Right I genuinely don't mean that as an insult, perhaps my cooking example was flip. There is lots of genuine progress made by other means -- anyone think that

Right I genuinely don't mean that as an insult, perhaps my cooking example was flip. There is lots of genuine progress made by other means -- anyone think that Toyota's process inventions in were done by double-blind trials on a large sample of factories? And of course some guys a few doors down are proving theorems. And lots of other things. It is slightly strange though that we try to vet all of these with the same peer review mechanism. This is one major source of the differing opinions in this thread about how this ought to work, I think.