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[stocks]

Peer review vs peer usage

In the past; the ultimate, bottom-line, within-science validation of science came not from the committee opinions of peer reviewers but from the emergent phenomenon of peer usage – which refers to the actual deployment of previous science (theories, facts, techniques) in the ongoing work of later scientists. This was an implicit, aggregate but not quantified outcome of a multitude of individual-decisions among peers (co-workers in the same domain) about what aspects of previous science they would use in their own research: each user of earlier work was betting their time, effort and reputation on the validity of the previous research which they chose to use. When their work bore fruit, this a validation of previous research (in the sense that having survived this attempt at refutation the old science now commanded greater confidence); but when previous research was faulty it 'sabotaged' any later research building upon it in terms of correctly predicting or effectively-intervening-in the natural world. Beyond this lies the commonsensical evaluation of science in terms of ‘what works’ – especially what works outside of science, by people such as engineers and doctors whose job is to apply science in the natural world.

But now that committee-based peer review has been explicitly accepted as the ‘gold standard’ of scientific validity, we see the bizarre situation that actual scientific usage and even what works is regarded as less important than the ‘bureaucratic reality’ of peer review evaluations. Mere opinions trump observations of objective reality.

In other words, when science operates on the basis of peer review and committee decision, it is not really science at all. The cancer of bureaucracy has killed real science wherever it dominates. Much of mainstream science is now ‘Zombie Science’: that is, something which superficially looks-like science, but which is actually dead inside, and kept-moving only by continuous infusion of research funds.

http://medicalhypoth...ureaucracy.html

[stocks]

Peer Review

Does It Ensure Quality
or Enforce Orthodoxy?

As a consequence, the production of scholarly articles has increased by more than a
factor of a thousand over the past fifty years. Unfortunately, the average quality of the papers
also went down. Since earlier there was no financial reward for writing a scholarly article,
people wrote the papers as a labor of love. They had ideas that they wished to communicate with
their peers, and they wrote the papers to communicate those ideas. Now papers were mainly
written to further a career.

If one reads memoirs or biographies of physicists who
made their great breakthroughs after, say, 1950, one is struck by how often one reads that “the
referees rejected for publication the paper that later won me the Nobel Prize.”

Today it is known that the Hawaiian Islands were formed sequentially as the Pacific plate
moved over a hot spot deep inside the Earth. The theory was first developed in the paper by an
eminent Princeton geophysicist, Tuzo Wilson: “I … sent [my paper] to the Journal of
Geophysical Research. They turned it down….


The American Chemical Society made a list of the most significant
advances in chemistry made over the last 100 years. There has been no change in the rate at
which these breakthroughs in chemistry have been made in spite of the thousand-fold increase in
the number of chemists. In the 1960s, U.S. citizens were awarded about 50,000 chemical patents
per year. By the 1980s, the number had dropped to 40,000

http://www.iscid.org...view_070103.pdf

Edited by stocks, 05 June 2010 - 10:26 AM.