Weird how when you're doing something that you love, that provides valuable information, and that's valuable to humanity, you're made to feel guilty about getting paid for it, huh? I'm sure none of our trade and self-publishing folks on here can relate (jk lol). Former biophysicist and current data scientist Jahed Momand joins us to talk about power dynamics in scientific publishing, how scientists are at the mercy of a multi-billion dollar industry with really really high profit margins, and what options we might have to change the way things currently are. Is it possible to have a world where researchers and creators get compensated? Where normal people can afford to access scientific research? Maybe?

Did you know mayhem literally means dismemberment?

No, yeah, when they say mayhem, yeah, you like cut someone's

arms off? Oh, wow, that's cool. Changes mayhem. For me, it's

mayhem in here. Do you

really think there's also a black metal band called mayhem.

That makes sense. Yeah, do they do it on stage? No. But one of

like, the lead singer was accused of killing with the

bassist and, like, eating his brains or something. Yeah, it's

super were they Norwegian? Oh, yeah.

Anyway, I just thought it

about that. I it's, I can send you money,

or anyway I will, but somebody put that in the show notes. What

should we have to created

in 1981

you

welcome to the hybrid pub Scout podcast with me, Emily einlander

and me Karim Pulaski, hello, hello.

We are mapping the frontier between traditional and indie

publishing, and today we have jahed momend on and I'm going to

read his bio, which he wrote for me. I just want to say

jahed momend is a former scientist biophysics, who went

into industry data science, specifically charged with

deriving effect sizes for medical interventions, for

personalized medicine, only to discover that from the

perspective of Bayesian inference, most of the medical

science literature was total nonsense. That kicked off his

investigations of the crises engulfing scientific publishing.

That's the name of the episode, the crises of engulfing science.

Oh, that's Rhett's really happy say hi, hello. Great to be here.

It is, isn't it, yeah, thanks for coming on our podcast. Thank

you for having me. Yeah, yeah. We're trying to get into all the

I was going to say, nooks and crannies. I hate myself.

We're well, I mean, what I what I meant is we just want to get

weird with publishing. So I guess that is appropriate. So

it's true. Well, we are in Portland, after

all. Just as a disclaimer here. It's not a disclaimer. It's just

a warning. This is going to be really political, and this is

going to have a lot of cuss words in it, like more than

usual, like mostly when we have interviews on here, like they're

pretty on the up and up, yeah. But not today.

I go, we're gonna say fuck. We're

gonna say fuck. Many, many times,

sorry, mom.

Gonna get lots of letters,

handwritten letters in the mail say, Fuck,

just underlined 12 times.

All right, all right, all right, so you said you were working in

as a scientist in biophysics, and then, so what? What was it

that turned you off to doing that? Oh, well, so it's, it's

2019 right? Yep, there's still a paper from 2009

that I submitted to the Journal of Physical Chemistry, a,

there's a, b and c.

That paper is still in reviews. It's 20. What I stopped, I

stopped carrying around 2013 and my, my old boss emailed me. He's

like, Oh, yeah, we got someone kind of making some refinements

to it's still out there. I mean, we might as well get it

published. I mean, if somebody's watching it, yeah,

like they're it long, extended periods of time where, you know,

16 months, 12 months, four months at a time, where people

are like, well, here's some new comments. And can you change

that, and maybe run this experiment too? And it's just

wild. So is it? Is it like a

when you're trying to, like, restart your computer, when

you're doing an update, and it's like, 49 minutes left, 30

minutes left, 20 minutes left, two hours, 119

years. Just kidding. We just don't feel like doing it at all,

in general. So okay, well, I feel like that's, that's

something that's going to be telling Oh yeah, funny, if it

ever gets published. But I was.

In biophysics at the University of Illinois, which is one of, I

guess, one of the better ones. People can't see my quote

fingers. I think they could hear them.

That's good if you have an Intune sense to quote fingers.

But

so I spent two years, two and a half years,

and honestly, my problems weren't necessarily related to

publishing at the time. They were more about epistemic

problems in science and the things that I was doing, I'll

give you an example. So in the time that I was coming up in

science, I was in biophysics, especially there was something

called single molecule biophysics that still exists.

But what people were doing at the time was they would take a

laser and a point this laser at a little polystyrene bead,

right? So, you know, think about, like, things that come in

your shipping, yeah, like the things that's in your that's in

your micro bead, Yeah, same thing, yeah. And they'd flow

these things into a chamber, like a little cell that has

water in it, like a tiny, like two glass slides, right? And

then they tried to attach a piece of DNA to these beads so

they could measure things, like a molecule of protein walking on

them, right? So, like, this is happening in our so they're,

like, stretching it out like a tight rope, exactly, and then

putting a bingo, okay, yeah. And they're using a lasers optical

force to keep the beads steady and also move them away from

each other. That was the thing that I built at the University

of Illinois. Sounds fun, yeah.

Like connects, you'll find, like, a

whole bunch of physics, at least, like astrophysics and

cosmological physics, is literally just building an

instrument for like five years so you can make one measurement

that you verified via mathematics. Wow, you publish

that result and now you're an astrophysicist. I mean, I don't

know, I didn't, I dropped out,

but it's funny, because back then, right? You could take

something like this notice. I didn't say anything about us a

biological cell or an animal or anything, right? It's all very

you have to purposely have very dilute solutions. And you have

to have these are in the this was in the basement of the of

the physics building. There was thermal shielding in the room,

there was acoustic shielding in the room. There was all kinds of

things where you're like, we have to be very, very careful

with this right? Now, the thing is, though, is at the end of the

day, what this protein is doing on a single thing of DNA in a

very dilute solution, you'd probably want to be like, Well,

what relevance does this have for a cell, right? And so that's

kind of where I started, even though I had voluntarily joined

this group. So I was like, Hey guys, we're going to talk about

that, right? I was like, Well, how does this ladder up to

actual, real life, biology? And it seems like no one was really

interested in that question. They're like, we're just trying

to build this fucking thing right now, you know, it's, which

is fine, like, you know, that's, that's all fine. You can't

necessarily walk in and demand that. And especially as a

graduate student, which, you know, maybe you may have some

experience, yeah, but, you know, I ended up having, like, big

epistemic issues with what I was doing, and I dropped out of the

masters. But I did have that one paper that's kind of going out

there, that was a novel sort of approach to looking at an

archaeal bacterial DNA. So, you know, the ones that are down in

the bottom of the sea. Oh, cool. Yeah. Someone had a sample of

that. We extracted its polymerase, we put it in. We

watched to see you do these things act differently than ours

out here. And,

yeah, they did to some extent, but I don't really think it was

that novel best on the point. So I was like, All right, I'm not

really seeing where this is going, right? But the really

funny thing was that at the time, you could take something

like this, like what I was doing, you could find any new

protein you want to put it in the system, and it'll be a

science paper like that. I mean, the publication, yeah, it's just

the, what does this do? Yeah, it's approach to scientific

papers. Absolutely, that do

totally. It's this new thing. Here's this novel. You could

just slap novel in the front of these things. Novel approach to

whatever, right? And it's literally Science, Nature,

Science, right? And so I was kind of like, what is this

really doing? That's funny, though, because I had some

colleagues who are now at really nice places like MIT, but they

use these methods to find really fundamental laws of how biology

works in cells or in systems where you could reliably make

the inference that actually that's probably valid, that it

does that in cell. Oh, okay, so they finally got there, yeah,

eventually they haven't gotten there yet, but a lot of this

technology is just really sexy, like they can make, they can

make 3d images of cells, like inside of cells, of living

cells, which is very new, right? That's not a thing people have

done. There's still very serious problems with that. But the

point is, I looked at this and I was like, one of those, what's

the word, I guess, entitled, or whatever,

is the point of this, right? But,

but I quit, and I was like, well, maybe there's something

more, you know, higher up on the ontological chain of things that

people are doing because I'm.

