Thank you @DeSciIndia for referring me to a SciCon 2025 Panel. This piece is inspired by the video.
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The overvaluation of prestige and outdated metrics isn’t just “culture.” It’s a systemic barrier throttling knowledge flow from academia to society contributing to R&D stagnation and the currently actively collapsing global economy. I don't understand the metric-driven incentive structure that values citations and h-index instead of utility. Publishing in certain prestigious journals is like buying certain luxury bags 👜 for $10K+ when you can buy it 90% off in certain countries without the logo.
I don’t understand why scientists pay so much to attend conferences in-person when we can host an e-conference in real-time on certain digital platforms. Borderless, permissionless streaming exists. Streamr exists. If you’re paying thousands for “networking,” what you’re really paying for is proximity to status and possibly a photo op that could have been a screenshot. 📷
People should publish wherever they want depending on:
who they want reading it,
who’s funding it,
and what kind of research impact they’re optimizing for.
Open-access vs closed-access should be a choice aligned with the funding agreement—not a morality badge, not a gatekeeping tool, not a “paywall = serious” cosplay. In a complex, multi-dimensional global society, I don't understand why certain centralized funding agencies mandate or coerce the researchers' distribution strategy through certain mandated incentive structures when they are not even the ones doing the work.
All are welcome to peer review Bitcoin University's publications regardless of university affiliation (or not), country of origin, socioeconomic status, or language of choice. I care whether you can read carefully, think clearly, and provide constructive feedback. DMs, RT, comments all qualify as peer review feedback. Peer reviewers' privacy should be a choice. I recognize the wide variation of personalities, so blocking is also a choice.
Failed experiments. Negative data. “Which hills not to climb.”
The gold mine is in the failures when people learn through failures.
And yet it stays unpublished. The core issue isn’t that science fails—it’s that our systems fail to capture and reward the information content of failure.
Journals—especially the prestigious ones—cherry-pick “interesting” results, not failed experiments. When tenure and grant evaluations prioritize prestige over value contribution, it becomes unprofitable for career scientists to spend time reporting failures.
The consequence is professors shooting for a “big paper” or a fancy p<0.0001. Ambition isn’t bad, but the lesson is: publish in smaller bites. Ship useful units early even if it is a failed experiment. Let the world iterate with you in real-time.
I’m sitting on three years of algal biofuels wet lab notes that could fundamentally transform and accelerate algal strain development—held hostage by the slow incentives of elite academia + COVID disruption + supervisor ambition. Lesson learned: I’m micro-publishing going forward.
The real business question in redesigning the incentive structure is: how do we reward failures that meaningfully update the shared map of reality without creating perverse incentives for spammy, low-effort “failure farming”? After all, failure only matters when it reduces uncertainty for others.
This is where values and incentives collide: when trust in judgment is replaced by rigid metrics, measurement stops reflecting reality and starts shaping behavior.
But that raises a deeper question: do we even need rigid incentive structures if people participating in the system are educated with the correct values?
Values education is societal engineering. The world we live in is the output of someone’s value system scaled to policy. Given the current state of the world, clearly some schools of thought suck—imperialism and patriarchy included.
When money and artificial metrics are merely lagging indicators of a person’s value contribution, then in a natural, complex environment, incentives must be determined systemically and adaptively—not enforced dogmatically.
The problem is, when the system keeps changing the rules, people can’t optimize for truth—only for whatever the rules currently reward. You end up rewarding gaming instead of learning.
Nature is a lagging indicator of the physical environment (including infrastructure and policy). Data is a lagging indicator of nature. Metrics trail reality, not the other way around.
So if we mistake metrics for truth, we optimize dashboards while the system quietly degrades underneath.
People “perish” in the academic pipeline. That’s not an accident. It’s a design flaw. When career interruptions due to family planning are not even included in tenure considerations, no wonder there aren't many female professors.
The Matilda Effect is real: women’s contributions are more likely to be discounted, delayed, or credited elsewhere. Male fragility in a patriarchal status system creates so much deadweight it’s honestly embarrassing for a species that claims it wants progress. Let’s be honest: some careers are materially propped up by invisible support labor. If the researcher's productivity depends on a full-time maid and babysitter (usually in the form of "wife" or "girlfriend"), that’s not pure merit—it’s subsidized output. Imagine failing to compete in a system designed for men.
Moreover, it’s not simply “talent drain” that we’re looking at. A lot of developed countries are staring at the same thing: demographic crisis + collapsing birth rates.
Reproductive Decision-Making Under Adverse Socioecological Conditions
Elephants don’t breed in hostile environments. Humans aren’t that different.
