24 Replies to “What Would We Do Without Peer Review?”

    1. Exactly. One has to convey the image of being productive because not only is tenure (and the associated golden hog trough) at stake, but research funding as well. The more money one brings in, the more secure one’s job is, and the higher and faster through the pecking order one rises.

      I often wished that I had become a professor, but, the more I hear about such things, the more I’m glad that I didn’t.

      1. I recall a piece of research in the late ‘70’s that showed that getting published if your work bucked the current belief system was all but impossible regardless of area of study, at least in the sciences and across journals. An intellectual elite apparently calls the shots. If the current group of intellectuals is bat shit crazy or unscrupulous then the troubles are just beginning. Apologize for forgetting the source.

        1. One thing I found out while I was finishing my Ph. D. was that one should not be too original. People either can’t figure out what one was working on or that person is sidelined as a weirdo or heretic.

          1. Well thank God Einstein published before “too original” became a concern.

  1. They’re being retracted now because Wuhan flu is old news. As a ploy to overthrow Trump, it has proven a total and outrageously costly failure.

    The bad guys have switched to a more old-fashioned tried and true tactic for removing governments they don’t approve of—renting a mob to make the country ungovernable.

    I was convinced that after the Fourth of July, you wouldn’t hear another word about Wuhan flu, except at places like SDA where people still care about their parents’ dying before their time and their businesses’ being ruined.

    The presstitutes have moved on faster than I expected.

  2. I don’t know why you keep picking on peer review. Peer reviewers can look at a submitted paper and evaluate it to see if it is appropriate for the journal, is well written and structured, appears to follow scientific norms, has definite conclusions, and so on. But reviewers almost never have the resources to try to reproduce the results of papers, and thus are seldom able to detect clever fraud , whether there are bugs in the software analyzing the results, and so on.

    In short, peer review is better than no peer review, but it has never been a panacea.

    1. Killer,

      You make some excellent points, but I’ll add that unfortunately the maim street media, and the climate change crowd, tout ‘peer reviewed’ as the platinum standard for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the scientific truth. We can’t question peer reviewed science.

      Too often our liberal arts curriculums, which feed most of our media, activists, social scientists, lawyers, and politicians, do not require any science, engineering, or technology courses of their graduates. Thus, these ‘educated’ graduates have little or no idea of how good science really works.

      1. The left uses it as a drunk uses a lamp-post, for support instead of illumination. If you assert that 2+2=4, the left will ask for a peer-reviewed paper asserting that.

      2. Results need to be replicated by independent researchers. Results from a single paper, or from a series of papers from a single group of researchers, should be placed in the “tentative” category.

        1. I’m big into theoretical physics. All peer-reviewed papers in that field are considered “tentative”, until there is reproducible experimental evidence surpassing 6-sigma. The “peer-reviewed = true” lie is just another abuse of language on the left’s part.

        2. If peer review works as it should then those who penned the papers that were later retracted, and also their places of work where the faulty work was done (if it was faulty work) should forever have their names attached to it. That’s the potential killer of the scientific method is when there is no fault or liability attached to being fraudulent (in the cases that rise to that level).

          In this case, a promising treatment was torpedoed for what many of us think is political reasons. This risked the lives of tens of thousands by removing a treatment from consideration. My first thought is that there should be some manslaughter or even murder (premeditated) charges against fraudsters who do this and cause people to die when a treatment was available.

          1. Government funding kills science.
            Politics becomes a consideration.
            Outcomes are predetermined to influence and control the public.
            Like say climate change.

      1. Not my experience, and I know. I peer review regularly, and I recently became a journal editor.

        In my field at least, peer reviewers tend to be quite senior, or at least talented up and comers. Editing is part of the job (English is not the mother tongue of most authors), but there are many other aspects as well. The most important part is to advise the editor whether is the paper is even suitable for publication. Many researchers are desperate to publish, and the significance of the advancement is sometimes modest.

