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> It isn't a panacea, and the last two years have drawn into sharp relief one of the major problems of the system: confirmation bias. I believe I was explicit
by sseagull 4y ago
> It isn't a panacea, and the last two years have drawn into sharp relief one of the major problems of the system: confirmation bias.
I believe I was explicit in saying it wasn’t perfect.
What alternative is there that doesn’t have something resembling peer review, isn’t curated by third parties, doesn’t suffer from confirmation bias/groupthink, and doesn’t leave it up to authors to sift through 100s of papers of unknown quality a day to learn about what’s going on in the field?
- timr 4y agoIt's not just "not perfect"...it's pretty much useless as a signal of quality. Certainly, it doesn't come close to the level of credibility that you've attributed to it (i.e. papers without peer review are somehow "blog posts"). > What alternative is there that doesn’t have something resembling peer review, isn’t curated by third parties, doesn’t suffer from confirmation bias/groupthink, and doesn’t leave it up to authors to sift through 100s of papers of unknown quality a day to learn about what’s going on in the field? There's no free lunch. Nobody serious in any scientific field relies on peer review to determine paper quality. You have to read the paper in front of you and use your experience, which means you must read not just "100s of papers", but literally THOUSANDS of papers, in order to have any reasonable chance of being a credible evaluator. If you don't have this experience, you can't know the quality of a piece of scientific literature. That's just how it is.