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gwern's avatar

It's a better afterlife, actually. Contemporary academics could observe the posterity reviews of past academics. Would-be martyrs and saints cannot observe the heavenly rewards of dead believers.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

There is a sort of posterity review going on for the moment: species are being renamed and re-classified as DNA evidence reveals how reliable or unreliable the previous classifications were.

Since a lot of these species are named after their discoverers, their names are being banished from posterity if the specie isn't well defined. So (current) posterity is reveiwing the classification work, and banishing those whose results don't stand up.

This sort of reclassification has been going constantly on for centuries now. So the scientists naming critters after themselves would be aware that their names would survive only if they did their jobs properly.

Has this had a beneficial or detrimental effect in the field? I'm not sure I can say, but this is an example Posterity Review, so should be looked into.

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