Re: OT: about peer review

On 13/07/2024 9:56 pm, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 13 Jul 2024 20:42:59 +1000) it happened Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in <v6tlo4$3i7qb$1@dont-email.me>:
 

On 13/07/2024 3:00 pm, Jan Panteltje wrote:

Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.
   https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/peer-review-is-essential-for-science-unfortunately-its-broken/
    There's no incentive to fix the system, which was never designed to catch fraud anyway.

>
It's a book that is designed to appeal to Cursitor Doom and other fans
of fatuous conspiracy theories.
>
"Science is getting more complex over time and is becoming increasingly
reliant on software code to keep the engine going. This makes fraud of
both the hard and soft varieties easier to accomplish."
>
One has to wonder how.
>

yea..
Lots of repeats in science of things that are obviously wrong.
Next generation maybe...

>
Not that Jan Panteltje can cite any.

 Let's start with the endless one-stone babble, space is curved etc etc
Any clown can write formulas that approximate thing observed by some,
but understanding the mechanism is what counts.

Actually Einstein did that, and his relativistic corrections are a necessary part of the GPS system. His insight into the curvature of space-time was what made it possible for smarter people than you to understand what was going on with rather more precision than you can grasp.

vote-on particle, like vote-on some senile or some criminal..

As moronic puns go, this has to be the pits.

Peer review isn't perfect,

 depends on who does it.

Usually post-graduate students who can be dragooned into working for free. My wife did edit a couple of scientific journals at one stage, and finding referees was a big part of the job.

Earth was flat and at the center of the universe for a long time.

Rather before peer-reviewed journals had been invented.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/big-bang/how-did-big-bang-change/a/claudius-ptolemy
Ptolemy worked out that the earth was round, not flat, and roughly how big it was by 165 AD. Aristarchus of Samos had hypothesised that it was in orbit around the Sun some 350 years earlier, but it took Kepler and Newton to organise the evidence that made the hypothesis look plausible.

Not only was it very hard to get published, you got burned if your idea conflicted with current religious fanatic leadership.
These day the mantra is 'humans cause glow ball worming' and if you just put that in your paper it passes.

There's a whole industry claiming that humans don't cause global warming, paid for by the fossil carbon extraction industry. Only dim-wits like you and Cursitor Doom and John Larkin take them seriously

Same for much of that kwantuum stuff...

Try to make sense of spectroscopic data without it.

Same for no life signs have been found outside earth...
  http://www.gillevin.com/

He may have persuaded you, but so did Le Sage.

but it
works better than anything else that anybody has come up with. It's very
good at cracking down on stuff that is obviously wrong. I haven't
refereed all that many scientific papers, but rejecting the ones that
were obviously wrong was remarkably easy, and took a lot less work than
finding and explaining more subtle errors.

 The wrong ones are taken by the masses, like capitalism is the solution...

The obviously wrong ones don't get published - at least not in peer-reviewed journals. The masses get a lot of their information from the mass-media, which is more into getting people's attention than it is into educating them.
Dutch science journalism is a whole lot better than English-language science journalism, but it clearly hasn't been able to educate you.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
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