> Now people barely bring it up at all. It’s like a lion has escaped the zoo and it’s gulping down schoolchildren, but when people suggest zoo improvements, all the agenda items are like, “We should add another Dippin’ Dots kiosk”. If you bring up the loose tiger, everyone gets annoyed at you, like “Of course, no one likes the tiger”.

> As much as people like to use NumPyro and sometimes even PyMC to generate JAX code, I think it may be easier in the end to just write JAX directly. That way, nothing gets between you and JAX and you don’t have to figure out how to filter JAX through middleware. When you do that, the models can be organized very much like in Stan.

^much truth. Nascent libraries like distreqx make it much easier to work at a lower level while maintaining some of the log density affordances that PPLs provide.

https://github.com/lockwo/distreqx

> There are self citations and citation rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenfactor and other such indices are much less game-able

Peer review (as currently practiced) and closed access are the problems, not the quality signal provided by journal publication.

Author reputation and citation patterns provide plenty(?) of signal without journal/reviewer/editor endorsement. But you could still imagine introducing “badges” that provide similar additional signal to what publication in a top journal provides today. Academic societies issue a fixed number of badges to top preprints each year. But ditch the song and dance around peer review.