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> From many of these examples, a common thread is the following or a combination thereof: - Someone is seen as an outsider within a field - The data t
by veddox 6y ago
> From many of these examples, a common thread is the following or a combination thereof:
- Someone is seen as an outsider within a field
- The data that supports or undermines claims is noisy. This I think is the core underlying reason, the root of most evil. In turn, the reason for this is lack of tooling to produce precise observations, or funding to increase sample sizes.
- Being right, for the wrong reasons. The reasons may be shot down. Rejecting "A->B" does not mean "B" is false, it just means "A"was not a good reason for B.
I think it's important to note that these are actually pretty valid reasons to be sceptical of a claim. (Well, at least the second and third are, but even the first is generally a useful heuristic.)
So I think the issue is not so much that peer-review is broken and needs to be fixed, as that it is by nature conservative and could do with a supplementary process to reduce the false-negatives.
- veddox 6y agoInterestingly, it has been argued that the Galileo affair was actually a case of him "being right for the wrong reasons". Obviously there was also a lot of politics involved, but the Vatican did have some of the best astronomers of the time on their pay roll - and Galileo's arguments failed to convince them on a scientific level, not primarily a religious one.
- jpkotyla 6y agoPerhaps some non-binary classification could be of use. You could imagine one or two additional categories of acceptance/rejection, something like plausible and implausible. Journals could publish articles falling into these classifications making sure that it is abundantly clear that they have not been fully approved/ disapproved. Having such options should allow for promotion/demotion of ideas as they garner more/less support. The concept is similar to that of working papers and preprints, in the belief that getting more eyes (both expert and amateur) on a paper is better for truth discovery than if only a few experts evaluate.