Peer review [is] an historical conveyor belt of outright lies.
I feared that this dreaded day would come whilst praying that it wouldn't. Yet here it is, and there's nothing to do but face it squarely. Of what dread and what day do I write? Nothing less than the day I find myself almost agreeing with glaston.
The saving grace here is the "almost," in that, as ever so often, by overstating his case glaston transforms a drab falsehood into an all-star Hollywood extravaganza.
Yes, peer review
is a fraud; that much is certain. In practice, however, the committers of the fraud are less interested in perpetrating grandiose deceits against the whole of mankind than in securing their own position, with all that such security entails—that is to say, more often than not, income and prestige, with increases to the latter almost inevitably generating comparable increases to the former.
The advice that parents used to give their children in the millennia before government and media became canonized sources of information needs reviving: Believe nothing you read and only half of what you see with your own two eyes. Heeders of this maxim still make mistakes left and right, of course—it could hardly be otherwise—but the way to bet is that they will be correct far more often than everyone else.
My favorite description of what peer review actually is comes from the esteemed researcher Peter Duesberg, a man whose own work has been the frequent object of outright suppression and whose life and livelihood have been jeopardized. Dr. Duesberg, in almost so many words, calls the peer review process the attempt to get the approval of your competitors for a product that may put them out of business. How likely is it that their response will be free of bias or unclouded by self-interest?
That, I aver, is a question that answers itself.
Topic: Almost half of Scientific Studies can be proven false! (Read 1056 times)