Abstract

Scientists have complained about the inconsistency and politics of academic publishing for hundreds of years. Among the explanations offered are that evaluators lack time and use shortcuts, that they lack the expertise to judge things properly, that they can't put aside personal biases and we must hide the names of authors, and that they are conscientious instead of creative and cannot judge new ideas. All of these are actually wrong. As a literary analyst, I spent the last ten years independently studying this same problem in book and movie production. I've found that the human decision-making apparatus doesn't work the way we think, and the solutions based on this misunderstanding could never have solved the problem. In this paper, we present the first method that actually can, which is a technique adapted from computer hacking, as well as a new view of how our brains make choices.