The Spiritual Anthropologist

Where Alcohol and Anthropology Meet

From Preprints to Omniprints

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Feb 17 0

Starting with ArXiv, the idea of preprints has been increasingly in popularity for some time. But now is the time for omniprints. Preprints were a good start. And Crossref has been indexing more and more preprints, with preprints outpacing journal articles by far (Crossref). There are a number of servers, including ArXiv and its derivatives, OSF’s preprint servers, ResearchGate, and more.

I rely exclusively on preprint servers for my publication, mostly out of spite for modern academia and its toxic nature. I absolutely refuse to pay a company so that they can profit off of my work. And honestly, if the goal of publishing is to communicate with other researchers, than traditional publications are not the answer, especially when they’re not open access.

But there’s an issue. A lot of people reject citation of preprints. They want to wait until there’s a “final” version. It’s not even that they’ll scrutinize it more heavily, but rather they will outright use the preprint nature of the paper to ignore it.

Of course, what matters isn’t whether a journal has decided to pick up an article — Wakefield taught us that—but rather what matters is that the content of the article is sound. And in order to determine whether that’s the case, a person has to read the article.

I do think that part of the problem is that the articles are called pre-prints. It’s right in the name: the article hasn’t been printed yet. It hasn’t been completed. That’s why we need to rename preprint servers, which have long since become far more than that, to something else. I’m not really sure what name we’ll end up using, but perhaps “omniprint” is the best option, as it implies “all prints” whether preprint or postprint, draft print, or final print.

Real Open Science

Related to omniprints is the idea of open access, where a journal lets anyone access the publication. I don’t see open access as real open science. It’s certainly a start. After all, if the goal of publishing is to communicate, we need to be able to read what’s being published! But it’s simply not enough. For one thing, publishing in open access journals is often very expensive, literally costing the author thousands of dollars! That’s why we need omniprint.

Actual Peer Review

Of course, in order to take full advantage of omniprint servers, they need to provide a number of tools to allow for an open peer review. Comment systems are useful, but they’re not a great way to quickly measure the quality of the paper. I think a tagging system might be useful, where people can anonymously tag a paper. Tags would probably have to include whether or not the paper is scholarly, if it justifies its position, if it needs improvement, and so on.

And that would be actual peer review. What we think of as peer review is really just one or two reviewers, who might be quite biased, along with an editor. How can we trust two or three people to make a decision about a paper, in an unbiased way? We can’t. That’s why we need omniprint.

Ramblings on a Paraconsistent Reality

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Feb 17 0

There are two camps of science: the provisional verification camp, which was really the first to arise, in a formal sense, when Francis Bacon formulated “the scientific method.” The second camp arose when philosophers such as Kant and Hume realized that there was an issue with induction. They questioned why repeated observations, consistent with a given explanation, really provided any justification for the theory. This concern led to Karl Popper creating a new view of science, as a system of falsification. And that’s where we’ll start this discussion.« Continue »

The Narrative of Science

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Feb 10 1

This article is a full reply to a discussion with D. L. Shultz’s about his article on soft vs hard science (not fully safe for work).
« Continue »

Email to the National Academy of Sciences: Why Evolution is not Fact

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Jun 3 0

I recently emailed the National Academy of Sciences in order to explain why their article on evolution is incorrect. I did not expect a reply, and I did not get one, as of yet, but misrepresenting science is not acceptable. Below is the email. « Continue »

The Fallacy of Scientific Consensus

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Sep 14 3

I have been involved in a number of arguments about scientific consensus. The most recent debate has convinced me to write about the topic in depth. The idea of scientific consensus has been popular since reports that 97% of all papers offering a position on climate change assert that climate change is happening. I am not going to address the validity of theories on climate change. But it is important to point out a number of issues with relying on consensus among scientists. First, peer reviewed publishing is dominated by a handful of authors.« Continue »

Robustness of a Theory

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Jul 1 0

I have written a few articles on the misrepresentation of scientific theory. I have pointed out that theories are not “fact.” They are not known to be true. In the past, I have used the word “consistent” rather than “true” in order to address a theory, but consistency is not really enough to describe how “good” a theory is. For this, “robustness” is needed. While this short discussion does not generate an actual metric for robustness, I use the term enough that I should at least explain what I mean, in general, when I say that a theory is or is not robust.« Continue »

Formalizing Science

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Dec 21 0

A very rough draft of a formalization of science, largely based off of the system of science established by Karl Popper.« Continue »

Arguments against Anti-Theists and Theists

By alcanthro Leave a Comment Dec 18 0

Having had numerous discussions with both anti-theists and theists, I’ve found that there are a lot of flawed arguments going around. This is an attempt to point out some of those fallacies. This is a living document, with more arguments and counter arguments being added as needed.« Continue »

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