So why would women volunteer to birth children into a world with rising pediatric cancers, mental health crises, and accelerating ecological destruction—outcomes that have been normalized and rewarded within exploitative patriarchal structures?
Patriarchy fundamentally conflicts with the natural world because it optimizes for status, extraction, and control—not long-term sustainability. And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: as a top-of-food-chain species on a finite planet, not every man “gets” a wife. Entitlement isn’t a sustainable reproductive strategy.
Moreover, socioeconomic inequality exacerabates the global environmental crisis. However, considering the globally available tax structures and men's territorial nature, technically we have an inheritance + hoarding problem. If the billionaires actually wanted to reduce global poverty in one generation, they’d open-source their sperm and wealth, like Pavel Durov—progressive inheritance caps, real redistribution, universal basic services, and scholarship/endowment structures that outlive their territorial nature. If men can't be competitive on Earth, then they should explore whether they are competitive on Mars. There is a lot of unclaimed and untaxable land on Mars. Plus they already screwed up a planet through the establishment and propagation of patriarchy. It's kind of their responsibility to find a new planet that's more habitable.
People love to say “just reproduce it” like everyone has the same equipment and budget.
Good luck reproducing results dependent on the latest HiSeq machine in a low-income country. Funding realities are not evenly distributed, and pretending otherwise is how you get performative “reproducibility discourse” that solves nothing.
Here is my experience trying to set up a research program in a certain low-income country, which is probably not unique to my circumstance. When government agencies in low-income countries are undereducated and unaware of the risks and benefits of scientific equipment, how can you import the latest models? When big scientific supply companies gatekeep operating software behind copyright licenses, how can underfunded independent labs reproduce anything? When there is no local supply chain for research consumables because instability keeps breaking logistics (and yes, a lot of this is geopolitical), where is the equipment supposed to come from — and how is it supposed to stay running? Without the local shipping routes and roads, where is the supply? How can a freezer stay running when power goes into a hiccup spree every time there is a storm?
Fancy illustration depicting the cause of the global socioeconomic inequality
We are currently looking at the rise of the Global South. The lesson from history should be: if you don’t want it done to you, then don’t do it to others.
I don’t understand why professors work so hard to write grants when the central banks have a magic money computer.
Central banks print. Funding agencies piggyback. Then they cherry-pick research directions like they’re omniscient. What do they know about what people living in chronic poverty need to participate in citizen science? How can remote communities that don't even have bank accounts pay publication fees?
Without access to international banking to pay journals in G7 currencies, how can people living in the middle of nowhere publish? The funding source needs to be decentralized. Tokenization isn’t “replacing science.” It’s adding another rail, the same way preprints complemented journals instead of killing them. People should use whatever currency that they recognise to fund and publish their work.
And I don’t recognise “prestige publications” from G7 countries that piggyback off Indigenous knowledge in low-income countries without equitable return. Here's the quiet part: when governments mandate public education curricula in ways that erase Indigenous language, worldview, and transmission pathways, that’s not “standardization.” That’s cultural cleansing by government mandate. Once the knowledge pipeline is broken, the same systems can repackage what survives as “novel discovery” later, post hoc—now conveniently detached from the people who carried it.
If producing cures is the mission, we need structures aligned with that objective.
Reward cross-discipline collaboration. Reward deployment. Reward people who move discoveries into real-world outcomes. And let’s be honest: nobody takes cancer research as seriously as someone with personal loss.
Disclaimer: The specific platforms may change to adapt to the global market preference.
Ideas, results, lessons, failures, negative data, “don’t climb this hill” notes
Optimize for speed + clarity + conversation
Where: X
Convert micro-posts into a coherent long writeup
Living doc, versioned
Borderless, permissionless peer reviews through DMs and article or tweet comments
Where: Paragraph
I might add more stages depending on the market demand. This is scientific publishing in a global free market.
Hold knowledge hostage for a “big paper”
Treat prestige as the definition of quality. It is a waste of the taxpayers' money to pay $10K+ to publish my knowledge under a fancy logo or journal title.
This is a free and open-source logo to publish under. Hide behind paywalls to signal seriousness
Filter reviewers by institution, country of origin, or language (there really is no excuse for language barriers with AI)
Participate in labor systems that treat trainees as disposable inputs
If you want science to move faster and reach more people:
Review my work (borderless + permissionless)
Publish your negative results and dead-end hills (wherever you want and however you want)
Build your own curation + trust metrics that works for your research discipline
Support decentralized funding rails that expand who gets to participate
Science should be a public good, not a status competition.