The DISRUPTED SCIENCE Podcast

While we were astounded to see the size of the Blue Wave that swept US politics last week, and realized it represents a backlash against the litany of problems unleashed over the past two years, we also have to be realistic — these problems are not going to be solved by removing a few bad actors.

And efforts by noble, well-informed healthcare workers will remain necessary.

RFK, Jr., is quite rightly being examined for impeachment, but the end of his tenure is something he’s very likely looking forward to, as this is when he can bring lawsuits, write books, and spew misinformation without guardrails. And he’s only part of the problem that US science faces, as Jay Bhattacharya, a gutted CDC and NIH and NSF, and more lie in abeyance.

Add to that the way scientific publishing has become the softest target ever thanks to high-volume OA and mindless AI systems, and the era of bad science may only be beginning.

We discuss this, the launch of Ad Fontes Science in Charleston last week, and why the time is now to break with the linear past RFK, OA, AI, and more represent.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Today, we’re introducing Ad Fontes Science, a new division of Ad Fontes Media dedicated to evaluating scientific publications for reliability and relevance.

Ad Fontes Science will offer the Scientific Information Reliability Chart (SIRC) to give researchers, publishers, funders, and other users a structured way to assess scientific papers beyond traditional measures such as journal reputation, citation counts, or impact factor.

Qualified analysts score individual scientific papers across two complementary dimensions according to a proprietary rubric and methodology that reflect norms and standards in scientific publishing, ranking their parent publications according to the relative reliability and relevance of the papers they publish.

Key criteria include how completely each paper documents its provenance, whether the study design is appropriate for its hypothesis, whether its claims are supported by its findings, and whether there is a clear line from hypothesis to conclusion.

The methodology also includes assessing contextual factors that can influence how research should be interpreted, including funding relationships, author expertise, the use of new versus reprocessed observations, how findings are communicated to professional peers, and how results are amplified to broader audiences.

You can read more in coverage yesterday in Research Information.

In this episode, we talk about how we got here, where we’re going, and how you can help:

• Apply to participate as a pilot institution or library
• Become an analyst

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week”:

• Red Hook Society for the Apprehension and Detention of Horse Thieves

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We’re back in learning mode. It’s a lot of fun and really interesting.

To start, we’ve been learning a lot since our book was published, mainly how the topics resonate broadly with different interested parties across a wide swath of society, why they find the topic and our treatment of it compelling, and why they are worried about where science is today. It’s made us glad we pushed ourselves to write when we did.

Now, our next adventure awaits. Heading to our session at Charleston Premiers on November 5th, we are busy building Ad Fontes Science to the point where we’ll have something to show.

This means doing the kind of work the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, Vanessa Otero, believes is the real fun of creating a new offering on the market, and the kind of work two product development people also adore — figuring things out, adapting and adjusting, and making the initial build-outs, prototypes, and personnel connections every start-up needs to hit the ground running.

We talk about some of this — but not too much — and share our Discoveries of the Week, including one about a particular spooky season accessory:

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arXiv was the first major preprint server, a practical Internet solution for a community seeking to exchange findings in areas like high-energy physics, particle physics, and astrophysics, all of which were growing at a rapid rate at the time due to machine-readable outputs and new sensor abilities.

First housed at Los Alamos, it moved to Cornell for a time before spinning out as an independent non-profit earlier this year. It has always been a bit of a financial albatross, so going it alone may mean more financial austerity is in the cards.

But now that it’s taken its future into its own hands and making changes, maybe it’s time to leave arXiv alone?

For its rather arcane origins and purposes, it has punched above its weight in how it has influenced thinking and been used as an example, inspiring utopian visions around the unfettered sharing of scientific findings that have proven misleading in the end.

Suffice to say, platforming preprints didn’t scale as an idea. Commercial forces of various kinds have done their best to abuse, corrupt, and extract value from them, and they have led to a litany of problems as readers here know.

But arXiv retains a talismanic power in some minds, so when extra review steps, limits on article types, and caps on article submissions were proposed, a clamor of alarm and disdain predictably followed — from the kinds of tourists and peanut gallery postulators who have taken roost in the open science era.

So today we’ll discuss a basic question about freedom, community boundaries, and grace:

• Can’t we just leave arXiv alone now?

We discuss why treating care and trust as antediluvian is ridiculous, why others keep wanting to exploit our infrastructure, why gatekeeping has become a more blunt, quantitative instrument, and how techno-fascism is monoculture-adjacent and why this matters.

We also share our Discoveries of the Week.

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The history of science and tech is at some level a history of fabulists — people who imbued new technologies with magical powers of one sort or another, and others who dethroned the magicians and seers with empirical evidence. Now, physicists are actively asking if freewill is an illusion, and if the laws of physics are so deterministic that our consciousnesses are themselves an illusion.

