I think peer-review is an answer, perhaps not a great one, to how can we trust specialist science. In a world where the renaissance man role is no longer feasib

I think peer-review is an answer, perhaps not a great one, to how can we trust specialist science. In a world where the renaissance man role is no longer feasible, to move science forward we must narrow our focus on particular sub-fields and problems within that field. One issue of this is that it becomes much harder for the general science community to verify your results, which is where peer review attempts to help, by forcing you to get other experts in your sub-field to review your work before it can be stamped as trusted. Does it work? Kind of. I've personally seen papers in reputable journals that while not fradulant, are pretty misleading. At the same time however I'm yet to see a workable alternative that fixes the trust issue. The question of boringness I think is pretty field dependent. In the ML community I've often seen papers almost be rejected by the peer review system because they're NOT exciting enough, despite them being pretty influential (a great example is AdamW [1]). Honestly my assesment of peer review is that not enough trainees (read: grad students/post docs) are doing reviewing. Trainees are often better acquainted with the details of methods, but also have a more open mind to accept a finding that could go a little against the grain. Additionally, they're often faster and do a better job since they have more time on their hands then senior researchers. There have been some efforts to fix this, but so far mostly isolated to specific fields. [1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=Bkg6RiCqY7 https://openreview.net/forum?id=Bkg6RiCqY7