Academic Publishing is Utterly Broken

Context: Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science

Complex systems of anything other than trivial complexity tend (and trend) towards a median value of approximation towards optimal system self-replication. These academic and associated publishing systems have become oriented towards the maximally effective and efficient reproduction of the organisational systems themselves and this is, as with pretty much all stratified hierarchies, a situation that incurs a cost of creeping irrelevancy and drift away from the aspirational goals of science. The extent to which this is true can be gauged by the defensive and generally adversarial posture assumed by those for whom such antitheses are utterly unpalatable; egos seek their own best, enlightened self-interests.

This means that what is reproduced at a gestalt systems level and over the longer arc and trajectory (of an academic entity or framework’s contextual tenure as intelligible or valid) is hardly if ever aligned to the stated goals of those systems. Notice, as an aside, that the necessary development of technical languages and context-specific vocabularies also has precisely this effect – of reproducing an abstraction that tends to drift into systems states optimally biased towards their own effective reproduction, self-replication.

All systems of belief possess blindspots.