Issue #13
Real peer review has never been tried | The Conscious Universe | Indian Big Business | + 4 Bonus Articles | Free Resources - Napkin.ai
The Jetty At Feste Near Moss (1898) by Hans Gude
Source: Artvee
Est. Reading Time: 8 mins
Science 🧠
Real peer review has never been tried
By Works in Progress
Annotations
Before the mainstream adoption of peer review, journals were known for their ability to swiftly publish research with little to no editing. Peer review became popular only in the late twentieth century as journals prioritized their reputation and wanted to avoid accusations of favouritism and poor curation.
In the past, a majority of journals were run by academic societies, now, a handful of big publishers like Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and RELX (previously known as Reed-Elsevier) – publish the majority of academic papers across disciplines.
What ails the current system?
Editors of journals exercise a lot of power in what gets published and can reject submissions even before sending them out for peer review.
Scientists who put their blood and sweat into pushing the frontiers of science remain unpaid by journals. Instead, publications are seen as a part of the research outcome that universities and research funders evaluate when allocating funds.
Reviewers who are an integral part of the peer review process and take time off their busy schedules to evaluate academic papers are also not paid for their work.
Journals are dependent on subsidies and subscriptions from institutional libraries, which pay large and growing sums to access the papers. The academic papers remain inaccessible for those not part of such institutions.
Today, research submitted to Nature or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), takes nine months to publish, on average. It is even worse among top economics journals, where the process takes an eye-popping 34 months. Most journals require exclusivity – researchers can only submit one paper to one journal at a time which further complicates the problem and stretches publication timelines.
How do we fix the system?
In journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and PeerJ, reviewers get small cash rewards when they submit a review within time.
Establish a centralized platform wherein scientists can submit a paper, select journals where they want to get it published, and be matched with reviewers who have the necessary expertise to review the papers.
Reviewers should not be expected to review the entire paper on their own but provide comments only on certain sections such as statistics, literature review, etc.
Use of tools like Statcheck to detect statistical errors and AI to detect image duplication and manipulation in published research.
The Conscious Universe
By Noema
Annotations
“Panpsychism” is a term originating from the Greek words “pan” meaning “all” and “psyche” meaning “soul” or “mind”. It proposes the concept that consciousness is not exclusive to highly complex beings; instead, it is a fundamental aspect of reality that extends throughout the entire universe.
Panpsychism doesn’t state that everything is conscious. It doesn’t mean the chair is conscious, instead, it means the tiny particles the chair is made up of have some kind of rudimentary experience.
Throughout the ages, some of the greatest minds in history were believers of panpsychism- Plato, Aristotle, the father of American psychology William James, and British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. However, over the course of the twentieth century, panpsychism was relegated to the fringes as it seemed incompatible with mainstream Western science and philosophy.
But in the last decade or so, there have been numerous scientific breakthroughs. We have now gained considerable knowledge about the inventive and playful nature of cephalopods, the intelligent interaction among fungi, and the interspecies sharing economy in forests. Recent studies on slime mould, a unicellular eukaryotic organism that lacks a brain or nervous system and resembles a yellow puddle, have revealed its ability to make decisions, perceive its environment, and select the most nutritious food from a variety of options.
Developed by the Italian neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is concerned with developing a method to measure the amount of integrated information (which, supposedly represents consciousness) in a physical system. In other words, it measures if something is conscious and, if so, how conscious.
Consciousness is generally associated with qualities like self-awareness, emotion, pleasure and pain, but in this case, it refers to a basic level of experience. The paramecium doesn’t have psychology but it feels like something to be the paramecium — and once the cell membrane dissolves and it disintegrates and dies, it doesn’t feel like anything anymore.
The most significant challenge for panpsychism is the combination problem. This problem questions how numerous small conscious units, such as fundamental particles, can merge to form a larger conscious entity, like the human mind.
