A truly radical take on scholarly publication and peer review

I just read this on Mastodon, and found it striking. I’m republishing it here, with permission from François Rincon, exactly as originally posted. The more scientific papers I write, the more I realize that the only truly substantial reason left for writing science these days is to improve your own self and to hone your own understanding of a problem. There is essentially no attentive readership anymore for science papers anyways (except perhaps for reviews, which a lot of young people in particular read to train). Peer review has not provided a single benefit to my work over twenty years, and the other reasons for publishing in a journal are for the most part superficial systemic incentives. Corollary is that I am increasingly thinking of just dumping things on arxiv when I feel so in case someone someday finds it useful (i increasingly doubt academia will still use papers to communicate in the future though, and even survive the slopocalypse), and using the freed time to do what i…