Yeah, I'm very skeptical. Just the decision to announce this by press release rather than peer reviewed paper suggests there are a lot of uncomfortable questions, similar to what you raised, that the authors are trying to avoid.
Berger's been taking some heat on Twitter where he announced this [1]. Apparently he considers a public-interest lecture and a publicity tour equivalent to a preprint on something like SSRN. Can't say I agree, but it seems to have been effective in getting people to talk about it.
I mean he's kind of right. A preprint is just a badly formatted blog post published in a pdf. Until its finished and published. At least if one see peer-review journal literature as the gold standard of scientific discourse. Maybe this Berger thing has more to it, but scientists can (and maybe even should) talk about their ongoing research before there is a paper behind it.
It's not the public awareness stuff that I'm concerned about. That's just a necessary fact of life that I've also been involved with on my own digs.
I'm personally simply skeptical that the research conditions necessary to make a Netflix special (premiering in May-June apparently) are also conducive to high quality academic work.
Publishing a preprint goes partway to addressing that by showing everyone where their results will fit into the existing literature and strengthen the published paper by hearing / addressing public criticisms before they actually publish.
> he's kind of right. A preprint is just a badly formatted blog post published in a pdf. Until its finished and published
No, it has empirical data, most importantly, and also methods, analysis, conclusions, citations. It's nothing like a blog post, or another way of looking it it - it is an extraordinary blog post.
