As a colleague once put it, "I believe papers published by people I know. Failing that, by people who have worked with people I know. In third place, by people

As a colleague once put it, "I believe papers published by people I know. Failing that, by people who have worked with people I know. In third place, by people who are at institutions I know have a history of good work." Science has a deep internal tension that drives it forward, because it is both inherently elitist and necessarily public. If results are not published they aren't science, because they aren't incorporated by the scientific community. And yet while a) anyone can do science and b) anyone can publish, it is still the case that c) the scientific community is overwhelmingly tightly knit and fairly conservative when it comes to adopting new ideas, and the number of new ideas that get generated is so high that this sort of heuristic really is extremely valuable. Sure there are lone geniuses. There are also lone nutjobs. It's not difficult to guess which one predominates, and these sort of filters do a good enough job of bringing the nut/genius ratio down closer to unity that we are always going to use them.