Down here at the very tiniest things, right? And so I got into

industry, and a lot of the stuff I was doing requires massive

statistical modeling, lots of actual programming, not very

complicated stuff, just in R just to

process data, looking at trends, yeah, all that kind of stuff,

mostly filtering noise, trying to find ways to actually see,

oh, is that a signal, or is that a signal? Right, right? Because

these are really, really precise measurements that are subject to

someone walking and going,

Oh, my God.

Good use of good use of microphones. Yeah.

Yeah. So and so I was like, well, that's fine that people

are getting in Science, Nature papers out of it, but

materially, what is it doing? And so I left, what? I left that

program I went into

at this point. Regrettably, technology, we're

never gonna let you forget that

Corrine has a vendetta against tech bros. Well,

I was gonna say you probably understand you lived in, you

live in the Bay Area, right? Yeah. So you know what I mean.

There was an eye roll, a flutter of the eyes. That's the correct

reaction, aggressive, head nodding and eye rolling. Yeah,

but so can I interrupt you real quick?

I always forget what epistemic means. Oh, just so you're saying

you have an epistemic problem. Oh, yeah, just a question of

knowledge, right? Okay, how are we justifying the knowledge that

we derived from this thing? Oh, it's like, the knowledge itself,

yeah, like the purpose of the knowledge itself, okay, it's

just the branch of philosophy that has to do with how we

justify knowledge, yes.

And it's funny because, like, it's not that scientists don't

know this. They do this all the time. A lot of them do it on

autopilot. Some of them are have taken the time to be like, Oh,

that's epistemology or something, right? My brain

always goes to epistle, because I was raised

like letters, the letters of Paul. Well,

of course he's gonna have a problem with God stuff. He's

gonna DNA.

God is in your DNA.

Did you guys see God in there?

One DNA at a time? Right? I've seen God and He's forgotten us.

Yeah, so I zoomed in with the laser microscope, and there was

a gnome on the DNA, and

he has forgotten

I'm your boyfriend now,

your boyfriend with a nice red hat. So,

data science, yes, right. So people were like, hey, it was

about 2000 11,012, and data science as a job, was pretty

much happening around then, like people were doing it. But there

weren't like, you know, directors of data science. No

one was hiring a VP of data science. There was just people

going, hey, there seems to be scientific, reliable ways that

data does things, and we can build models that makes it, that

can extract features from data, right? So this just means, like,

if you have

like a table, like a data table, right? And there's rows and

columns, and it really doesn't matter even what's in them, but

if you have, like, the rows represent one form of thing,

maybe it's like the X, like the height of something, yeah, maybe

it's like, the height of all the buildings in America. And why is

something like, you know, the concentration of people per

square foot, or something, right? Sure. And so people will

go, Hey, is there

an association between, like, you know, building size and

number of people? Seems like a no brainer. Data science company

like, well, I can build a model that will extract the trend

feature from this data, tell you, and then other fancy things

can happen too. But

so I got into personalized medicine, which I use heavy

quote, fingers on, because I do not think it exists. Oh, okay,

which I mean, we can. But am I not special? My own

personal personalized?

Yeah, yes, yes, you do, just like every all the other special

that are in my standard of care table here, yes, you get this

much. No one else does just you, therefore personalized. But this

was so what this company was doing, though it was formed by a

lot of crazy rationalists, because we're good at Bayesian

inference. Bayesian inference is pretty useful. It has its

drawbacks, but here's the idea, right? This Reverend Thomas

Bayes, five centuries ago, four centuries ago. I think it was

just kind of put in a mathematical representation, the

idea that Bayes.

Basically, how will you update your belief on something, given

a set of evidence, and allow evidence beforehand, before you

actually took a measurement of some kind or a change in your

belief state? Okay, so people said, you know, there's a lot of

medical literature out there, hundreds of millions of articles

published here, all over the world, India, all these other

places, Asia, Europe, all these massive, massive, massive

amounts of data. How do we know any of this shit is true, right?

Yeah. And what does true mean?

Actually, when I when I wrote this, when I wrote the doc, at

first, I don't know if you looked at it,

but my last question, because I was doing it like midnight last

night, yeah, was just in all caps, what is truth?

Talking we'll talk about that. Well, I guess I was more on the

money than I thought. Yeah, so like the I know that you were,

like, already explaining this, but I'm just making sure that

I'm following that the the idea of having your mind changed is

important to this concept. Absolutely, having your mind

changed by the data. There's a lot of medical literature out

there. How do we know it's true? The standard for truth for most

of these people is something called the p value, and you

might see it if you ever look at PubMed or Google Scholar. That's

the bell curve thing, right? Yeah, exactly. And so the point

being that they you'll see it published. When they say, this

is a significant result, they'll say, P value less than point 05

right? And I'm not going to walk through the operations of that,

but the point is that the P value is less than point 05 is

in some ways related to the and then a person saying, therefore,

this finding is significant, is somewhat related to when a

person goes the false positive rate of my machine here is point

oh two. Therefore, when you walk through it, it's 98%

accurate. That's kind of like what these folks were saying is

that actually there's a gulf of information these people aren't

taking into account. So if you look at things like the top 15

disease killers in America, it's basically like you're looking at

the sync this single set of data and not taking it's like, an

externality in economics, yeah, to some extent, yeah, because

it's like, oh, these other things don't matter, yeah. So

we're not even going to take it into consideration. Absolutely.

It's like, yes, the Environment Matters. Yes, this matters like,

and in addition, we're going to try to quantify those things,

right? We're going to try to actually look at things like,

I'll give you example. One of the first products I was put on

there was, I was put on the atrial fibrillation project,

which is a thing that hits a substantial percentage of the

population. So we were interested in figuring things

out like, Okay, first, if I'm a 35 year old man or a 45 year old

woman or a 53 year old man, what have you right? What is my

likelihood, my risk, of developing atrial fibrillation,

based on the medical literature, and once I have it, what is the

best way to mitigate its risks, and what are the risks? Right?

Because it's not just that your heart flutters a little bit in

the atrial chamber. It's that that becomes stroke risk,

becomes cardiovascular disease risk, all that stuff. So the

thing is, is that there is no good answer in the medical

literature about this kind of question, that there's a lot of

different studies have been done, lots of controlled trials,

lots of different populations, but no one has come out and

said, Okay, given all the stuff that we know in the various

populations and the prior likelihood of having it, what is

The best thing to do. That's why this company, like, came into

existence. And so I just when I was like, Oh, this looks pretty

cool. I should just do this for a while. And so I walked in and

did that for a while. I was working with these guys, and

what we discovered, at least, what I discovered in a really

deep investigation of atrial fibrillation specifically, is

that almost most of the things which you were talking about,

the environment, yeah, most of the recommendations ended up

being pretty mundane. We even integrated things like genetics.

So we looked at all the top single nucleotide polymorphisms,

SNPs

for various things, and we said, okay, great. Which one of these

actually has some sort of risk tied to atrial fibrillation and

cardiovascular disease? They do these with these things called

genome wide association studies, which are garbage for the most

part, as I figured out. But anyway, I'm not saying they all

are. So if you're listening into this and you're mad,

sorry, you can tweet at him.

Yeah, we'll leave my handle here. You can get mad at me. I

enjoy mad people against utopia.

So, yeah, that's what I was doing. And so I made a pretty

hard claim here in my bio, which I don't want you to defend. I'll

defend that.

I like wrote this in a screed at like, I don't know, some time I

remember what I was doing that stupid chickens are ruining my

brain.

But I said total nonsense, which is not, I'm just I have a

tendency to exaggerate, right? But the point being that, like,

when you look at the P values for developing a risk for

various types of diseases, up is down, left is right, depends on

who.

You listen to is a lot of really divergent information in the

medical literature. The standard of care, that is what doctors

use to manage these conditions, isn't really well informed by

any of them, yeah. It's really more in film, informed by the

sort of overarching pharmaceutical industrial

complex and the trade unions that govern how they work. Yeah,

but I will be can that's a whole we can talk about that forever.

