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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29842 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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I hint at it in my previous post but the point of journals and peer review was never originally to credential knowledge production (which is actually anathema to the scientific method) but to solve a logistical problem for institutions that had to rely on paper and its very narrow and expensive bandwidth. A problem that no longer actually exists in any meaningful sense.

time is a finite resource. so is manpower. people who read journals do not want to have to sift through piles of crud. peer review is not just about saving space but about curation.

The thing is, we do have the counterfactual, which is what happened before the reification of scientific publishing and what still happens in novel disciplines: it was a free for all with all manner of cranks and yet the quality of scholarship people actually cared about wasn't worse, on the contrary. Nor indeed was it any harder to parse than what journals have now become where most of what is published is garbage and even the most prestigious ones are not what they used to be.

The crank ideas fell out of favor because of peer review. Otherwise we'd still be seeing papers about luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, and perpetual motion machines. It's not so much as a 'free for all' , but that competing ideas can coexist and then one wins out as being correct and the other is discarded.

This entire line of argument is a post-hoc rationalization. Again this isn't actually how peer review came about, this is the excuse to keep it going, but regardless of the merits of peer review, that excuse is nonsense, because the process has proven quite unable to filter out garbage science.

What it does do is prevent heterodox publication, which is completely different

It's not so much as a 'free for all' , but that competing ideas can coexist and then one wins out as being correct and the other is discarded

What's you're describing here is paradigmatization as conceptualized by Kuhn, the process in which a discipline becomes more structured and predictable by producing more incremental work based on an assumed theory or framework until it becomes so untenable that some crank show it all to be wrong and the process begins anew.

Now if you want to say that this process is necessary for science to move along, that's fine, and I'll agree. But if you want to say that increasing the level of control on publication to exclude the bad stuff is how you get new discoveries then that's just plainly wrong. It's quite the opposite actually. Scientific revolutions come from the margins.

And in that light, it makes attempts at sorting out the cranks from the serious people by establishing some bureaucratic authority and process quite futile.

Otherwise we'd still be seeing papers about luminiferous aether, spontaneous generation, and perpetual motion machines.

Yeah, maybe if we'd tightened it a little more we would even not have to see papers about semiconductors, aerodynes, and other such discredited impossible things. What a great win for humanity that would have been.

Again, to bring this back to my main point, peer review , contrary to popular belief here, does not suppress new or fringe ideas. The only criteria is the ideas must follow some guidelines, like be mathematically or logically consistent. For example, Alcubierre Miguel's 1994 paper about warp drives, which is speculative even by the standards of theoretical physics, was published in a peer reviewed journal, and the idea has now gained mainstream attention from that original publication. Same for ADs-CFT, in 1997. or theories in which Newtonian physics is modified.

Speculative and heterodox are different concepts.

But I mean, you're not going to convince me something I have witnessed first hand doesn't exist.

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