This is not an incorrect point but rfks motives are more likely delegitimization of major journals to make the hacky bullshit journals he cites not seem so quacky
If this is successful in 5-10 years it will be much less normal to say “at least show me a paper from nature”. Then the confusing landscape of journals that are not well known become even harder to differentiate from the ones he cites
For reference, when he was citing his antivax bullshit at (I believe it was) his confirmation hearing the article he cited came from a journal of extremely dubious quality. The board of directors were all antivaxxers, one of which being the guy who published the article, and the journal was registered out of a residential home. It was basically the academic journal equivalent of a fanzine with obvious and extreme conflicts of interest in its peer review. The paper itself had glaring methodology issues (shocker).
If scientists are forced to leave the most reputable publications it just muddies the waters even more for articles that are of very high quality or importance
The issues you point out are still very relevant and need resolution of course but they can be solved in other ways. Regulation surrounding how government funded research is handled, how government endowment funds for library access to journals are handled, etc could give significant leverage over private publishers without having to start over from scratch. Or you could be more aggressive and force the publishers to be more equitable, but good luck with that in America
I work as a therapist and if you work in a field like mine you can generally see the pattern of engagement that most AI chatbots follow. It’s a more simplified version of Socratic questioning wrapped in bullshit enthusiastic HR speak with a lot of em dashes
There are basically 6 broad response types from chatgpt for example with - tell me more, reflect what was said, summarize key points, ask for elaboration, shut down. The last is a fail safe for if you say something naughty/not in line with OpenAI’s mission (eg something that might generate a response you could screenshot and would look bad) or if if appears you getting fatigued and need a moment to reflect.
The first five always come with encouragers for engagement: do you want me to generate a pdf or make suggestions about how to do this? They also have dozens, if not hundreds, of variations so the conversation feels “fresh” but if you recognize the pattern of structure it will feel very stupid and mechanical every time
Every other one I’ve tried works the same more or less. It makes sense, this is a good way to gather information and keep a conversation going. It’s also not the first time big tech has read old psychology journals and used the information for evil (see: operant conditioning influencing algorithm design and gacha/mobile gaming to get people addicted more efficiently)