Yeah,

we might.

But yeah, so that then led me to, well, if there's this much

sort of fuzziness in p values in medical literature, what is

really going on in scientific publishing? How does this

happen? Right? Like, what are the various incentives that

people have. Why are these things getting published? Is

there a sort of when you're like, what is truth? Is

there a sort of truth that people are driving through, or

are they just, you know, socially organized around the

notion of finding truth? And it doesn't really matter what that

truth is like, it needs to be in line with what everyone already

exactly, is it shaped by everyone's actions? I don't want

to say constructed, because then people get really pissed. People

get people get super mad, socially constructed, when

really, I'm just saying it's shaped by the by social the

social organization of people. No one made it up. It's not

constructed in an imagined order

people get piping hot, mad at social constructions. And I'm

like, okay, all right, you're trying to associate me the post

modernist got it shaped. How about that?

Yeah, but yeah, so, and that's when I just started looking at

this. And I mean, there are a lot of people who are now

looking at this, Tim Van der Zee and James Heather's Right? Like,

those are two folks who are really deeply embedded in this.

They got, no, they didn't, didn't get Brian wanting fired,

per se, but they definitely raised enough flags where people

were like, Oh, that dude is making stuff up. We're gonna

have him on to

James Heather. Oh, good, yeah. I was, I was gonna tell you,

because that would be a either me following him, or him

following me would be really great. Well, I was kind of like,

Ooh, maybe I should have had him on first, but I don't think it's

gonna be bad. Either way, it should be fine. He's a fan. He's

fantastic to talk to you, yeah. But that was kind of like, what

got me the point where I was like, wow, okay, well, we're

dealing with this thing. So many millions of people have it, and

honestly, at the end of the day, a lot of the recommendations for

it, even after you pass them through the various sort of

algorithms we had developed, they end up being quite like the

contributions from things like genetics were very, very, very

small, and that also could be reflective of the state of our

knowledge on genetics in 2012

but at the same time,

things like doing the DASH diet, which is a salt reduction, oh

yeah,

walking for 15 to 30 minutes every single day, getting

sunlight, all these kinds of things ended up being really big

contributors to lowering the risk. The biggest ones were just

things like, don't you know, have a BMI of whatever. I don't

know what the cutoff was, but 27 something, yeah, something.

Emily knows, right? But you know that stuff is really more a

byproduct of people trying to objectify physiology into

numbers, which doesn't really back out. But, like,

again, another whole podcast.

We're on a publishing podcast. Yes, so please lead us on the

publishing tour. All right.

I mean, okay, so you said it was taking forever for them. It's

been 10 years and you still haven't gotten your paper. Oh,

god, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about this going is that

typical? It's, it's not super typical, okay, it's really, I've

heard it's cool, a little more typical on things like

sociology, gender studies, other sort of it's more typical for

those things. Well, yeah, it's, it happens a little more often

that things end up going into development hell, almost for

like, six or seven years, because they're just, I mean,

I'm not, you need to have more people in your sample, yes, or,

like, or if you're, if you're challenging serious things that

everyone thinks is true. Mm, hmm, true. Again, right? Like,

like, one example could be that it's actually a really good

example of scientific publishing kind of failing because it

doesn't people sort of assign their responsibility and shared

understanding of this to the literature. But it's not really.

It doesn't live there. It lives in the communities who are

publishing, right,

right? So a really good example of this is adult neurogenesis.

This is when

I, when I was, you know, 10 or nine or something. I heard even

the school, you know, that adult brains don't have any new

neurons, so when you're 14, you never get a new one again. Oh, I

heard Yes, like, once you're in fifth grade, that's the way you

are done forever. Your brains fucked. Yeah, sorry, sorry for.

You idiot.

But anyway, it turns out for you, the saga of that one

finding is fascinating. There was an assistant professor about

40 years ago, forget the guy's name, who published a result

saying, using just tagging radiation tagging of DNA to show

that something that was ingested by an animal ends up being

incorporated in the brain. And people were like, that's crazy.

Also, you didn't prove that it's the important part of the

neuron, so we don't believe you, right? And this person lost

their funding, they left science, and they wrote a

memoir, like, 35 years later going, like, essentially, I was

right, but I was right, but I lost my career. I literally was,

like, part of the title, oh, wow, yeah, yeah, maybe put in

the show notes, but yeah, black metal band, right? And so when

you look at the way that scientists talk about what they

do, and they say, like, well, if you have enough evidence and you

publish it and now your peers see it, it'll be fine. But

that's not true, right? There isn't some sort of strict

governance structure around how truth works. It turns out that

actually one of the big luminaries in the field,

I also forget his name, sorry, fucking chickens,

but I'll find his name. I'll say, like, his name is Pascal,

something. He's a neuro. He's a neuroscientist. He in this first

result was like, That's bullshit. No way not happening,

right? And it was very he did in the worst way possible. I don't

know his last name. I can remember what he said. He had a

conference. He said to the person who is sharing this, he

goes, I don't know what neurons do out over there in Texas, but

over here in Connecticut, Yale, they don't do that. Wow. I'm not

even making that up. That's actually a quote, yeah, I'll

find it. It's incredible, yeah,

but yeah. So like that. Now, what happened with that is that

20 to 25, years later, after that initial controversy, Pascal

guy still has a career, by the way, another group, two people,

published, and were like, we use new methods, and we got the same

thing. And again, the people were like, That's no way. That's

true. And then what happened was people went, you only did it in

rats, or you did it in nematodes. And they just kept on

saying, Nope, nope, nope, nope. And then we haven't seen it in

primates, oh, shit. Someone published it in primate Oh, and

then fight. And then people said, Well, you haven't shown it

in an adult human in the part of the brain that matters, the

cortex. And so literally, like this kind of thing continue,

right? And so the real problem with publishing is that people,

this is the primary way that these people advance in their

careers. It's the primary way that they derive status in order

to in order to advance in their careers, and also to do things

like consult and get, you know, nice, cushy deals with your

garment or pharmaceuticals, right? So a whole lot of things

are wrapped up in this one thing that people thinks is a people

think is a very specific truth deriving mechanism. And so you

can see how a lot of problems result from that. Yeah, well, I

feel like that's one of the big problems with trade publishing

right now, is there's a group of people who are entrenched in

their point of view, who remember the way that things

were like and romanticize them constantly. Black Books don't

sell like, right when books written by women are Chiclet Uh

huh, like, all kinds of fucking like ideas about who buys what,

which have been disproven time and time again. Go listen to the

Joe Biel interview, black women over 50 are the main book buying

population. Yeah? Like, I learned a new thing today. Yeah,

yeah. So all of these ideas that people have about will and what

will and won't sell are just based on the fact that that's

what has been done all along. It's that whole we've always

done it. Yeah, right, right, yeah. And see that's, like,

that's also part of the problem with Bayesian inference,

actually, is that it's based on, of course, it's you're setting

your prior probabilities in some way. You're saying, like,

whatever you're doing, this is the big, I mean, this is the

biggest controversy in statistics. And see it manifests

in everywhere, right? People go like, Well, how do you, how do

we start with induction? What should we what's the part? Where

should we start with this? Right? People go like, well,

this is the way it's always been, right, right? And so you

can't look at something like that. This is its mere

materializing in scientific publishing. You can't look at

something like that and say, like, oh, well, that's a, well,

that's an objective criterion, right? Like, there's no power

involved in that decision.

Well, and I think that that's a probably a good trans transition

to talking about centralized power in publishing, oh, yeah,

because that's that seems to be what a lot of people are having

a problem with right now. And when you have so many

gatekeepers and there's nothing you're running up against that

brick wall of like, tradition. Yeah.

Quote tradition for a certain group of people.

You know, what are the alternatives to that? Well, I

think first, first, let's talk about the centralized partners.

