[bouchard]

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons.

Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response.

Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

[Conscat]

It would only be effective if the significance of this work is clear. They certainly felt this message needed to reach people, and that it did work makes it self evident they were probably right.

[Retric]

Journalists believing what you tell them says nothing about if the underlying work is actually significant.

The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

There are other quotes that do think it’s significant. Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?

> John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.

> “We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.

Maybe you prefer scientists who put their money where their mouth is (even if that’s a conflict of interest)

> When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy… (a synthetic biologist at Stanford University) … last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers. “I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said.

[Retric]

> Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?

I am not qualified to make a judgement here, the point is following the process is better than jumping the gun on principle.

It literally doesn’t matter if it’s eventually considered groundbreaking research or not, jumping the gun is a bad idea.

[thaumasiotes]

> I am not qualified to make a judgement here, the point is following the process is better than jumping the gun on principle.

Why? The process is quite obviously net negative; we'd get better results with no process at all.

[Retric]

> we'd get better results with no process at all.

I’m going to give some advice that you probably won’t understand for years, but when you don’t find value in a process you’re missing something about what it’s doing.

A common shortcut is to look past who is making money to who is paying for that process and why they would want to pay for it.

[derektank]

>The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you

Who do you believe should be the gatekeeper here? Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?

[Retric]

> Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?

Because the scientists involved and reporters manifestly do a bad job about picking what is or isn’t groundbreaking and more importantly have various incentives to hype things up.

CERN scientists with the whole FTL neutrino particle were actively skeptical of the results and still held a press conference on the topic. As to reporters, you’re welcome to go through the published stories about the topic and notice how rarely getting the distance wrong was brought up even when the scientists involved where skeptical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...

The general public is utterly incompetent at judging science. Homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance.

[derektank]

You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?

Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.

[Retric]

Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.

In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.

[NuclearPM]

Why would it be an overreaction?

[iJohnDoe]

> Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

No knowledge on this particular situation. My guess is that they wanted to protect their work by getting it out there. This prevents someone from stealing it during the peer review process.

[stale2002]

Journalists are meant to report on the news. This sounds like an interesting piece of science/news to me.

[im3w1l]

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

[Lerc]

Nobody knows how another person will see something with their eyes.

What appears to be obvious and revolutionary to one person may not be so to all.

Review is precisely to protect against the importance and accuracy of a work being decided by the person who is most invested in it being so.

[wyldberry]

Whenever i sit down to read research, I remind myself of Lockheed Martin reading the USSR published research[0] on how electromagnetic waves scatter off of surfaces, and using that to fuel the initial stealth technology. The leading theory being that the USSR didn't recognize how brilliant and revolutionary ability these calculations were.

Just because I can't see the immediate brilliance, doesn't mean it is not brilliant in it's own right.

[0] - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-soviet-union-acci...

[geoduck14]

There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls

[Lerc]

I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.

Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.

[stale2002]

Seeing as we are talking about it now, it seems like they were right that it is interesting to the public.

I am not sure why you think social media attention needs to be gate kept.

[IAmBroom]

"everyone" is overly constrained.

"The intended audience" is what is needed, and absolutely does require a middleman to publish it.

No blessing required.

[im3w1l]

Distribution is trivially easy these days. All publishing does is say "yup, this is some legit science alright". It's a stamp of approval. Blessed by the publisher. To get this blessing you have to fulfil a set of requirements ranging from promoting good science to "thats just how its done, thats how we always done it" to the whims of a particular reviewer. You play the game you get the prize. But if you don't need the prize then you don't need to play.