Now, we’re using technology to make new forms of what looks like consciousness to reassert some magic into our world.

Information technology and religion merged early on, with “book religions” expanded by the printing press, which itself spread rapidly largely because the Catholic church printed and sold indulgences to absolve believers of sin — for a price.

With money on the table, there was a good reason to build or buy a printing press.

But the fabulism of indulgences didn’t last. Fortunately, the technology was general use.

We may be living through a similar period when it comes to digital technologies, with fabulists making money and adoption while the larger world seeks general use to solve problems or expand human capabilities.

As we wrestle LLMs to the ground, we seem to be turning a corner as three related trends emerge:

1. The fantasies are being identified and deconstructed
2. Practical applications and sensible approaches are starting to emerge — they are not as grand as the fabulists wanted us to believe, no surprise
3. The general use purpose of LLMs and GAI is being questioned at a fundamental level

• One great new source about AI sense-making is a podcast by Catharina Doria, an excellent AI debunker who made her mark on Instagram and is now moving over to podcasting.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t in danger of allowing fabulists to wreck things. Their ability to shift agency away, to spin fantasies, and to hide behind ideologies creates a lot of risk.

It all hurts science and scholarship, because the fabulists also hide the specifics of their technologies inside a black box of beliefs and make claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny. And the flood of information they are producing is shutting down legitimate scientific data, discourse, and distribution as fabulism seeks dominance.

We discuss all of this, and more.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week,” including the egopantis.

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Various ideologies have captured the handful of leaders atop the major AI firms currently calling for a slowdown in development — effective altruism, long-termism, Singularitarianism. The way these firms are whipsawing society is notable, and the superficiality of the leadership at these firms alarming.

The utopian/dystopian fantasy world their ideologies has created — high hopes, disassociation from reality, groupthink, and more — may be fun for bros in their 20s to discuss over their THC infusers and ketamine drips, but it may also be more familiar to scientific and scholarly publishers than many think. After all, it was scientific publisher who underwent an ideological conversion decades ago with the high hopes and utopian beliefs of open access (OA) publishing foisted on us by a few strong and relentless voices.

AI and OA have some key similarities — the belief that technology can and will solve problems simply through scaled deployment, the blindness to obvious problems created by the pursuit of the ideological goals because stopping is not an option, and the cult-like status of the ideas where dissent or critique is not allowed.

For a profession that at its root has the idea of taking a breath, evaluating claims, and making careful judgments of those, scientific publishing’s headlong rush into OA is now being matched by a headlong rush into AI — one that seems even more likely to end in tears given how things are unfolding overall and the lack of a culture of caution and considered choices. Scientific publishing at least still has that going for it . . .

In this episode, we discuss these topics, leaderboardism, and the latent backlash for both OA and AI.

We end by discussing why it’s time for us to go out and make new observations at the following upcoming events:

• • Peer review week webinar this week
  • STAT Conference
  • Publication Ethics Week
  • Charleston

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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A recent press release from Springer Nature — gussied up to pretend it was a “white paper” representing “findings” and pushed right out through Research Information, where press releases go for release — provided a litany of incentives being pursued by the author-pays Gold OA publishers these days:

• Citations
• Downloads
• Attention

However, these are not reliable incentives. Some work against OA publisher finances. Each one has been hacked to death. All three are meaningless to whether the scientific claims being made are important or reliable.

Worse, they reveal a rejection of the duty of care the scientific enterprise has in relationship with the public.

Today, we talk about the lack of consumer protection in scientific publishing and its negative effects, why editorial and peer review done right protect both fellow scientists and the public by engaging communities of experts, and why something unbiased and unhackable might make sense as a priority for those who care.

We also share our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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We have a chapter in our book (“Trapped in the Tech Shrine”) about how scientific publishers became habituated to taking publishing and business advice from technology vendors.

It became so entrenched that some might wonder who’s in charge.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a palpable tech backlash against:

• Big Tech oligarchs
• Data centers
• Techno-authoritarians

Lawsuits are everywhere as extraction and exploitation are challenged, as the energy and economic disruptions of data centers are sparking increasingly organized protests to thwart them, and AI and tech valuations and futures are in flux.

Through their embrace of digital tech, publishers became accustomed to platforms and templates, which were developed in large extent to spread the higher costs of digital publishing. As a result, today we have code bases full of business risks, incentives to set it and forget it for as long as possible, and distractions built in a decade ago that too often go unquestioned.

It seems time to say that tech often distracts from substance, is too quickly elevated for no good reason, and can easily mislead us about what matters to our audiences.

Is it time to question assumptions? To begin a digital detox? Is it all vaporware, selling us on a future that will never come?

As automakers replace massive touchscreens with knobs and dials, do we need to do our own program of digital detox?

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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