    2. Having gone through the academic research system as a grad student, I’m often skeptical of peer-reviewed papers.

      I’ve heard how some are “reviewed” in less than 5 minutes from inbox to out basket. I’ve read some publications that were complete rubbish and, likely, the only reason they were accepted in the first place was the author’s name and/or affiliation. Actual quality or accomplishment seemed to be secondary.

      Many were mediocre because the author wanted to get several papers out of the same set of data, simply by dividing, mixing, and matching the results. Doing so made him look productive simply because of the multiplicity of publications that were produced rather than a single, solid paper.

  3. More verbiage to describe just a flu. Got to keep up the foolishness.

  4. The hydroxychloroquine study that was retracted was based, mostly, on continued investigation into its use and effectiveness. It wasn’t a disavow of the findings.

  5. How do you know you have been screwed over by the political flu? When the shamwow guy is promoting shamwow masks. It does not get much dumber than that. Someone, anyone please prove me wrong with facts not B S.

    1. OWG. Try Alexberenson.com, he is publishing a book in parts using the Covid data he acquired. He is a straight shooter, objectively examined the data. Amazon banned the first instalment at first, significant in that he is a well known author of thrillers and other scientific examinations, all of which they sell. Reinstated after pressure when word got out. There are excerpts here and you can view interview clips at Foxnews.com. Berenson credits Fox with giving the ban publicity causing Bezos to back down.

    1. You’re welcome, it is just a flu, a really bad one, but a flu. About 12 years ago we picked up a friend and her kid at the airport having just returned from a tour of Vietnam. Passing threw to the prairies, a few days visit. Two days later the whole household was puking sick with some form of southeast Asian flu. Never felt so bad, almost called 911 several times, it was that bad. A couple days later everyone was on the mend. It was quite frightening for awhile, would not want to experience that again if it could be avoided. However, would I want he country to go into endless lockdown and trash the economy for good to avoid it….absolutely not. We have become too soft and frightened in this country, it will be our downfall.

  6. The Public “Health” Officers have kept saying we can’t return to a normal life without a vaccine, which will take years or may never be found. This does not meet the criterion: “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

    Effective therapeutic and prophylaxis does allow the nation-states of the world to return to healthy economic, social and political activity, to normal.

    Especially so, when the therapeutic/prophylaxis is an off patent, cheap to produce and distribute w/ few contraindications. Returning to normal ends the justification of the power hungry bureaucrats, and aspirants to absolute power e.i. Justin Trudeau et al. When ordinary citizens can afford an effective $20.00

    The only area not under almost total control of the Cult. Marxists (running dogs of the C.C.P.) are the S.T.E.M. fields.
    Those 15 bogus studies is a tactic to keep the economic and political power of nation-states in chains. The chains forged by being terrorized by way of the threat of the unknown(here be dragons).

    Even the brief period before these studies where retracted, a number of double-blind studies into promising therapeutics where halted when the (Mendacious) M.S.M. made their conclusions leading news. For the C.C.P. and that of global firms who’d benefit massively from a treatment under patent, keeping the U.S. economy crippled is critical. When the U.S., Japan and others, start bringing back manufacturing from China to their domestic economy. China will lose it’s status as the 2nd largest national economy and it’s aspiring to #1 status, which was/is their goal of weaponizing the C.C.P. virus.

    The loss of face would be a failure of Pres. Xi’s strategy and likely an internal coup within the Chinese Communist Party.

    Even in Canada, a return of Parliament and the legislatures, of having them face the music of high unemployment, business and personal bankruptcies means they’d have to fear an angry electorate. One who is increasingly skeptical of the extent and nature of the current political shake down… err, I mean shut-down.

    The medical journals realized their credibility, as institutions loyal the scientific method, had been compromised and reacted, but the retraction will receive a small fraction of the publicity that the bogus studies have received.

    The wars of the 21st Century have only just begun. A continuation of the 20th Century Cold War, which we did not finish. The claws of the giant Red Dragon, to be stilled will require many inspired by the courage of a young shepherd boy with only a sling and a stone, but with unerring aim.

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