What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

34 Replies to “What Would We Do Without Peer Review?”

1. Maxwell = Mossad

   1. Proof?

2. Oh, wow. Fascinating information, but KM is gonna HATE this…

   As I and others here have said countless times already: follow the money. It always points directly to the truth.

   1. Fred
      Maxwell got into financial difficulties, and “fell” off his boat. Follow the money indeed!

      1. Indeed, the truth would appear to lie in Davey Jones’s locker.

3. Peer review is a farce. It is far too often actually PAL review.

   1. “Peer review is a farce. It is far too often actually PAL review.”

      It’s been ‘pal review’ to me ever since the East Anglia ClimateGate scandal let the cat out of the bag.

      I really miss the days when I would see or read a statement from a doctor or a scientist and automatically assume it to be true.

4. The horror,we would have to judge an idea on its merits,actually examine the evidence provided and think about the weight and likelyhood of the conclusions..
   Nope..Nope..No.
   Not in Can Ahh Duh or any other country blessed with “Public Education”.

   1. “The horror,we would have to judge an idea on its merits,actually examine the evidence provided and think about the weight and likelyhood of the conclusions..”

      Worse still, someone would have to actually {gasp!} TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for making a decision.

   2. “Public Education” has not produced and educated public.

5. This is why I always laugh when the marmot boi comes on here touting “peer reviewed journals” as the gold standard of science. The most pernicious group of un-hung scoundrels in Western society are the scum who write some of these journals. Grifters, citing each other’s grift.

   Culminating in the mad science genetic modification experiment that was the covid jab. Honestly, IMHO we all dodged the biggest bullet in history that time. As bad as it was, and remains, it could have been so much worse.

   Peer review, yeah.

   1. Peer review is rife with fraud and under the table payouts. The method that should be used is something similar to the “tenth man”. “Gate keeping” is a better description of “Peer review”.

      1. Eric calls it the “ gated institutional narrative”.

   2. It’s why I kept posting the link to the peer-reviewed study with AI-generated nonsense illustrations. It’s hard to credibly keep defending the peer review process when stuff that blatant is sailing through unchecked.

      1. Indeed. In legitimate science giant rat willies are literally peerless. In peer review, not so much.

6. Quite amazing really, watch the whole thing when you have the time. Also recommend Peterson’s conversation with Taibbi.

7. WOW, excellent.
   It’s a cartel: “you review me, I review you”, wink wink.
   Also, I like his point that many people mistakenly equate peer review with the scientific method. It should be obvious that it isn’t even remotely true, but isn’t generally. You hear people try to end a debate with “but it’s peer-reviewed”.
   Yunno, even Jordan Peterson is sometimes guilty here. Leaving aside the question “is psychology even a science?” he sometimes refers to “the literature” as proof of some concept. Yunno like, “settled science”.

   1. Yes….essentially a mutual masturbation session.

8. It only take 1:30 if you double the speed. And only one minute 15 seconds if you just skip the first 30 seconds of nothing. Peer review is a cult of unprecedented greed and seclusion. I have a daughter doing a Phd. in biology, and there is no talking to her about anything. She lives and breathes that world, and I’m sure will not live as long because of it. She’s naive about the nature of man, and thinks scientists can do no wrong.

9. Academics over the past 20 years or so are worthless. There was a time when a Phd. meant something….but more recently all they show is that the person is too lazy to leave the comfort of school to enter the real world. I have dealt with several Phd’s during my working life and found that the older ones tend to be able to understand the real world while the younger ones are so caught up in their own self importance they can’t see past the tip of their nose.

   1. Yup.Seen that.
      Totally comprehend;”Piled Higher and Deeper”.
      There really is nonsense so insane that only an “educated” person will spout it.

10. The Latin term for peer review is argumentum ad populum — a logical fallacy.

11. Various editors of the big medical journals have railed about this over the years. Even John Ioannidis, recently famous for his (correct) Covid heresy has strong opinions on the subject. Marcia Angell had an NEJM editorial ~20 years ago. David Sackett, the father of evidence-based medicine has a tongue-in-cheek article about the prostitution of medical research (search David sackett harlot). Nothing new under the sun with any of this unfortunately.

12. But, but, but, they are science, as one infamous character said recently.
    Yeah …. the going ons are rather questionable, though you can’t as questions.
    Who do you think you are?
    As one short-lived prime minister said, you don’t understand.

13. The start of this about have an .edu email address is nonsense. They’re making it up wholesale.

    Most peer review today is blind. The reviewers don’t know who the authors are, and vice versa. They’re not shown each other’s email address. And when I submit a paper, I use my personal email address, which is simply my name @gmail.com. This is a common practice, as you always have access to your personal email, but you can lose access to an institutional address when you leave it. The editors don’t seem to care, or even notice.

    And I wouldn’t blame Maxwell on current problems with scientific publications. Things like publication cartels occur because the number of scientific papers has grown massively. No editor, no matter how good they are, can keep track of all the papers in their field. Another reason is that many papers come from Asia, where there are few unique family names. Is the C. Zhang listed as the third author in one paper the lead author in another? It can be very difficult to tell, if anyone had the time to check, which they don’t.

    1. Most peer review today is blind.

       It may well be. However, how many “experts” are there in some of these specialized fields? I’ll take a particular case that I am familiar w/ as an example. Guy was doing his PhD on a particular songbird’s song. When the time came to defend, he knew that there would be 1 or 2 of 3 authors reviewing his work as they were the only other expert birdsong researchers on the planet at the time. One of the 3 was his supervisor and the other two he had met during his research. So much for anonymity.

       1. Yeah, but they were just doing that for a lark!

       2. In highly specialized fields, that could be a problem. And occassionally I’ve peer reviewed papers where I could easily guess some of the authors just from the style and citations.

          But blind peer review is still highly effective. And more to the point, their point about .edu email is palpable nonsense.

    2. “Most peer review today is blind. The reviewers don’t know who the authors are, and vice versa. They’re not shown each other’s email address. ”

       I call BS on that. Says who? How do you know that?

       And that doesn’t even touch on the issue of “no interest”…as in, I submit a paper alleging human-caused climate change to be wildly overblown, the the journal responds with “no interest”. In other words, *nothing* will even be published that offends the keepers of The Narrative, never mind reviewed.

       1. How do I know that? Because I …

          Publish scientific papers
          Peer review scientific papers
          Am an editor for a scientific journal

          Anything else I can help you with?

    3. “Most peer review today is blind.”

       Yeah? Explain gun control “research” in the medical literature.

14. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
    “Upton Sinclair”

    1. I always liked the Upton Sinclair song. “You load up a ton of Sinclair, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt…”

15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7495745/

    “Hydroxocobalamin currently only carries approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of cyanide toxicity; all other clinical applications remain experimental. Our institutional practice in the setting of vasoplegic syndrome refractory to traditional vasoconstrictors (catecholamines and vasopressin), is to first administer methylene blue and if patients remain hypotensive with high vasopressor requirements then administer hydroxocobalamin.”

    Nothing to see here folks. Nothing.