Because I think really it was the scientific publishing people

are just, it's wild, so I don't know what it's like with the

sorts of different trades that you folks are working, yeah, but

scientific publishing is a handful of entities that control

most of it. There's vultures, Kluwer Elsevier, Springer, I

think those are the main three. I mean, I interviewed for a job

with them that I didn't guess. Now I'm glad I did it, yeah. Oh,

it just you wait.

Now, I love doing this with people, because even some

scientists don't know this, but they kind of guess. Hi, what do

you think the profit margin? Oh, God, of these three companies is

just pick one. It doesn't matter.

I don't know, 1,000,000% Well, let me give you some benchmarks.

So, you know, like, a good business has like, you know,

like an 8% profit margin people are, oh, that's a good business.

98%

Amazon, your favorite company, yeah, ran a like 1% or 0% profit

margin for like, 15 years, yeah, because they were just trying to

grow prime Yeah, right, right. And now I don't know what it is.

I haven't looked at their financials for a long time, but

else of years, I get some of them mixed up. But these guys,

they land in the range of 34 to 37% Wow, holy shit. Now it gets

even worse than that. So let's walk through like, well, how

these people function, right? First, we already covered that.

They have a captive audience of people who are derived their

status and progression in their careers from the activity these

companies, right?

Well, let's just get down to the really nitty gritty of it. So

like I said, 34 to 37% right? And we'll get into why, that's

how and why that can be so high. It's pretty amazing. But the

first thing is, let's just break down what's actually happening

in scientific publishing, right? So when you are a graduate

student or a postdoc, you are,

I could really get into some hyperbole here, and people might

get pissed, but whatever, essentially, essentially you're,

you're sort of an indentured servant in some ways, yeah,

because you don't have much say over the you don't have much

autonomy over your work. For the most part,

you come in, there's a set of projects that your advisor is

known for. You work with them to go, to pick something in the

good cases, in the most cases, that's not the case. They go,

here's the thing that someone should look up, because it

ladders up to grant money for us, me, us, right? And that

grant money that comes in from the public in America, for the

most part, some of it comes in from private sector as well, but

a lot of it comes from the NIH, the National Institutes of

Health and the National Science Foundation.

Those funds are then used.

And if this was kind of i This blew my mind when I was, when I

submitted this paper years ago. You pay about $1,800 to submit a

paper to these journals, yeah? Jesus Christ. That's like,

that's like, vanity presses, yeah, exactly, yeah. Oh, we're

gonna let you say whatever you want. We're gonna make it really

pretty. You deserve it, yeah? $10,000 Yeah, right, right,

yeah. So, like, so, right? $1,800 right? The only reason

this really exists, and people have independently verified

this, when you submit your papers, these people say, well,

we need, you know, these are, like, cover our costs, whatever,

right? Because a lot of the stuff's put up online, there's

Developer Operations, infrastructure, all that stuff,

internet, you know, maintenance, things like that, that have to

be put in place. But a lot of that stuff is commoditized and

available. It's not like it's constantly being developed. If,

sure, there are 1000s of bullshit jobs that people are

working and I'm using that in a very narrow sense,

good, good so that then your listeners will hopefully that

will resonate with them. That's the presumption that you are

paying for the cost of the process. But that's not actually

true. This is just standard rent seeking behavior. No one gets

paid from the for this stuff directly. And I for the evidence

for that, I point to the massive profit margins here for the

funds and public

and so anyway, profit means you're not paying.

And the other thing too is it's very much like what happened

with student loans, right? Like, it's not that student loans are

bad, it's that people said, Oh, the government's gonna guarantee

them, we can probably just jack up our costs by an equivalent

amount, and no one will give a shit, right? Because

Same thing here, oh, you have a spate of, you know, whole bunch

of funds you're getting from your grants and their millions

of dollars, and you literally don't care, because it's not

your money.

Yeah, for the most part, like these people are not financial

managers. I don't really understand why a lot of

academics become professors anymore, but that's a different

thing, like where it basically, no, it's the same thing. That's

what we're talking about right now. It's like, it's, it's that

whole like idea that you can advance in power to become the

person who is the broker of knowledge, and then it's all an

illusion, because everybody's just kind of working in the same

direction based off of everything that happened before.

It's all like, I mean, I feel like that's what we're doing,

yeah, too. I mean, yeah, not necessarily in an academic

sense, but yeah. I mean specifically the behaviors of

the job, right? So, like, here's people come in with all kinds of

things. They're like, Oh, I'm gonna discover new things. I'm

gonna study a thing. I'm gonna, it's like a, it's like a

Thoroughly Modern Millie of science.

I'm gonna make new contributions to this field. Right? Things

that people have said, when really, you end up becoming a

project manager, you become a RFP applicant.

Why can't I remember what RFP stands for? It's like a call for

open request for proposal. Yeah, oh,

girl, there you go. All right. You become an RFP, proposal

writer, grant writer. You become all kinds of things that have

nothing to do with, you know, truth, knowledge and all that

kind of stuff. If you're in discovery, yeah, right, and so,

but at same time, you know you have you are a captive audience.

In some extent, your career depends on advancing in this

field, and now you have money to do it. If someone says, pay

$1,800 submit this paper, you're not gonna ask questions. Yeah,

that's the way it's always

been.

So, so you do that, right? You submit your paper. They have

very strict formatting guidelines. They take that. This

is what they're charging $1,800

for the entity, whether it's Elsevier, Walters, Kluwer,

whoever takes that and goes, Great. Scientific community

don't even do they do, like, the bare minimum, they go, great.

Who's a good reviewer for this? Who wants it? Raise your hand,

yeah. Based on that, based on the reviewers, get anything out

of it. Oh, we're gonna get to that.

But so what happens is these people, like, in some cases, in

some cases, their editors, who are really engaged, remember,

the editors are not paid. Actually, the editors of these

journals are usually academics themselves, and they're not paid

for it, okay, so, but they're, like, interested in the status

of being the editor for cells or whatever, right? Publishing is

very prestigious.

Yeah. So these people are, like, one they're not getting paid. So

that goes the editor associated or a group of editors, and they

go, Oh, who's if they know immediately what the subject

matter is, they'll go, Great, we know who to send that to. And

they'll do that. If not sometimes they'll go, Hey, do

you think this is a good editor for this thing? Like, they'll

literally email you and be like, Hey, do you think this is a good

who should be a good person to review this editor thing? And

I'm not even joking, yeah, that actually happens, right?

Money.

Give them all the money so they find, you know, so though,

through that process, they'll find reviewers. They'll, it's

usually two to three, sometimes more,

and they'll, they're strict guidelines for, in some cases,

there are strict guidelines what they're looking for. So they'll,

you know, some people have put together heuristics and rubrics

for this stuff. Others haven't, and it was like,

but you look at things like the neurogenesis, thing we were

talking about before, right? And those things are published, but

just, I don't know the backstory on the review, so that's

completely not trans only sometimes they'll, they'll

review the they'll show the comments. There's, we'll talk

about this too, but there are some things like archive and Bio

Archive, where they actually just will circumvent the peer

review process. They'll put it up on archive, and people will

just really comment on it. And I want to know about, okay,

continue.

So, but yeah, so you're going back to reviewers. They don't

get paid. So, right? Isn't it like a requirement that you Is

there some kind of like, you have to review this thing going

on? Like,

what are the well, yeah, there are definitely rules. And it's

super funny, because just think about this, folks, think about

in a situation where this is your job, and someone goes, do

this thing for free, and also there's a deadline. Oh, it's all

the

graduates. Oh, graduate students, the reviewers are

rarely going to be like the actual PIs the principal

investigators, it's going to be their grad students and

postdocs, right? Occasionally them and so you pass so you have

this entire ecosystem of unpaid labor that's really keeping this

going right now. It's interesting, because I was

talking to Heather's about this James Heather's, and he I had a

suspicion about this anyway, but I asked him, and he sort of

confirmed it. It's hard to confirm this suspicion, but the

idea was that, especially when you're a scientist and you want

to be like, precise about what you're saying, yeah. And so I

was like, essentially.

