Just to be clear here, you're drawing a comparison between citations in peer reviewed papers - written and refereed by experts in a field - and Like buttons clicked by non-experts on social media? I feel compelled to ask if you're arguing in good faith, because if you have a valid point I can't immediately think of a worse comparison to use.
Yes, obviously citations are a heuristic for achievement and Likes are not. Citations signal that one piece of research has had impact on another. It doesn't immediately declare the research is true and valid, but it does signify the research has held up to the scrutiny of n other researchers who felt it worthwhile enough to include in their own work.
Likes do not involve any of that reputation staking mechanism, nor do they involve experts in a review process that can reject papers by design. It would be incoherent to claim 17,000 upvotes on reddit give a paper anything resembling the weight of 17,000 citations.
I wonder if there is a good way to study biases in academia, which is maybe what the poster was getting at? Feynman criticized aspects of academia as being "rotten" for the record...
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Just to be clear here, you're drawing a comparison between citations in peer reviewed papers - written and refereed by experts in a field - and Like buttons clicked by non-experts on social media? I feel compelled to ask if you're arguing in good faith, because if you have a valid point I can't immediately think of a worse comparison to use.
Yes, obviously citations are a heuristic for achievement and Likes are not. Citations signal that one piece of research has had impact on another. It doesn't immediately declare the research is true and valid, but it does signify the research has held up to the scrutiny of n other researchers who felt it worthwhile enough to include in their own work.
Likes do not involve any of that reputation staking mechanism, nor do they involve experts in a review process that can reject papers by design. It would be incoherent to claim 17,000 upvotes on reddit give a paper anything resembling the weight of 17,000 citations.
I wonder if there is a good way to study biases in academia, which is maybe what the poster was getting at? Feynman criticized aspects of academia as being "rotten" for the record...