I completely agree with all of this. I just think that peer review is more than just the bare minimum for "formal validity," whatever that means. It's really th

I completely agree with all of this. I just think that peer review is more than just the bare minimum for "formal validity," whatever that means. It's really the bare minimum for starting to talk about publicly understanding something. It's easy to have a pet theory, in fact, the freakonomics book is exactly a series of pet theories. The point is that these pet theories have done the bare minimum which almost no other pop science books do. Most pop sciences books are basically: "I am an authority on this subject, let me explain the world to you." Which is all fine and dandy, involves a ton of faith in that authority, but there's something unique and interesting about a book that's like "here are my papers, let's go through them one by one." Do I think all of the theories in freakonomics are correct? Of course not! At best they are wildly outdated studies, at worst they are completely wrong and harmful for people to blindly believe. But my point stands, for a pop science book, it's admirable for them to just hand you the data. It's right there. If you think there's a problem or you want to try and confirm the studies, you just can. That's how we should be doing things, and it's really not at all common. Anyone who reads a pop science book for Truth doesn't understand science. The vast majority of "settled facts" are still debatable at the highest levels of academia, even in the hard sciences.