It's Bad That There Are Incentives To Publish Boring Papers
Wouldn't it be nice if there were incentives to publish interesting papers?
I was recently emailing physicist and friend of the blog Aron Wall (read his blog, seriously!!) We were talking about the anthropic argument for theism and I sent him the stuff I’ve written on it. I’ve written a paper with my friend Amos Wollen (also read his blog!!) on the argument, and I’ve also written some blog articles about it. I sent him the blog articles rather than the paper for a simple reason: the paper is much less interesting than the blog articles.
In the articles, I argue for SIA, and link to all sorts of cool things supporting SIA. But in the paper, if I argued for SIA, it would be too bloated and reviewers would reject it based on the arguments for SIA. So the paper says more boring, milquetoast, conditional things about how if you accept SIA you should accept the argument, rather than arguing for SIA.
There’s an incentive to be boring in philosophy papers. Rather than saying things like “there is no free will because X,” which reviewers will reject because someone might disagree with X, you’re incentivized to say “here I object to Wentworth’s argument that Smith’s argument against Grayson’s argument misstated the dialectical context, and argue that given the dialectical context Grayson’s argument can be seen coherently, depending on one’s views, to give one some sort of reason—of a strength that is hard to say—to accept that there is no free will.”
Richard has mentioned this before: reviewers have an annoying tendency to reject a paper because it makes a controversial argument. This encourages people to say fewer controversial things that make papers interesting. That’s why philosophy blog articles, while often written in just a few hours, tend to be more interesting than papers poured over for weeks.
The solution to this is simple. First, reviewers shouldn’t reject papers just because they’re controversial. If a paper is interesting, even if one could easily reject a premise, that should count strongly in favor of its publication. Second, reviewers and authors should accept brief defenses of things without addressing them in complete detail. For example, in our anthropic paper, we should be able to say something like “while we don’t intend to comprehensively defend SIA, here are some reasons one might find it plausible,” before presenting some arguments for it. Third, there should be less of an obsessive focus on citing everything said on some topic. It’s hard to get things published on free will, for instance, because a million people have written about them! If you make an interesting point and address a few main objections, even if you don’t cite an object to every objection ever given, your paper should still be publishable.
The main problem is intrinsic to the blind nature of review: You don’t know the reviewer, so you avoid controversial opinions because there is a risk that she is in the other side of the controversy.
Now, the solution is simple: write the technical arguments in the paper, write a blogpost about the paper.
In sciences, the most important thing about a paper is that it is the best attempt possible to accurately reason about the objective world. Being “interesting” is not as important.
What is interesting to the lay person is often less interesting to a journal reviewer, because the journal reviewer is deeply familiar with the relevant arguments and literature about preexisting topics.
Having a “hot take” which is interesting, controversial, and skips over some of the boring technical details can make a great blogpost for the lay reader.
But these are boring for journal reviewers because most of those *hot takes* have actually been taken before, and then others have argued against them. It is better to have people engage with the preexisting literature and reply to the counter argument to the counter argument because that is what moves the field forward.
Furthermore, saying something like, “if you accept X, then those are some potentials reasons to favor Y” might seem boring, but is much more thoughtful then just coming out and saying “you should believe Y.” The latter demonstrates an unfamiliarity with the broader literature around a topic, and demonstrates an ignorance or refusal to engage with of other arguments.
Academic papers are often written in the a boring tone and style because, unfortunately, that turns out to be the best mode we have for dispassionate objective reasoning.