accept - manuscripts from prestigious universities, creating a self perpetuating cycle of visibility and credibility while sidelining equally as rigorous or valuable work from lesser known affiliates.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389738363_Impact_of_institutional_affiliation_bias_in_the_peer_review_process

A similar dynamic has appeared across institutions - from the entertainment industry to government institutions, and certainly has been visible in widening wealth and income in developed countries. This is one reason that I've decided to leave the United States. Widespread corruption, overselling promises and underdelivering results, and a lack of academic integrity has plagued the sciences - something Sabine Hossenfelder and even longstanding well-known elite physicists have described like Dr. Roger Penrose (in his book Faith, Fashion, and Fantasy). and Leonard Susskind.

If you want to know why there has not been much progress in understanding the foundations of physics, and what went wrong with string theory, one problem is perverse financial incentives. Let me explain.

The reason that string theory seems abstract and unfalsifiable is largely because it is - and predictions failed to materialize in experiments at the LHC (like supersymmetry, which string theories often depend on). So why are folks so fixated on it? A part of the reason is the ulterior motive towards funding research into string theory was to develop math to be used for cryptography (because the black hole information paradox is the most extreme possible one-way encryption, it would make sense that the math would be appropriated for this purpose).

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05491

Another motive was that the maths used to develop string theory are also appropriated towards complex socioeconomic modeling. A society is bifurcated into social systems (much like quantum field theory) and economic systems (much like general relativity) under Luhmann's systems theory - and cryptography is used to enforce one way flows of information between them useful for representing money and enforcing contracts needed to keep a society stable. Balancing and maintaining the stability of social and economic institutions is a primary goal of much of the funding.

After a while though the "science" begins to look more like numerology and orthodoxy - because that's exactly what it is (because the cryptographic systems and models must be maintained which does not take kindly to new ideas) and the gutting of research budgets where overworked grad students are asked to go Into debt and work at starvation wages certainly doesn't help.

Financial incentives distort research, reward nepotism, and facilitate protectionism from corporate and government bodies. The more I've looked at this, to me the more it seems to me that this appears even in the validation process for the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Prize Problems. By rule, no claimed solution is even considered until it is published in a “refereed mathematics journal of world-wide repute” and has “general acceptance in the mathematics community” for two years; only then does the Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board convene a select committee to verify the proof, after which the Board of Directors alone authorizes any award. Critics have pointed out that this concentrated authority not only dictates the formal standards of proof and notation but also effectively grants the Institute veto power over which approaches are deemed legitimate - a form of gatekeeping that can reinforce established viewpoints and potentially stifle more radical or emerging lines of inquiry. Certainly in recent years lack of trust in academic institutions can be attributed also pandemic misinformation - even from "trusted" sources.

https://youtu.be/9yPy3DeMUyI?si=ibhdc6AbFziaHKXa

Those that begin in academia and pursue a PhD frequently get pushed out - in fact, some estimates show over 50% of PhD students drop out before finishing their program - then even fewer get tenure, even as budgets have been cut, stipends and grant funding is reduced, and cost of living relentlessly increases. During my studies at UC Berkeley, 10% of the students were left homeless while I attended, with H1B visa holders knowing that not taking classes and waiting for housing is not an option without risking losing their visa status. I know that when UC Berkeley devolved into violent riots and protests between police and students amid a 500 million dollar budget cut where 10% of them were left homeless while attending, that was one reason I initially dropped out.