I was like, Well, James, I'm starting to think that

this sector of publishing has very specific like, problems and

baggage with getting paid for what they do anyway. Like they

actually absolutely think that it like tarnishes their

reputation or what they do, wow, like poets.

And he was, like, to a certain extent, you're right, like

people are, you know, you are kind of looked at with derision,

depending on certain things that you that are either above, you

know, above ground or below, in terms of taking money for things

that you are sciencing for, right? And so I think that,

should someone ever kind of make an ecosystem where there is

publishing and people get paid on the bottom up, there might be

substantial psychological baggage for some of these people

to go, wait, I'm this is weird. I thought I have to be an

unbiased reviewer, right? Well, that's like, the like, the

greater thing where, like, if you're doing something that

gives you that you feel is valuable, intellectually or

emotionally. People expect you not to want money for it. Yes,

because you should be getting the emotional reward from it,

and you should only get paid for things that are shitty. Oh, you

read my again. I was trying to pull that out. I didn't That was

fantastic. I mean, we read the same book that is kind of

exactly Graber bullshit jobs. Read it absolutely and read

everything else he's written that he's very good. You could,

I mean, read it just for the stories of the people who sit at

their desks and pretend to work, because that's probably what

you're doing. To read

it for the ones who do it on purpose too. Those are really

funny. The ones who just like, those are a lot of ones who just

like, Yeah, I'm really sad about not doing anything today. And

then there are others who just really lean into it. Little

column A, little column B.

I'm not saying either one is good. I just enjoy the ones who

are like, Oh, I know what this is. The jig is up. I'm gonna

lean hard in this.

Like, I'm gonna go on two hour walks every day, wow. Or I'm

gonna go play golf in Scotland, right? It was, yeah, the other

guy who, like, became an expert in this one, like, obscure

author.

Oh, that was the Spanish guy, right? Yeah. He was like, it

was, like, a damn or something like that, yeah? And he was

like, Yeah, we haven't seen him in six years. Oh, he just went

like, right enough,

six years. Nobody noticed he was gone. Whoa, that's kind of sad,

though. No, it's great.

Yeah,

totally. Because he ended up becoming like, I don't know it

wasn't Bruce, but it was some, like, a scholar of some, like,

it was like, a proof type, yes, someone that you everyone knows

about but hasn't read.

God, yeah. So where was I was talking about submitting? Oh, we

were talking about the guilt and the baggage of accepting money

for doing something that is valuable to you, yeah, and

valuable to society, society. So, like, now we're kind of in

the abbreviated version of, like, the power structures that

control publishing or have you. But so, yeah, so that sort of

baggage issue aside, I definitely think it exists. Like

I've just in, I used to be one of these people. They were, many

of them are still my colleagues, and we all get paid shit. Yeah,

yeah. Absolutely everyone who works in publishing, yeah, who

doesn't make it to those upper level, yes. Like, right, not get

paid. Well, yeah. Like, the only that's why so many people in

like, big New York publishing companies are, like, subsidized

by their parents. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's why it

I was subsidized by my parents when I lived there. I couldn't

have afforded to live there if they hadn't helped me. And

that's why publishing is so white. Everyone's like, what's

going on? Yeah, I'm like, unpainted internships. Like bad,

bad salary. Yeah, not salaries, yeah. When I started out,

there's an unnamed company that I have seen lady somewhere. Yes,

I'm not gonna name them. Okay, they're paying a new publicist.

Uh huh, 1375 an hour. Fuck yeah. Can you tell me what company it

is? Off air? I'll tell you later. Okay, they know who they

are. Jesus Christ. Well, yeah. So these people, like we said,

they demand payment for submitting to the journal. It's

somewhere, depends on the journal, sometimes 1100 1815, or

whatever, right? It's in that it's in that territory, and you

submit it, they find reviewers. The reviewers come the they

sometimes they will all sort of, either someone will kind of

coordinate everyone's comments, or they'll submit them

separately. This is all kind of done via email. There isn't,

from what I've seen, I've been out of it for a while. There

might be systems now that kind of collate comments and put them

together in a project type way. But I don't think those are

widespread. Maybe PLOS ONE, public library or science one,

which is one of the open source publishing projects, which is

really cool. Yeah, they've been around on a 1520,

Years. Maybe they're based in San Francisco, aren't they?

Maybe job postings from them all the time. So yeah, so the one of

the guys that follow on Twitter, Michael Eisen. He's a, he's a

professor at, I think it's Berkeley of evolutionary

biology. He helped find, found PLOS ONE years ago. He's a big,

big proponent of open science, and that's and so they sometimes

will even not take the submission fee. They'll waive it

if you have demonstrated some kind of need or what have you.

So they're super cool. But point being that you have some

mechanism to then say, we all agree this is a thing that

should be published, right? And It either is or isn't, and it's

somewhat subjective, and people will tell you that it's not, but

it is. It is. It can't. There's no way. It can't be every

acquisition, yeah, is subjective, yeah, absolutely,

yeah. So, so then at that point, the entities that be the control

this stuff go great. It's gonna be published. Fantastic. So they

put up the DOI number, which is kind of the thing that says this

is now a published thing is referenced in all the search

index services like PubMed and all that.

And it's kind of like, like the source of truth for this paper.

This is its identity, right? There's other ones to pm ID,

which I believe is PubMed ID, and there are a couple others,

but those are the like predominant ones. Everyone uses

DOI and so.

So that's like, the point of view of the centralized

publisher, right? But if you look at what they do, they take

money to sometimes find you good for the proper reviewers, and

then they go and they provide the infrastructure for all of

this to happen in terms of, like, here's the website and the

paywall. So let's back up. A little website works really

well, too.

It's funny. Some of them were getting okay for 2016

2013

but so, but I haven't touched on the part of this that affected

people like Aaron Swartz, right? So, like, if you're not familiar

with Aaron Swartz, oh, my goodness, we can tell. I mean,

it might be, but please, I don't know. Absolutely So Aaron

Swartz, wonderkind,

co founded Reddit,

oh, and but also did amazing things. Like CO found he wrote

the art he co wrote the RSS protocol, which is the RSS feed

protocol, yeah, we need that. Wow, yeah, it's really good, and

fuck Google for letting it just sit there and get destroyed beer

after they got rid of Google Reader. Very few people use it.

But anyway, it's still very good, and it's an open source,

and everyone should use it. That's how our that's how our

podcast gets distributed to different platforms. Nice. There

you go. Right. Yeah. So rip Aaron Swartz, so what happened

Aaron Swartz is he looked at publishing in about 2000 10,011

and I posted one of his quotes up on Twitter the other day.

Essentially, he I don't remember the exact quote, but he said

something the point of the fact that we use public money for

private entities to publish these things, and we charge the

world's most downtrodden people astronomical sums to access them

as, like, basically a crime against humanity, like, it's

it's unacceptable, yeah, right, yeah. And so he

allegedly went and wrote a bunch of scripts that went after one

of the biggest stores of human knowledge, JSTOR. I forget what

JSTOR stands for,

yeah. But,

and he took all this stuff out, he put it up on the internet. He

used MIT's routing for this, because I think he either was a

student there, so I don't remember the exact facts of

that, but he used MIT's license to do that. So, you know, the

people who are charged with reinforcing structural power

came down with the biggest like shit that they could Yeah him,

right? And eventually got the point where, like, yeah, he's

gonna, he's probably gonna go to jail, and he committed suicide,

or died by suicide, yeah, Jesus,

yeah. And, I mean, he was just an amazing person. I'm not gonna

talk about too much, because I will get sad, yeah, but, but,

yeah. So what he was doing is the next part of this that I

want to talk about, which is the fact that after these people

take 1500 bucks to publish this from public coffers. This money

comes from the NIH from the from the National Science Foundation,

NSF. They then put this up on their websites. And if you have

an institutional license that costs 10s of 1000s of dollars a

year, hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year, if you're going

after multiple collections, sometimes millions, where you

have multiple universities doing it, yeah. Then you first

institutional licensing fees, right? Four things that already

came from public coffers. Secondly, if you're not in one

of the institutions, then you'll be paying anywhere from 35 to

sometimes 100 bucks an article if you want to access these

things. So it's just, it's on the come and the gift like

everywhere, right? So you look at that and there's really, it's

holding back so much of what science.

