I think this is a simple mix-up ;) Perhaps you confused me for xorbax, or you were still in the stream of consciousness of discussing with him: if you double-c

I think this is a simple mix-up ;) Perhaps you confused me for xorbax, or you were still in the stream of consciousness of discussing with him: if you double-check which of your comments I replied to I think that you'll find it is not the one where you mention the demand for a citation that was simply non-existent. It appears you believed my comment to be a reply to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917506 while in fact I replied to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36917126 I would appreciate if you re-read your own comment at the last link, and observe the second paragraph you wrote about peer review, and then re-read my correctly placed comment. I think you'll find my comment to make more sense, and in my opinion ties in nicely with your second paragraph. I was not tryihg to summarize you, merely appending my gripes with the supposed finality and atomicity of the Journals redefinition of "peer review". In reality the real peer review is in the back and forth discussions within the community, spread out over many papers, and sometimes even over generations. As an oversimplified example consider relativistic mechanics correcting Newtonian mechanics: if we anachronistically pretend Newton published his Principia in some Respectable Journal under the current implementation of "peer review", then it would have been accepted with apparent Finality under peer review, even though it would eventually be repudiated by relativity generations later; this artificial example should make anyone pause about the insinuated Finality of "peer review", effectively forcing one to recognize that the current concept of artificially muzzled "peer review" through the arbitrary selection of the reviewers by journal editors does not constitute true peer review. I'm not saying it's useless to have an initial screening, but then it needs a better name, perhaps "Quality Control" or "Publication Criteria" or "Discipline Specific Methods and Publication Criteria" etc... Before the modern incantation where reviewing by peers is made artificially atomic and pseudo-final, anyone in the field could provoke questions about specific claims. The illusion of Finality works discouraging: where-as in the past you would feel compelled to respond to any criticism, the current concept of "peer review" implies "it already happened since its published" and nothing forces an author to come up with a rebuttal for a criticism. While this may help prop up appearances of the scientific field with an aura of Finality of conclusions made in its domain, its really damaging to the scientific process. Back to the comment confusion: I've seen this happen to others when a sub-thread gets a lot of attention, resulting in a high rate of replies, where one of the authors gets confused which exact comment was being replied to. I would be lying if I were to claim it never happened to me ;)