Hi, Jason; I'm delighted that you got something out of this week's essay!
Epstein affair aside, I believe the biggest problem with peer review is that—as with any discipline—progress tends to come from lunatic fringes, rather than from establishment cores.
In my view, the glorification of peer review is turning science into yet another orthodoxy that buttresses entrenched economic structures. History repeats itself.
I agree that it often does from the fringes. For instance, the Alvarez team, a father (who was a physicist) and son (a geologist), were not specialists in dinosaurs or astronomy, but they upset both of those worlds with their suggestion that certain dinosaurs died out because a giant asteroid hit the earth and sent so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocked out the sun, and created what would later be called a nuclear winter. I have a friend who was working on his PhD in astronomy at the time, and I remember him complaining about how the Alvarez team knew nothing about astronomy, but here they were trying to act like they were experts in that world. But that theory is now the top theory about what killed off the dinosaurs.
What a great anecdote. It sure does illustrate the point! I recall reading about the Alvarezes in high school biology.
I suspect the same dynamic may be playing out, once again, with respect to Graham Hancock's hypothesis about very old human civilizations potentially being erased by the Younger Dryas impacts some 11-12 thousand years ago.
Despite what appears to be compelling evidence, mainstream scientists seem to be having that bizarre immune response to his ideas. It reminds me of Max Planck's famous quip that "science progresses one funeral at a time."
Thank you for raising questions about the peer review process. Here is an article that goes into some detail about it:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1420798/#:~:text=Abuse%20of%20peer%20review,These%20have%20all%20happened.
Hi, Jason; I'm delighted that you got something out of this week's essay!
Epstein affair aside, I believe the biggest problem with peer review is that—as with any discipline—progress tends to come from lunatic fringes, rather than from establishment cores.
In my view, the glorification of peer review is turning science into yet another orthodoxy that buttresses entrenched economic structures. History repeats itself.
I agree that it often does from the fringes. For instance, the Alvarez team, a father (who was a physicist) and son (a geologist), were not specialists in dinosaurs or astronomy, but they upset both of those worlds with their suggestion that certain dinosaurs died out because a giant asteroid hit the earth and sent so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocked out the sun, and created what would later be called a nuclear winter. I have a friend who was working on his PhD in astronomy at the time, and I remember him complaining about how the Alvarez team knew nothing about astronomy, but here they were trying to act like they were experts in that world. But that theory is now the top theory about what killed off the dinosaurs.
What a great anecdote. It sure does illustrate the point! I recall reading about the Alvarezes in high school biology.
I suspect the same dynamic may be playing out, once again, with respect to Graham Hancock's hypothesis about very old human civilizations potentially being erased by the Younger Dryas impacts some 11-12 thousand years ago.
Despite what appears to be compelling evidence, mainstream scientists seem to be having that bizarre immune response to his ideas. It reminds me of Max Planck's famous quip that "science progresses one funeral at a time."