Scientific publishing could be for the world, really, yeah,

because it's supposed to be valuable for like, yeah, these

are supposed to be things we need. Yeah, absolutely. Like,

put aside all my meandering about truth claims in science

and just if there are actually useful things there, and we all

think there are, because we still fund the stuff and people

dedicate their lives to it.

We what we are doing is taking public money and then saying,

also the poorest people in the world who may not have access to

this, fuck you.

So well, it's all, it's all kind of that

self contained stuff, right? Because it's like, oh, well,

this is just for the other people doing exactly the same

thing. This isn't for other people who might apply it in

different situations. It's like we're just writing papers to

write more papers, yeah, and like, you can have all kinds of

things here, right? Like we're

there was, there was this one publishing controversy in the

90s.

This one is kind of been saying, but basically, two people,

one person, decades ago, there's this hormone in our bodies

called leptin that controls how much fat we store. For the most

part, I'm butchering that, but you get the idea. Look it up.

There's Wikipedia, right?

Yeah. So there was a person who sort of had inferred the

existence of leptin before the 90s. Forget his name. We can

I'll show notes. He

this one too. Yeah.

He had inferred the existence of leptin from working with he was,

he was a clinical he was in clinical medicine. He's also a

research doctor. So he was looking at this, and he was

like, I'm pretty sure there's a hormone that is controlled

somewhere in the hippocampus, or what have you, somewhere in the

brain that pays attention to how much fat is in cells and

modulates that. And it's like, that's like the fat regulator,

the global fat regulator, Governor. And there was another

guy who was a molecular biologist, who was probably

about 10 to 15 years younger than him and came to the same

institution, I believe this is NYU, and he had the skills to

discover this while co working with him, publishing a bunch of

papers, what he ended up doing was write for the one paper

where they discovered leptin. He left that guy off of it. Oh, my

God.

So he left that guy off of it. And it gets so much better. What

he did was

behind every he was now a PI himself, okay, so, and he left

that guy off of it. He, at the same time, filed a patent with

the university with only his name on it, not even the people

who are doing the work, the graduate students and postdocs,

and he sold that patent for $20 million to, I believe,

GlaxoSmithKline. Oh, my God, but the best part, good money,

absolutely, that guy is amazing. The person he fucked over, I'll

look up all their names to give it to you earlier, but like that

person who he totally fucked over is amazing, because decades

later, he was just like, you know, I'm over it.

Yeah, yeah. He was like, it's fine. I, you know, I forgive

him. I talked to me, it's fine, right? And I was like, man, but

yeah, so like, now that again, you look at the just the so many

things that are entangled in this scientific publishing,

yeah. And so I don't think, I think that already, we can stop

with the pretension that it's this truth through the mechanism

that gives people all this objective knowledge. And we

can't, it's sacred, yeah? And we can't, like, change it, right?

Because look at this, the dead bodies

happening one we already covered, right? We are literally

impoverishing the entire global south by not sharing knowledge

that's been derived from the tax money of the public in the

majority of Western countries. Yeah,

this situation with this patent and this person

to who, by all rights, did nothing wrong legally, yeah,

everything he did he could do, like, July, yeah, exactly right.

And, and, you know, we covered some the other ones, like

neurogenesis, ruining three young scientists careers before

even the guy who said they were wrong still came around to at

the end. And again, I'll get you helpless, but that's just wild.

When you look at that and there's so much entanglement, I

think it's enough for us to now be at a point to be like this

isn't as sacred as you think it is, and there's probably a

better way to do it. So what are those better ways that people

are thinking about or starting to do or trying to present?

Well, I'll start with the the normies, and I'll go to the

really weird, the weirdings. I think that's a good Yeah,

exactly. So some of the normal things I already talked about,

plus one, a Public Library of Science, they they saw this

problem years ago, and they said, Well, I think that the

submission fees are out of control. They create these weird

perverse incentives for especially early investigators

who were.

Or maybe on their first granted it, maybe it's only a couple

$100,000 now they have to requisition a bunch of money

just for publishing for six, the first six years of their career,

five, six years, and they came along and said, Great. And also,

we're gonna, we're gonna review, we're gonna make open, we're

gonna open up the review process. We're gonna show people

the how the sauce is made. Yeah, do we're gonna publish

supplementals always. We're gonna pre we're gonna do

supplementals. Yeah, supplementals, ours, right,

right. So supplementals are, like, when you publish your

stuff typically has an abstract which is just a really nice

short summary what's going on. Yeah, it's a paragraph of, just

like, it's still somewhat impenetrable to like, the

average person who maybe isn't in this

field, then, you know, they'll have a summary of the problem.

They're investigating the methods they used to go about

it, the results of those methods, and then a discussion

to sort of make sense, interpret what happened. And a

supplemental will then be things like, here's all the shit that

didn't work, or or here's all the nitty gritty of the

transformations that data transformation we had to do to

make sense of this. And is it like? Does it also include like?

Here are the things we thought would happen, and we're like,

sure it would happen. Yes.

Hope so not, not as much as you'd hope they put some of that

stuff in the discussion. It

ends up being more like it for

the this kicked off. Some of the crises in publishing is that

which we didn't cover at all. But there are some other ones,

like the replication crisis, which is people like, we didn't

cover the crises, or we didn't

even, we didn't even cover the crisis. Remember when I was

like, I'll skip over the truth claims part.

You were saying supplementals, yeah, people like Tim Van der

Zee and and James and other folks just started looking at a

lot of this stuff, and they were like, You know what, mate, that

doesn't

add up. I did. James is Australian, yeah. So they looked

at stuff, and they're like, yeah, the supplemental

information doesn't add up. Let me investigate. Me investigate

more. Let me investigate more. And that really unraveled some

people's careers because they were publishing bullshit, right?

Yeah, but anyway, like, plus, there's a lot of cool stuff like

that, then archive. I don't know the exact timelines your archive

could have been around before or long before. I don't really

know, but the problem with archive is that it's run by one

university, people at Cornell University, and they're just

really good, like, that's basically it. And so, so this

kind of stuff. Oh, yes, right? The Greek letter, yeah. So,

like, Korean was in the sorority. Oh, thank you for

reminding

so. So archive basically came about by the, you know, the good

graces of people at Cornell. And it's a does a couple things, I

think, you know, we'll talk about it. But pre print

publishing is one of the things that they sort of pioneered,

which is, they're like, You know what? Before we send this out,

we're just going to put it up here. And then there have been

some really interesting things that came about as a result of

that, which actually, James Heather's told me about, he was

essentially, there are people who will publish only pre print,

and then they'll just put it up there. And then someone will

come along and go, You know what? That's a pretty good

result. Can I put it in my journal and they just go, those,

stick it in there, right? And the exact term for this, maybe

he'll remember it when he talks to you, yeah, there's a little

new term for that. But essentially, you can put it up

there for comments. You can put it up there for get up there for

getting people mad, essentially, or you can get it to just, sort

of just really open up what's happening, right? Yeah. And

that's been, like a pretty big move for a lot of people, and

the way they did it is,

you'll notice on archive, archive is very, very heavy on

physics, math and engineering, okay? And they found really

niche communities within those three practices where they kind

of said, Hey, we're you guys are of your group of 12 people at

your conference every year. Like computer science is a really

interesting we need to talk about computer science people

advance in their careers in a completely different way than

everyone else. I'm sure they only publish papers at

conferences. Oh, and they're usually published as walk out on

stage

while wearing a black turtleneck.

So it's in that's like the primary way they do these

things. So they went out there and said, like, Hey, you people

who do shit weird, come to archive. And so they're really

like burgeoning communities of statistical physics, all that

kind of stuff that all publish preprint to archive. And it's a

really nice into lab publishes an archive.

