Hi Kyriacos,
Although I agree that Steemit may bring something to research, I mostly disagree with everything stated in your post. Let me try to explain why (after all, we are here to discuss).
First of all, I am a professor. Therefore, one of the ‘bad guys’ you mention in your post. Now that this is said, let’s chat :)
I was a bit surprized by your very rude tone against professors. Maybe you got some bad experience during your lifetime, but you should not generalize too much. I can believe that what you mentioned may have happened here or there, but this is far from being happening every day, in every research area and in every place. I would like to mention a few things:
- To get a professorship position, one must often work during many years and be recognized by our academic peers. This is not easy and the competition is fierce. And only one or two guys out of hundreds of excellent candidates will go through.
- Professors are not forming any kind of sect or mafia (let us try to avoid conspiracy theories please). If you disagree, please demonstrate your statements.
- Although I know cases where one professor may have a bunch of PhD and postdoc slaves, this is far from being always the case. Professors usually invest time in forming PhD students and discussing ideas with postdocs. Even if they are often not the ones running the codes, they bring enough to deserve signing the papers. They are also often critically analyzing the outcome of the research. And note that they are the ones bringing the money (but that is not their only role).
Now, the fact that Steemit should rule academia. There a good ideas in this option, and I am confident that Steemit may bring something to academia. The something should still be defined, and one should not be too naive on another hand. I may elaborate this in a further post as I can see a lot of pros and a lot of cons here. For the moment, let me recall that:
- You will always hire someone for 2 or 3 years (at least). Please compare the amount of money needed, and what you can get from a Steemit post. I guess that a factor of 100 should be found. This must be kept in mind. One cannot factorize out the standard sources of fundings.
- Upvotes cannot decide what is good quality research and what is bad quality research. I agree that the current academic system may not be the best one (for instance, it is very hard for me to get grants as fundamental research is not the one usually funded first and we only fight for the remainder). However, coming back to upvotes, let us take my personal example. I can upvote a post on chemistry because I like it, because it sounds reasonable. I am however not an expert in chemistry and I cannot tell whether the content is good or bad science. For this, you need experts, and no one else. And note that experts are not always professors. I referred my first paper when I was PhD+3 months, and I was definitely not a professor at that time :)
- By relying only on upvotes, one may at the end not be able to distinguish between research and sensationalism. A good example of this: the media. People generally want sex, violence and blood. Interesting (scientific?) shows are usually not falling in this category.
Now regarding research in general:
- Anyone can write anything and submit something to the experts of any given field. They will most of the time always read the text and show why this or that theory cannot work. In the case an idea is a good idea and works, they may encourage for publishing it in peer-reviewed journals. I recall that independent researchers exist (they are nevertheless rare).
- The number of publications and citations have too much importance those days. But you cannot reduce their importance to zero. This reflects the impact of a given researcher on his or her community. You must just take these pieces of information with some grains of salt. (And some people being part of hiring committees are trying to get rid of trying to have everybody fitting the same boxes).
- With your proposal, you actually kill fundamental research (there is no immediate industrial application, it is usually not very trendy, etc.). Exploring how the universe works may not bring anything directly. But you should not underestimate the indirect gains. One example of the indirect benefits of fundamental research: we have a free open web since April 30, 1993, thanks to CERN researchers who needed to communicate with their peers. Let us imagine the disaster if the web would have been invented by a private company…
I may continue writing for ages, but I think I have said the main points of what I think. Do not hesitate to answer (and disagree :p).
Cheers,
Benjamin