The first is that anonymous peer review is a broken process. Anyone who has been closely involved in the process knows that most peer reviews are perfunctory wastes of time. They also know that peer reviewers are given impossibly tight deadlines to do a thorough review, even if they wanted to and had the required skills.

The solution in these on-line days would be a fully-attributed public review system, probably analogous to Amazon book reviews. Publish the paper, and then dynamically append all reviews by anyone who is prepared to stand up in public and put his name to his comments.

The second problem is “Publish or Perish” in the academic world, which leads to a proliferation of not-very-useful papers. That is a more difficult problem to deal with. The solution probably begins with abolishing tenure. Once in a generation, there may be an Einstein who deserves tenure — for the rest, 3-year renewable contracts would help to keep academics on their toes and make universities a less comfortable environment for Far Left activists.

All the rest is just talk.

I’m not of this view, but I’ll say they are smart people poorly deployed: much of academia is set up to select for conformity.

K, PhD today is almost totally a jobs program with a side gig of leftist indoctrination.