By Kent Anderson — 16 Sep 2026

Negligent Experiments: The Old Normal

Is scientific publishing’s comfort with ideological capture causing a repeat?

Various ideologies have captured the handful of leaders atop the major AI firms currently calling for a slowdown in development — effective altruism, long-termism, Singularitarianism. The way these firms are whipsawing society is notable, and the superficiality of the leadership at these firms alarming.

The utopian/dystopian fantasy world their ideologies has created — high hopes, disassociation from reality, groupthink, and more — may be fun for bros in their 20s to discuss over their THC infusers and ketamine drips, but it may also be more familiar to scientific and scholarly publishers than many think. After all, it was scientific publisher who underwent an ideological conversion decades ago with the high hopes and utopian beliefs of open access (OA) publishing foisted on us by a few strong and relentless voices.

AI and OA have some key similarities — the belief that technology can and will solve problems simply through scaled deployment, the blindness to obvious problems created by the pursuit of the ideological goals because stopping is not an option, and the cult-like status of the ideas where dissent or critique is not allowed.

For a profession that at its root has the idea of taking a breath, evaluating claims, and making careful judgments of those, scientific publishing’s headlong rush into OA is now being matched by a headlong rush into AI — one that seems even more likely to end in tears given how things are unfolding overall and the lack of a culture of caution and considered choices. Scientific publishing at least still has that going for it . . .

In this episode, we discuss these topics, leaderboardism, and the latent backlash for both OA and AI.

We end by discussing why it’s time for us to go out and make new observations at the following upcoming events: