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I think it would have helped if the article had discussed the work Peters got published in Nature, Science and any other top journals. Was it good work, or was
by da39a3ee 6y ago
I think it would have helped if the article had discussed the work Peters got published in Nature, Science and any other top journals. Was it good work, or was that a failure of peer review? In principle at least, a lot of the problem being discussed should be addressable by the peer review process: rather than adjudicate on all of Peters' work en bloc, evaluate it on an article-by-article basis, via peer review. And don't engage with him at all in other contexts. But it sounds like part of the problem is that comment threads under journal articles and blog posts are being taken as a serious part of scientific discourse.
- Kednicma 6y agoYou're being too generous. Peters clearly hallucinates features; whenever he gets community acclaim, it's a failure of the community.
- geofft 6y agoWell, the problem is that they are, in fact, a serious part of scientific discourse. Peer-reviewed publications are the output; the process of science also requires conversations in offices and labs and conferences, preprints, letters between researchers, etc. - and always has required it. You need to figure out what's interesting enough to research, what angles you may not have thought of yet, what ideas seem fruitful but lack someone pursuing them, etc. Blog comments (and mailing lists and newsgroups and Twitter) are a new way of accomplishing this at a larger scale, but they're not fundamentally anti-scientific - the conversations at Solvay weren't peer-reviewed either. The major claim of the article is that Peters is pushing his ideas in that realm - not the realm of peer-reviewed articles - and taking mindshare away from legitimate and worthwhile ideas.