📺 The Americans are to the 2010s what The Wire was to the 2000s: a masterfully crafted epic overshadowed during its original run by more critically acclaimed and more popular shows (Game of Thrones and The Sopranos, respectively). But I’ll take D.C. over Westeros any time.

Did the US military shoot down a literal UFO over Alaska a few days ago or was I dreaming? The headline looks real enough.

Funny that it happened a week after we started our X-Files rewatch. I’m primed for news like this.

🎮 Getting into Pentiment now, and I don’t know what I like more: the use of typography in the dialogues, the dialogues themselves, or the fact that I can role-play a late medieval craftsman who studied theology in Flanders and specialized in Latin and the occult.

As of this year, eLife no longer has “accept/reject” decisions after peer review: ⊕ Which I learned via Andrew Gelman.

All papers that have been peer-reviewed will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by:

• An eLife assessment
• Public reviews

Authors will then receive a paper with a full DOI that can be used on funding applications. They will be able to include a response to the assessment and reviews, and decide what to do next:

• Revise and resubmit
• Declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record

This is as it should be in the age of unlimited digital space.

The quality of public peer review on eLife seems above average: I have once, as the sole peer review of this paper from a double-digit impact factor journal, ⊕ Impact factor of eLife, per Wikipedia, is 8.7 received a single sentence which amounted to “sample size too small”, but with more spelling errors and the same lack of punctuation. If your goal when reading a paper is both critical appraisal and learning, you could do worse than reading this exchange.

But! Eleven reviewed preprints total in the last 5 months seems… low? Am I missing other public reviews? I would, for example, very much like to learn what the reviewers said about this.

More generally, I am worried that this will make eLife become the default publication of last resort — trouble for the Infection and Immunity and Leukemia and Lymphomas of the world, but not exactly the killing blow to Science or Nature or most of its million offshoots.

The current, bizarre, inefficient, unsustainable — Byzantine, if you will, thought that is too disrespectful of Byzantium — keeps itself alive through force of reputation. Critical thinking is hard, so unless I am in the opposing team and my goal is to tear down your data I will save many a mental cycle by “trusting the process” and taking the conclusion, abstract, that one piece of information I need to cite in my own work… at face value. And evidence to the contrary be damned, say published in NEJM to a clinician and their ears will perk up.

So we are in a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts. Take a group of one hundred researchers: the average benefit to all of them, and to science in general, would be greater if all published in eLife. But, if 90 of the 100 submit to CNS journals or NEJM first then go down the impact factor list and only 10 shmucks go straight to eLife, there will be only a handful of “winners”, the state of science remains what it is, and everyone ends up wasting so… much… time.

It doesn’t have to be this way – and Covid did expedite some reputational decay – so this is a good a time as any to place a chisel in the crack. What’s needed now is some forceful movement of the hammer and, well, I guess people who publish ⊕ People who review are equally important, but maybe just maybe we will at one point be able to leave that to an algorithm. It would certainly do a better job than most! are the hammer in this strained analogy.

Should I start with myself? I do have a handful of side projects which are neither industry nor strictly academic — myself having no academic affiliation. Stay tuned.

A Skynet update:

• As of yesterday, GPT-3 (or is it 4?) is part of Bing, for which there is now a waitlist.
• Google is scrambling to keep up, with a press conference scheduled for today and a release “in the coming weeks”.
• Meta is feeling left out.

Popcorn, please.

🕹️ Unavowed was an unexpected surprise: beautiful 16-bit graphics, engaging, mature story, and just the right amount of 4th wall breaking. If only the puzzles were a bit tougher.

🍿 The Pale Blue Eye was big on feels, short on plot. For a murder mystery, that is a death sentence. I do want to see more of Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe but please, Netflix, let’s not turn this into another franchise.

One of the reasons why 24-hour time is better than the am/pm shenanigans the English-speaking world insists on is that it would avoid this type of embarrassment: a haiku competition submission form closing at noon when it was clearly meant to close at midnight.