S04E07 - Independent Voters in the Presidential Election and a Crisis in Science

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we are joined by Vance Reavie from the Independent Center. We start with a lengthy discussion about independent voters - how many there are, what they want in candidates, what issues are important to them, and why they often feel marginalized in US elections. We then turn to the primary question of whether independent voters will decide the Presidential election in 2024. The answer is likely "Yes," but it's complicated because neither of the two major party candidates is particularly appealing to independent voters and hasn't done much to make themselves more attractive. We all agreed that the current primary and then "first past the post" election system ends up disenfranchising moderate voters. We then turn to our second topic - scientific fraud in academic publishing. We talk about the broken incentive structures - "publish or perish" and for-profit publishers who own the copyright to scholars' work and then sell it back to the scholars' universities for billions every year. We also talk about ways to address this issue and even come up with a brilliant technological solution for tracking peer-reviewers' effectiveness that should be monetized. We conclude that peer review is far from perfect but the best system we currently have for advancing science.