A central part of the system is that the knowledge is generated as a side-effect of the striving for status. The admiration or envy of your peers is taken as a proxy for success in understanding the world, spreading the light of reason, advancing the progress of humanity, etc.

Wait. I'm the only one in it for the money?

Because I'm at a primarily teaching institution, I don't actually stay abreast of any field at all, and only read math papers when I've exhausted all other possibilities of doing the thing I'm trying to do

The thing you are trying to do is fall asleep. Am I right?

There's been lots of speculation regarding why theoretical physicists managed to bypass this system so effectively with the arxiv, seemingly without it disrupting the status competition game within the field at all.

The most convincing explanation I've heard is that the HEP theory community (which led the way in adopting the arxiv) used to be small enough that everyone pretty much knew each other and pre-prints were widely circulated by mail and then email. So the arxiv just made it easier for people to do what they were already used to doing.

It's definitely true that preprint culture significantly predated the arxiv. I know it was already operating in a big way in the early-to-mid 70s when people were figuring out the Standard Model.

On the other hand, hiring and promotion decisions still have to go through people who work in a different culture where publishing in Science or PRL is considered a big deal. And a lot of people seem to think that journal-centric peer review is crucial to the operation of science (mysteriously, even after they've participated in it). I'm curious how long it will take for the journal system to wither away and die, if it does at all, even in a field like high-energy theory where it's already kind of an afterthought.

4: Doesnt there has to be some way for people who don't understand science to evaluate scientists?

Can't they do like with lawyers and evaluate based on bus-shelter advertising.

5. Grants. In principle, also citations, though this can absolutely be gamed

It's all grants from what I saw.

There's a phase of a career where citations mattered a bunch, but it was just a step you need to get through before you can get your own real-money grants.

There's been lots of speculation regarding why theoretical physicists managed to bypass this system so effectively with the arxiv, seemingly without it disrupting the status competition game within the field at all.

The most convincing explanation I've heard is that the HEP theory community (which led the way in adopting the arxiv) used to be small enough that everyone pretty much knew each other and pre-prints were widely circulated by mail and then email. So the arxiv just made it easier for people to do what they were already used to doing.

Is this field like math, involving 1 to 3 authors per paper and not depending on massive grant funding to do lab experiments?

In my 12 years in academia I never noticed anyone refer to a preprint of their or anyone else's paper. Even people obsessed with being "scooped" put their effort into establishing their precedence by giving conference talks instead of getting their papers out fast. And even though they could have gotten their papers out fast by not trying to publish in a prestigious journal, they always wanted to publish in a prestigious journal.

Everyone seems to be sick of the publication process. Some people see it as a game they are good at, but even those people simply don't have the time to go through endless rounds of revision and 5 arbitrary requests for pointless edits for every edit that improves the paper. People secure in their own positions surely would rather just publish things, get them off their desk and wait to see what the response is. But every paper has a student or postdoc for whom it's their entire job, so if it gets "dumped" onto a server somewhere it hurts their career.

10 seems right. Conference presentations and posters were big for us.

The worst meetings were the ones where people decided whether to make one paper for a good journal or multiple papers for worse journals.

Second paragraph in 10 should be italicized, of course

12: Moby got so fed up that he decided on his own that instead of one good article or 2-3 mediocre articles, it would be infinite comments on Unfogged.

I'm staff. I got money and the other people got the prestige. And usually more money than I got, but maybe not per hour.

Or was staff. Now I'm sold out.

Elsevier, Wiley, Springer/Nature - had stumbled over the economic model of the social internet long before the internet itself existed. What they are actually selling isn't knowledge. It's status.
Clearly they're selling status, but I don't that's what social media platforms do. For journals users and customers are the same people, whereas for social platforms they aren't, the principal customers being advertisers. I think the journals are more like social clubs: the members get certain concrete services for their fees, but mostly they get the right to be among the right sort of people. Both scholars and club members do the unpaid labor which provides the journal/club the critical mass of status it needs to survive.
The unpaid labor of social media users doesn't produce status though; it produces the engagement needed to maintain the critical mass of users the platform needs for ad sales. I doubt the users come for status either, but for the distraction and minor dopamine kicks of interaction. Status-through-engagement certainly happens, but based on the 1/9/90 rule I think it's only a minority who care much about it.
I think the club and platform models pull in opposite directions. Advertising platforms always want growth*. Status though is inherently hierarchical and therefore exclusionary: the status of the club/journal/university derives precisely from how many people can't get in, rather than how many can. Economically, I think that also points toward different structures: network effects push social platforms toward monopolies, where exclusivity pushes journals to fragmentation**.
*In terms of market value, if not necessarily of absolute user numbers.
**Which AIUI is perfectly illustrated by Arxiv: the actual information has gravitated onto one social network while the status remains scattered among the many journals that publish the finished articles.

one paper for a good journal or multiple papers for worse journals

One paper for a worse journal seems like a good compromise.

Unless I really manage to fuck something up spectacularly or my son becomes really accomplished (or, to be complete, manages to fuck something up spectacularly), various journal articles will probably be my longest imprint on Earth.

17 is a nice point, especially 17 last.

But I'd push back a bit: I think the dopamine rush of social notworking is precisely an illusion of status boost. Even on fb, people mostly interact within communities much smaller than Dunbar's number. The social internet feels structured like a honeycomb, with everyone safe in their own cells. And when suddenly that illusion breaks down and there is a pile-on involving thousands of strangers, the effect is traumatising partly because it is unvexpected.

Ridiculous. The dopamine rush of social notworking is the same as that of notworking in any context, even alone and unobserved.

I just read that and had a small dopamine release.

Network effects push social platforms toward monopolies, where exclusivity pushes journals to fragmentation

Fragmentation of the journals I suppose is what you're talking about, but the businesses aren't fragmenting and fwict are reaching ever closer to monopoly power (or from the perspective of authors, monopsony). And there are presumably some kind of network effects with having lots of journals on one platform (like h-index, I think? not nec. a good thing, but an effect). So a similar approach might be called for as with Facebook etc.: socialize and de-profitize.

23: Yes, I mean journals. I assume the status resides with the journal, not its publisher.

One publisher and many journals was the foundation of Robert Maxwell's fortune. The more journals, the more status to fight over: the fewer publishers, the more money they make.

"I published in the journal of Merovingian consciousness studies" is the equivalent of lurkers supporting me in email