I can't look at that.

Hey, he blocked me too.

So yeah, like, and these are all really good things. They're,

they're they're extending the reach of these things. They're

making things cheaper, like all, that's all, it's all good

initiatives. But

a I think, in my opinion, they don't address things like,

specifically, things that not people, people not getting paid.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. When you look at how much money is flowing through

the system, it is, it is ridiculous that I was paid

$23,000 a year as a graduate student. I only I lucked out in

that I went to the University of Illinois, where everything is

cheap, yeah, my my bedroom, my one bedroom apartment. My first

year was $515

a month,

yeah. So I was like, oh, you know, I was getting a paycheck

of like, 1500 bucks after Texas, 1600

Yeah, something. They're like, Oh, that's great. Only 30% of my

money, that's great.

But I look at stuff like that, and you, honestly, if you're I

was looking at other places like, I,

I didn't go to MIT because I couldn't afford it. Yeah? So I

got into there are all their courses, like, free, online. Now

you can go to MIT OpenCourseWare. Yeah? Take but

yeah, they put up their syllabus, all their book

chapters in PDF form, all that stuff. But yeah, so like you

look at that and they don't really address things like that,

right and right, you would have to think of some way, because,

you know, I don't think it is an easy problem to just show up and

say, Let's pay these people. Yeah. I mean, he's gonna, yeah,

yeah. Who's gonna do it? How should it be done? How should it

be incentivized? Like, these are all really critical questions

someone's gonna have to figure out. And I don't think that you

should just

this go ahead, like this, correct? Yeah. The whole, the

whole thing, the whole bend of all the tech people is, yes,

technological solutionism, where they just jump into and say, oh,

we'll figure it out later. We'll make a solution. We'll just do

it right? I bought, Yeah, yesterday, hot blood. Oh yeah,

yeah, my new, my new audio box program that is not audible.com.

Nice. I just, I just read. They published another thing on her

on the New Yorker yesterday. Yesterday, I read a New Yorker

thing all the way I've read something today about the Husky

that she owns that you still let p all over the office. Yes, it

comes from

that's like the CEO of thanks, who used to like do Skype

conference calls while she was sitting on the toilet naked,

what? Fuck yeah, she got, she got kicked off of her board,

yeah, for sexual harassment. Oh yeah. I remember reading, yeah,

okay. Because I was looking for like, Oh, I'm gonna find, like,

young millennial, like women, girl boss, yeah, girl bosses

that we're doing. And then I was like, Oh no.

All these girl bosses are bad. Yeah,

it's good, yeah, but yeah. So like, if we were looking at

things like this, there are some nascent movements that are kind

of trying to think through, like, Okay, how do we get a

thing that out of the box gives us an incentivization system

that gives us a way to track records of things that happen.

Yeah, track edits, version control, basically, right? How

do they give us a version control? How do they give us a

source of truth in the computer science sense of the term,

right? And some of the things that have been that were being

tried in the space. I don't know if they're still active

projects, but we're in this, you know, Blockchain space, so

that's kind of this is

now a blockchain podcast.

Welcome to What's hybrid block scout.

Hybrid chain. Scout,

Blockchain, pub Scout,

oh, my god, pub chain, I had a question, actually, about the

public library science. They had any pushback from like Springer

or any of the more, like, established, oh, sure, they

haven't had pushback. You know? What they've had is those people

all made imprints that are also open source. Oh, okay, yeah,

which is a totally, if I was sitting there, like, of course

they would do that. Yes. It's like, market share that you're

losing, right? Yeah,

and yeah. So that's kind of like, you know, there are

various versions of things where they will just take a journal,

and they'll be like, You know what? This journal is, called

this new thing now, all the editors will leave, wow, and

they'll be like, and it's gonna be open source this time. And

else, awesome. Fuck yeah, fine. We'll still publish it.

I only know that because Heather's told me about it.

For them, we gotta find more of those people

so and it's funny because, well, you, if you found, as I was

talking to Heather's about this, actually, the blockchain stuff

and so real quickly, for people who don't,

but I was telling, do you remember last year we were

talking about, like, New Year's resolutions over and over again?

And, yeah, you're just.

Kind of making shit up. Yes, I was like, Corinne, this is the

year that I figure out with black cheese, yeah, but you kind

of know what it is now. Jah is going to explain. Okay, I'm not.

Okay. So you guys, you're familiar spreadsheets, right?

Yes, yeah, no,

oh, wait, that's what. That's what I do p L's on listening.

Have you used a spreadsheet before

I got my job and I said I knew

Excel I hope,

I hope they're not listening.

I knew there was a box. I put a number in it.

So you can think of these systems as

a so let's say that there are like 10 computers, right? Like

you have one, I have one, some seven of our friends have one,

right? And we are trying to keep track of with a spreadsheet, who

owes who money? Okay, let's just use money. Okay, okay, yeah,

that's what I understand,

P and L here

more on the p side.

Well, so we, we, we all say, Yeah, we're gonna use a

spreadsheet. And so people are like, Well, okay, this is,

there's, like, one centralized source of truth for this. It's

our spreadsheet, right? That's fine. But what if someone goes

in there and changes it or whatever, right? And, and we all

just have to go along with the change. Oh, right. Well, so

blockchain, this, what I'm describing, is something they're

calling a distributed ledger. So there is. It's distributed to

people,

as in its its makeup is distributed to all people who

are subscribed to it. And in order to make changes to the

ledger, you have to submit a amount of work, essentially. So

let's say that you're, let's say with the same 10 people thing,

right? Someone said Emily gave Corinne 10 bucks. Yep, right.

And in order,

oh, yeah, so you then you've given her 10 bucks, and everyone

goes, Okay, great, let's go update like we're moving away

from the shared spreadsheet. All of us have our own and we go,

and you go, I can print 10 bucks. And all of us go, okay,

great. Let's make sure we update our ledgers right now. And

nothing stops you from just going, like, I gave her 10

bucks, I gave her 10 bucks, I gave her the same 10 bucks,

double charging, right?

So we all say, hey, prove it, right. And, and in

cryptocurrency, which is a type of blockchain implementation, we

call, they call this a proof of work, which means that you have

to crack a very difficult to solve math problem, and when you

have the solution to it, we all verify your solution and go, she

did the work to actually give her the money for 10 bucks,

right? So here's the thing you have to do that with. Okay,

sorry, every single Yeah, you have to ever see on time. So now

let's say let's the cool thing about the blockchain is that you

have a distributed source of truth. No one owns it. So if you

then take everything I just described, and you say,

actually, instead, I want to have Emily submit a thing she

found in the science that she's doing to everybody, because

everybody verified that transaction, right? We, we can

scope this down a bit, because there are reviewers. We don't

send it to the entire universe, right, right? But since everyone

let's run with this blockchain thing, right? If we have a set

of 10 scientists who are all involved in this blockchain

project on that governs, maybe one thing that they all do,

let's say it's a computer science journal, and people go,

great, what's my you'll have your identity, right? So one

thing we didn't talk about is these things, the way you verify

transactions is there's something called a public key.

So people go, how do I know Emily is Emily? Oh, she has a

public key, and I verified it. Great. It hasn't changed same

person. Okay, so now you've kind of got a long way with trust.

Yeah, you established who's who you're in real deep together.

And if someone submits something, and you wanted to

look at it and who it came from, it's all there. And you also can

on the same thing, the same little chain of events, you can

look at and go, what did that person do at this point? What

are all the things they've ever done? Right? Yeah, but yeah. So

in this, if you're looking at something like, what could you

know? What could a blockchain project do for this? Well, let's

say that it if you're gonna run the system, all blockchain

projects today cost money to run because they're running on

everyone's computer, actually. So you know how? You know there?

