alt Hacker News> On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy.
It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.
And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke.
“Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.
Replies
Peer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or utility.
It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they can spot some methodological problem.
That's completely upside down take. The problem with peer review is not that it does not allow good papers to get published (that rarely happens, almost all good papers get published!), but that shitty papers get published!
I feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect guardrail! What would be the alternative?