Finance 💶
Indian Big Business
By Phenomenal World
Annotations
Over the last few decades, many of the family-controlled corporate groups that once dominated Indian capitalism have ceased to exist. There are two main reasons for this.
First, Indian corporations such as those led by Vijay Mallya (Kingfisher Airlines), Subhash Chandra (Zee TV), Anil Ambani, or families like the Dhoots (Videocon), Nambiars (BPL), etc., became insolvent due to a combination of factors:
Strategic miscalculation - Vijay Mallya launched Kingfisher Airlines without any expertise in the airline industry.
Formidable competition from global players - consumer electronic giants Videocon and BPL were decimated due to the competition from LG and Samsung.
Fraud - the siphoning of loans coupled with excessive levels of debt from PSUs (state-owned banks).
Second, Indian family businesses have been plagued by messy divisions when the patriarch decides to step down. One of the prominent family tussles in recent memory has been that of the Ambani brothers for the control of Reliance Industries. One of the key reasons that complicated the division was the fact that Reliance was a highly vertically integrated corporation which made any fair division impossible. The Hindujas, Chhabrias, and Wadias are other more recent examples of families which have experienced power struggles. But not all divisions have been messy. The Singhanias, Goenkas, Thapars, and Jindals have all witnessed asset divisions (between sons) without much resistance.
Among Asian countries, India has been an exceptional case where family businesses have ventured into capital-intensive sectors such as steel, power, and telecom. But in many cases, such businesses did not have enough skin in the game. Every project is supposed to be financed by equity (promoter’s funds) and debt (bank loans) but more often than not the equity component was a mirage. The tycoons devised a clever trick to dupe the banks by claiming the equity component was from their own pockets when it was actually financed by another bank for an entirely different project.
From 2007 to 2012, Indian businesses binged on debt. In 2012, Credit Suisse came out with a shocking revelation in its report titled House of Debt, in which it stated that Indian banks had increased their loan books by 20% since 2007, largely to a handful of corporate entities. The report mentioned ten groups (Adani, Essar, GMR, GVK, JSW, JPA, Lanco, Reliance ADAG, Vedanta, and Videocon) which saw their total debt level increase by an alarming five times in just five years, to equal 13% of all bank loans and 98% of the net worth of the Indian banking system.
The report turned out to be prophetic as within a few years of the launch of the report, around seven of the ten groups became the subject of insolvency proceedings initiated by banks. Over the last five years, commercial banks have written off more than ₹10 trillion (~$120 billion) by way of bad loans.
One of the major innovations borne out of this period was the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) of 2016. Under the IBC, companies bid for other companies that have declared bankruptcy under the Code. Intentionally or unintentionally the IBC has served as a powerful way of consolidation since the strongest bids come from rivals within the industry with the deepest pockets. Recently, Videocon’s assets were acquired by Vedanta for a pittance. Anil Agarwal (Chairman of Vedanta) is said to have offered only 4.1% of the total outstanding claim of ₹880 billion, wiping out the remaining 96% of banks’ claims.
Bonus 🎁
How free-market economics reshaped legal systems the world over [Paywall]
Read to know more about the legal origins theory and how contrary to popular beliefs a country’s legal system (civil vs common law) doesn’t have a major impact on its economy.
How to Spot Corporate Bullshit
From Big Tobacco to Big Oil, corporations have been using similar talking points across time to stymie social progress and protect their profits. Read about the laundry list of tactics and groundless claims employed by them.
The Online Maze of Job Applications
For many of us, applying for jobs has been the bane of our existence - endless fields, unsaved progress, uploading documents, and the list goes on. What if you did this 250 times? That’s exactly what the folks at Careerfair did. Read about the interesting stats they’ve uncovered.
What’s in a domain name?
A short and interesting read about the origins of various domain names such as .ai and .vc.
Free Resources 💡
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For more free resources (180+ websites and tools), please check out Searching (it’s a Notion database that I’ve created).