A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscien

A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science. And what do you think the numbers are now, in the current world with pre-publication peer review? You make a beautiful argument (genuinely) but I think it overlooks some of the most important criticisms of the current approach. Yes, it's almost universally accepted that ideas published in a high ranking journal have a strong correlation with consensus of those within the field the journal represents. The criticism though is about what happens in the (presumably rare) cases where the consensus of the field is wrong. If the decisions of what to publish are made only by those invested in the status quo, how does a field self-correct rather than allowing errors to accumulate? How can one from the outside distinguish between a true-scientific field where this happens, and a pseudo-scientific one where it does not? It's a hard question without clear answers, but almost certainly it can't be done by relying only on the opinion of the experts within the field in question. Using your very appropriate Ted Cruz example, it's worth remembering that credentialism plays to his strengths: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz). He was a debate champion at his undergraduate Princeton, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he was the primary editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are highly respected institutions, and association with them would generally would convince a lay-person this person is not an idiot. Imagine that he's set up a system of peer review with a group of equally bright but ideologically biased peers, and is trying to argue that anything published without the approval of this group should be ignored as the work of "pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks". Irrespective of the truth of this claim, it wouldn't be a very convincing argument to anyone who didn't start out agreeing with it.