5 thoughts on “Peer Review”

1. I’ve reviewed hundreds of technical articles. It’s not fun, and you can get bogged down in lots of details and there were more than few articles I had to green-light despite serious concerns about the underlying conclusion — without access to the data, I doubted that the results were real, but the process was sound (as far as I could make out).

   The thing about science journalism is that you’re supposed to allow papers making serious claims if they’re done in a serious manner. You depend on other people confirming the results even if they aren’t very reproducible in many disciplines.

   But there are disciplines where there are more problems with reproducibility and with sketchy journals; look at the confidence member place in published literature in medicine and biology in that link above, for example. And in fields where there is vast amount published, you can get tempted to just slide things through, too.

   Personally, I don’t trust the literature in anything other than a hard science if it hasn’t been repeatedly reproduced since more than half of the social science literature is completely irreproducible. Frankly, faking something or making a gross mistake in a hard science paper is career suicide, while other disciplines tend to excuse it as “small sample errors” unless direct fraud can be conclusively proven.

2. unless direct fraud can be conclusively proven.

   And when it can and had been a la climate “science”, it is ignored if politically charged.

3. Yet Mitch, those which FAIL peer review, they really do have holes. You know, like virtually EVERY claim by the fossil-fuel industry “scientists” about how Climate Change can be explained by other sources. Wherever they’ve tried that, they’ve failed. The only thing they can claim is that it isn’t 100% certain it’s partly caused by man and the reason they can claim that is because nothing is 100% certain. Still, those peer reviewed papers which say man is causing it, in part, have survived without being shot full of holes, even though supposed “peers” (and I appreciate you pointing out that meteorologists aren’t peers of climate scientists and that paid “scientists” of oil companies aren’t either), well anyway, despite the fact that supposed peers have tried to poke holes, those trying have generally failed because their “science” was basically BS and couldn’t, itself, pass peer review.

4. Mitch, you REALLY should check out the underlying story before publishing. The publications which published this bogus paper were PREDATORY publications, meaning, they were paid to publish. The AUTHOR of the story said they were peer reviewed, but get serious, do you really think Predatory publishing is peer-reviewed? You’ve been had just like the author, or, if you weren’t fooled, then you were trying to fool us.

5. Pen, exactly how many times did Mann’s hockey stick graph pass peer review before someone dared to point out that the kink was based on the rings of a single tree? Exactly what percentage of papers have to be deemed irreproduceable (in some fields it’s a clear majority) before we decide that this process is arguably not working?

   Reality here is that the evolutionists and climatologists are telling us exactly why peer review isn’t working in many fields whenever they tell us, piously, that everybody that matters agrees with them–a basic appeal to popularity fallacy. In other words, a fair number if fields have fallen from science to bad politics, and it shows.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.