I just saw someone talk about "the enshittification of science" with respect to peer reviewed journals and the university system.
I think this goes to show how bad just latching onto a word is. Enshittification allegedly deals with the way services get worse due to capitalism. The problem is that scientific journals and the peer review process isnt capitalist and is often part of systems run by people that explicitly hate capitalism.
Honestly though, I'm impressed that the ai generated image of the rat with the giant penis was both peer reviewed and published in a journal of science. Neither the author nor the reviewer were paid for creating and approving that photo, but it got published regardless!
I think this goes to show how bad just latching onto a word is. Enshittification allegedly deals with the way services get worse due to capitalism. The problem is that scientific journals and the peer review process isnt capitalist and is often part of systems run by people that explicitly hate capitalism.
Honestly though, I'm impressed that the ai generated image of the rat with the giant penis was both peer reviewed and published in a journal of science. Neither the author nor the reviewer were paid for creating and approving that photo, but it got published regardless!
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The reason that I assume it has something to do with capitalism is that Cory Doctorow who coined the word explicitly places the blame on capitalist forces. He says platforms start off being good to their users to lure them in, then slowly start to abuse their users to claw back the value and make the platform profitable. If something else doesn't follow that criteria, then it isn't the thing as he described it.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
I subscribe to a number of academic journals, and I tend to agree with you that there are legitimate criticisms of science and academia. Foremost, I think there's an incentive to bamboozle reviewers and readers with bullshit. You'll see papers using 37 letter words where a simple description would suffice. Often you'll see a long and extremely complicated explanation and then after reflecting realize that they are describing a simple and standard method that anyone would use, but they can't just describe things properly because you won't get published for that -- you gotta break out the thesaurus. (Even in my own field I see it, that they'll use non-standard descriptions of simple things)
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
I subscribe to a number of academic journals, and I tend to agree with you that there are legitimate criticisms of science and academia. Foremost, I think there's an incentive to bamboozle reviewers and readers with bullshit. You'll see papers using 37 letter words where a simple description would suffice. Often you'll see a long and extremely complicated explanation and then after reflecting realize that they are describing a simple and standard method that anyone would use, but they can't just describe things properly because you won't get published for that -- you gotta break out the thesaurus. (Even in my own field I see it, that they'll use non-standard descriptions of simple things)
I followed Doctorow early on when I joined the fediverse, but found while he has good things to say he's also got some really dumb things to say. I must've pushed back at some point so I'm blocked lol. never read him before that. Only followed I think because I recognized the name from xkcd, but I did know enshittification was his concept.
I don't think I'm missing what you're saying, it's more like that's another angle to it. Forcing positive results through means like p-hacking is certainly another means to bamboozle with bullshit. You're absolutely correct however, negative results are just as important. I recall AvE trying what he found in a paper on making transparent wood, and ultimately he didn't succeed, and nilered tried to and got closer, but it's important to have that sort of work because sometimes a negative result doesn't mean the positive results was necessarily wrong but that things the first experimenter took for granted ended up being important to why it couldn't be replicated, but that data is lost if it isn't published.
I don't think I'm missing what you're saying, it's more like that's another angle to it. Forcing positive results through means like p-hacking is certainly another means to bamboozle with bullshit. You're absolutely correct however, negative results are just as important. I recall AvE trying what he found in a paper on making transparent wood, and ultimately he didn't succeed, and nilered tried to and got closer, but it's important to have that sort of work because sometimes a negative result doesn't mean the positive results was necessarily wrong but that things the first experimenter took for granted ended up being important to why it couldn't be replicated, but that data is lost if it isn't published.