Maybe you don't know about this, but I'll kind of this is a very

similar thing. When I was in graduate school years ago, they

had people who are solving protein crystal structures. So

like, when they were like, Hey, I'm going to shoot X rays at

this thing, and I want to figure out what it looks like all the

proteins in our bodies, right? Yeah, it takes a ridiculous

amount of computing power to figure out what that looks like

after the X rays diffraction. So they made this cool little

program called PDB. I think it was mm.

Right, which is still around where, like, Torrance, you could

actually make your computing power available to this

institution for decoding this, this protein data bank thing,

okay, yeah, right. So, like, that's a pretty cool thing,

right? Now, take something like that and instead say, Who are

all these people that are actually trying to publish

stuff, right? Yeah. And we kind of walk it back. Well, you have

everyone's identity. It costs money to do stuff. It already

costs money if you're going to publish something, right? And if

we're going to keep the cost the same, let's say the people are

cost invariant, right to they're already paying 1500 bucks that

are public funds. Who cares? Yeah, my grant money. I don't

care. There's a very assume, you know, there's a very easy way to

take that money and then say, okay, they someone made the

submission. Let me tell everyone who's on this that a new

submission has been made, a new event of some kind. Someone has

said, I want to put a new transaction on this thing. Yeah.

And since it's a blockchain and everyone's identified, they can

get a notification that goes, this is the thing. This is its

title. This is the area it's in. This all comes out of the bag,

because that's kind of just how the data structure of it works.

You can literally just have it be whatever you want, right? A

lot of accountability. And so if it's a small enough community or

there's some form of social capital, don't sue me.

But at play assigned his identities. You can decide who

gets to review this, right? At the same time, if it's an $1,800

transaction, you can decide if you want to incentivize anybody

to actually like review it right, right? And this is where

I think are the really hairy problems of this is people need

to figure out, how does this change the dynamics of science?

How does it get gamed like, if you're actually

who decides they care enough? Yeah, be paid for something

absolutely. Yeah. And of course, it opens up new dynamics for

someone saying, Can I submit something for 3600 bucks faster,

like all that kind of stuff, right? And the cool thing about

these communities is that no one person can make that decision,

right? They come with governance mechanisms out of the box. So

what that means is basically someone can literally just

submit something to the entire something to the entire network

that says, You know what we should publish when 51% of the

network says we should, or someone else can say, You know

what we shouldn't. We should wait for these four people

around the chain to say yes or no, yeah. It's really up to

them. They can decide how the structure of the Garmin should

work. So there's kind of an organic power structure that

emerges in every different system. Mm, hmm. And I think

it's really up to the people to make sure it doesn't become a

centralized, hierarchical thing. But yeah, so you look at that

and you

this stuff is only as good as the social organizations that it

can reflect, right? So you James actually had a really good idea

where he was, like, you know, the people who do this stuff

already, the way that some of the computer science, you know,

forget the term you use, like secondary journals or like skins

or something like that. You're talking about the ones that

where they just go. You know what? We're gonna leave the one

we're on right now, it's under Elsevier. We're gonna do another

one over here. People and else viewers like, fuck. We don't

have everyone to do that thing anymore. Fine. We'll acknowledge

this, and they'll do whatever they want in their new thing,

right? Yeah. You got to find a community people like that who

are willing to try new things like that. And in my humble

opinion, they're going to have to want to give up a lot of the

status related and, uh, sort of like hierarchical arrangements

they already have. You got to find a a sector of this, of

academic publishing, where people are ready to do that,

yeah, because you're just going to rebuild the same shitty power

structure. If you don't That sounds hard.

We need to stop

before

Yeah, I think this is a good place to stop, because it's

going to leave it open for our imaginations.

Please, please share in the Facebook comments. How you think

this might succeed?

Oh, well, I'll have to actually read if a Facebook comment now.

Oh no, no, do it on Twitter.

Jump in with an AMA on our hybrid.

I would totally do that. Because the number one question people

have about stuff like this is they go, well, so you and you

think that we shouldn't have bosses and managers. How would

you do

anything? Hashtag be

well, hybrid pub chain.

Hashtag, hybrid pub chain. Next week we can have a Twitter

party,

how decentralized publishing will work? Yeah, absolutely. I'm

down.

All right, that said, What would you like to plug? Je head, Oh,

right.

Has this, this thing that he works on very diligently.

I mean, you folks are involved in publishing, you know, much

writing. So we also have a newsletter

that's true. Newsletters, yeah, so I do have two newsletters.

One is an essay series that where I basically take a lot of

things I talked about and apply them to, you

know, do.

Different parts I'll probably write when I'm publishing,

actually, all right, yeah, if you need any bitchy quotes,

you

quotes and plugs. Absolutely. I would love to plug you on that.

It's, it's nascent and growing. It's kind of about a couple 100

subscribers, but basically, I shit on something related to

hierarchical management of information, people, all that

kind of stuff once in a while. Right now, the current subject

is the medicalized depression. And when I'm done with that, I

don't know what I'm gonna do next, maybe publishing. And then

there's another one where I kind of take the same sort of

concepts I've been talking about here around sort of autonomous,

decentralized organization, power structures, all that, and

apply them to whatever thing that comes up. The last one I

decided to do was on eugenics,

how all of your doctors are actually eugenicists, and they

don't know it. Oh, my God.

Where can

they find these you want to tell them? Yeah, absolutely. So

twitter.com/against,

utopia, against utopia. And then same thing, patreon.com, against

utopia. There's I have, like, small budding group of people

who support the newsletter and talk to me about whatever. I'm

probably gonna have to stop doing some of the talking, but

the face to face Google Hangouts.

Oh God, really, I've got a couple of those. Yeah, wow. We

could talk about that at dinner. Oh, we can talk about, yeah,

there's a ton of stuff. Talking about, basically, like, I mean,

you can cut this if you want. But one of the things that you

all

know Jordan Peterson, of course, my life is never

the Jordan Peterson problem walked up to my doorstep,

really, yeah, absolutely. Like in on my Patreon where, you

know, there's a few folks who have talked to me and have said,

you know, I'm like, a young young man, and, you know, some

given western country or what have you, just obfuscating

details here, but point being that, like, I don't really know

what to do about masculinity. Like, how do I be a man when it

seems like I'm going to be destroyed by the SJW if I do

anything? And if I and I, to some extent, I, you know, I kind

of, I'm like, Yeah, someone needs to do something about

this. Why is it me?

It's like, maybe you should, maybe

you should talk to some people. Yeah? Well, yeah, that's kind of

what I've done is I was just like, it's like, Hey, look. So

first of all, everything that the SJWs are complaining about

are they're almost entirely right. So let's start there and

then, and then, like, I can understand where you are

bewildered by some of this, and we'll talk about that too. But

it's just kind of like, yeah. So I have some people who support

me on patreon ask me random things about masculinity and

what I think it's like in western civilization, for

whatever reason. But we need men like you to slowly coax the

terror the men who are following the terrible men from those

people are definitely serving a niche, and we have to find out

what that is and stop it. Yes, there's people are like, I have

a crisis of meaning and the skin that I inhabit. And Jordan

Peterson goes, you shouldn't feel that way. You should clean

up your bedroom and everything's okay. Yeah, exactly. So don't

listen

to them.

Trans people are your friends, and bees be friends with them.

Yeah, well, yeah. So I do have a patreon on Twitter, you know, at

me with whatever you want. It's fine,

Adam, with your best shot,

though, that's

where you can find me. I write a couple times a month, usually at

least one, yeah, yeah, all right. And you can find us on

Twitter at hybrid pub Scout, also on Facebook at hybrid pub

Scout, where I mostly take screenshots of dumb things I

find on Amazon,

please, yeah, yeah. Subscribe to our newsletter, and then go to

apple and please rate and review us, because then more people see

us, and also because we love hearing from you. Je head was

one of our first thank you. Jeff, star rating. Very nice

because I listened to Jade. He's a lovely voice.

He's great at what he does. Yeah, there's a reason I married

him,

and it's because of his reading

that's right, you heard it firstly,

clean your bedroom and read books.

I think

that's a good sign. We should change her

you.