I agree with the OP a little. Central repository models have advantages but they've always seemed like short term benefits in exchange for long term costs.
Things like the app store, in for profit scenarios, seem like ways to slip in monopoly control. Brew is an attempt to circumvent it.
I don't want to come across as suggesting they're a bad idea or don't have advantages, just that on balance I've always had a sense there had to be a better way.
Pay to publish imho always seemed to have a perverse incentive structure to me. Reminds me of the "advertisement" journals you used to see.
The way I see this headed is academic nonprofit orgs self publishing using open source software etc. and recouping costs through membership fees. Journals are already often closely affiliated with orgs, and the members do all the work except copyediting and editorial portals. Academics are also used to paying academic org membership fees for other reasons.
I've already had conversations in this direction with colleagues.
It's either this or eventually things like the preprint services, maybe with sugar on top.
The killer app in this area would be an open source service / server software for running a journal imho. If it were done well it would be hard to beat.
That said, I think traditional publication models are going to be around for awhile, maybe with much more open access or lower pub charges, just because the publishers do provide a service, even if access and price are distorted, and there isn't a uniformly better model at the moment (maybe too big a conversation for typing on my phone).
I agree but there are many varieties that could meet and have met the criteria for public sales, except for current trends in appearance or taste.
It's really remarkable how canalized apple markets have become, when you're exposed to alternatives. The fads become somewhat self perpetuating because they shift context of perception (people judge based on what they know).
It's not so much currently popular apples are bad, just that there's lots more out there.
With apples too you have the interesting case of the cider market, hard and soft. You can kind of get a sense of the effects of fads because cider apples can be really different in appearance but otherwise meet other marketability criteria. You end up with different sets of apples, which speaks to what people like when appearance isn't an issue.
I acknowledge texture is an issue in eating vs drinking, and that cider apples are blended for their charactistics, but many are also varieties that used to be popular eating or cooking apples that drifted in popularity but are still used in cideries because they've stood the test of time and customers like the flavor.
Speaking from personal experience, it's impossible to find anyone who wouldn't be labeled as unbiased in this area.
There are too many turf wars, government sanctioned monopolies, and rent seekers for anything but that to be the case. There's biases in maintaining the status quo too.
I suppose you could have someone with a pure economics or public health background but in my experience they tend to avoid these topics, in part because they have no incentive to fundamentally change healthcare delivery structures.
Lack of real competition among providers is a real underecognized problem in discussions of healthcare in my opinion. Much could be deregulated in a very beneficial way, but discussions almost always focus on payment instead. When deregulation is raised as an issue, it's almost always done in a way that focuses on easing obstacles to large pharm corps, without addressing other forms of deregulation.
In every case that I'm aware of, increasing scope and practice of providers only has net public health benefits. The only losing group is physicians. It's has always been that way, all the way back to dental practice.
This standard sentiment seems to me to be a machiavellian justification for the status quo and for not trying to improve anything. The costs of the problems are the problem, not whether they are eventually resolved extremely ineffiently.
Yes, we can improve things, but it is important to recognise that the scientific method and process is the best thing we have right now to figure this stuff out. Making it more open and reliable (open acces by default, data and code publication by default,more funding options that encourage public participation and replication studies etc.) is definitely possible but the core is not rotten. Especially some private interests (oligarchs and those with that ambition, "race realists" etc.) like to push the meme that something is fundamentally broken with publicly funded science and we shouldn't trust those ivory tower academics - often because those academics are actually able to go for the truth instead of following the market (i.e. create disinformation). This is what I'm pushing back against
Those oligarchs and race realists have supporters within academia, when selecting the reforms for academic process, this should be considered. Also, acknowledging the core truth these people build their lies around is fundamental to dismissing the whole ball of infectious meme.
Interesting read that loops full circle to classic AI debates.
I was frustrated a bit by the dismissal of probability theory, though, as if Bayes theory solved it, and by extension, and probability as a whole could be dismissed.
A lot of the issues the author raises are limitations with Bayesian (at least classical Bayesian) theory. The author's critisms dovetail with some areas of probability theory (cf Jaynesian or algorithmic probability literature); I suspect their concerns are one in the same at some level as some of the concerns discussed there.
The problem is uncertainty to various degrees is fundamental to reasoning, so probability must be involved at some level. An integrated approach is needed. I agree that Bayesian theory per se isnt the end of the story, but something involving probability will be part of it (and because Bayesianism is a big part of that, probably that too).
> "Even though it was discovered by physicists, it's not a physical theory in the same sense as electromagnetism or general relativity. <...> Quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let's try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call "probabilities" can be negative numbers."
I came here to say something similar. You're right to point out baking powder, because it's a mess. Think it's all the same chemically? Nope. Different brands use very different chemicals that can affect lift, and it can vary over time for the same brand.
Just about everything is like that. Whole wheat flour? Different bran and gluten percentages create really different loaves.
Pretending weights will solve everything is nonsense too. If humidity affects mass per volume, it's going to affect chemical identity per mass too.
Finally, everyone has different tastes. You might like a finer crumb to your bread; your spouse might like it more holely.
Recipes are like guidelines. Always. Experience matters because it reflects knowledge of how variations on the recipe matter.
Finally, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that a lot of things in cooking get passed down as critical when they're not, or even worse, are detrimental. This goes for traditional knowledge handed down, as well as half-baked "scientific" approaches to recipe development that are bad science and driven by a desire to establish authority above all.
Plausible deniability must be assumed with morally controversial actions on the part of institutions, especially government security institutions.
One way to deal with this is context. In this case the pattern of Russia with regard to electronic free speech is pretty clear, so it's reasonable to assume these actions are at least partially motivated by something other than emergency preparedness.
Things like the app store, in for profit scenarios, seem like ways to slip in monopoly control. Brew is an attempt to circumvent it.
I don't want to come across as suggesting they're a bad idea or don't have advantages, just that on balance I've always had a sense there had to be a better way.