[nicf]

I worked as a research mathematician for a while, and I've published peer-reviewed math papers. Reading this tweet put me in the strange position of feeling like defending the way peer review works in my (former) field, which I'm not used to doing. Among other problems it goes too slowly, it pays only the participants who provide the least value, and it was designed for a world that hasn't existed for a long time.

But this tweet paints a somewhat misleading picture of the role peer review plays in practice in modern math research. Reading this tweet could leave you with the impression that when someone proves a new result, no one pays any attention until it's gone through peer review and published in a journal. This just isn't true. ArXiv preprints are much more widely read than the journals' version of articles, and they go up essentially as soon as they're written. Certainly no one's waiting the year-plus it would take to get the article published in a journal! And even before that, mathematicians communicate their results to each other through slightly less formal channels, like blogs, conference talks, and regular human word of mouth.

In short, despite the sclerotic and parasitic nature of the journal system, the way ideas get disseminated in the field in practice is actually a lot closer to the ideal prewar picture he's describing in the tweet. I'm led to understand that this was less true before the Internet, but even by the time I started my PhD in 2009 things had been working the way I just described for quite a while.