Stop the presses -- the psychology hucksters want to be paid by the page! At least they're mask-off pulpers now.
Your error, here, is accepting on faith that every current professor of anything is an "academic." Most are, quite a few aren't. In what I may call the fictive disciplines - or perhaps, now, the pulp disciplines - there is a very obvious supply/demand-related issue at play.
In disciplines where nothing more is required to produce "academic things" than fingers and a chair, field members are not limited in their output by physical factors. One researcher in chemistry can only prepare so many solutions, and grants have to be sought and papers published on the basis of material evidence. One p-hacker in sociology, on the other hand, is only limited by his (or her) words per minute - and maybe not even that now thanks to ChatGPT - and grants are sought & papers published strictly by dint of the relative appeal and zazzle of his conclusions and proposals over and above the rest of the field.
The latter thing, as a concept, is not outside the remit of the university: it is in fact a thing called an art and/or letter, as distinct, specifically, from science. Such a distinction was drawn because arts and sciences are governed by very different rules. What we now have, in our sort of hybrid fields, which sometimes judge by evidence and sometimes by beauty or morality, but purport to rely on neither fully, is what would be known to the ancienter academics, of which you speak, as a "chimaera," a miscomposed and hopeless notion, crudely and gappily stitched together from parts of several incompatible bodies.
I enjoyed this piece but I do think if you're gonna talk about bad publications the vaccine one isn't a particularly representative example, as it's one bad paper that was retracted. Whatever one thinks of its effects (I'm sceptical it has had much of an effect), it's not the typical bad publication. The typical bad publication is something with a questionable methodology, faulty logic and/or bad evidence that gets through because it supports a hypothesis the reviewers and editors want to support.
As you note, reviewers are unpaid. Some people use the review process to pressure people towards their views (or even say things like 'you should have cited X' when X is their own work). Reviewers demand impossible standards of proof for views they disagree with, and demand nothing for those they agree with. Then they use the overwhelming number of publications on one side of the debate to declare the other side illegitimate.
Paying reviewers wouldn't completely solve this, but it does provide another incentive besides enforcing ideological uniformity.
That example was used not to illustrate the problems with the journal publishing world per se, but simply to demonstrate that what happens in journals can affect society. We wanted to make sure throughout the piece to communicate that everyone, not just academics, has a stake in what happens in journals. That single retracted paper has been wildly influential in fueling the anti-vax movement.
It's more of a worst-case scenario. It's a bad paper in a prestigious journal, that had ripple effects for decades, and has actually killed people. But it's a result of an overarching culture. You're eventually going to get the one that sticks and spreads, kindof like if you eat exclusively food from gas stations. You're eventually going to be in a situation where the ultimate outcome is lots of sticking and spreading in a way that is unhealthy for everyone.
Stop the presses -- the psychology hucksters want to be paid by the page! At least they're mask-off pulpers now.
Your error, here, is accepting on faith that every current professor of anything is an "academic." Most are, quite a few aren't. In what I may call the fictive disciplines - or perhaps, now, the pulp disciplines - there is a very obvious supply/demand-related issue at play.
In disciplines where nothing more is required to produce "academic things" than fingers and a chair, field members are not limited in their output by physical factors. One researcher in chemistry can only prepare so many solutions, and grants have to be sought and papers published on the basis of material evidence. One p-hacker in sociology, on the other hand, is only limited by his (or her) words per minute - and maybe not even that now thanks to ChatGPT - and grants are sought & papers published strictly by dint of the relative appeal and zazzle of his conclusions and proposals over and above the rest of the field.
The latter thing, as a concept, is not outside the remit of the university: it is in fact a thing called an art and/or letter, as distinct, specifically, from science. Such a distinction was drawn because arts and sciences are governed by very different rules. What we now have, in our sort of hybrid fields, which sometimes judge by evidence and sometimes by beauty or morality, but purport to rely on neither fully, is what would be known to the ancienter academics, of which you speak, as a "chimaera," a miscomposed and hopeless notion, crudely and gappily stitched together from parts of several incompatible bodies.
I enjoyed this piece but I do think if you're gonna talk about bad publications the vaccine one isn't a particularly representative example, as it's one bad paper that was retracted. Whatever one thinks of its effects (I'm sceptical it has had much of an effect), it's not the typical bad publication. The typical bad publication is something with a questionable methodology, faulty logic and/or bad evidence that gets through because it supports a hypothesis the reviewers and editors want to support.
As you note, reviewers are unpaid. Some people use the review process to pressure people towards their views (or even say things like 'you should have cited X' when X is their own work). Reviewers demand impossible standards of proof for views they disagree with, and demand nothing for those they agree with. Then they use the overwhelming number of publications on one side of the debate to declare the other side illegitimate.
Paying reviewers wouldn't completely solve this, but it does provide another incentive besides enforcing ideological uniformity.
That example was used not to illustrate the problems with the journal publishing world per se, but simply to demonstrate that what happens in journals can affect society. We wanted to make sure throughout the piece to communicate that everyone, not just academics, has a stake in what happens in journals. That single retracted paper has been wildly influential in fueling the anti-vax movement.
It's more of a worst-case scenario. It's a bad paper in a prestigious journal, that had ripple effects for decades, and has actually killed people. But it's a result of an overarching culture. You're eventually going to get the one that sticks and spreads, kindof like if you eat exclusively food from gas stations. You're eventually going to be in a situation where the ultimate outcome is lots of sticking and spreading in a way that is unhealthy for everyone.