We need more scientific societies. Modern peer review is super modern. Go back to the origins of science and it was all about a real community—setting high standards and having just a few people decide what to publish. It wasn’t trying to be “objective” — it was just high standards, determined invisibly by the members of the society. “Should we publish this?” asked the society.
Alas, scale ruins everything. Nevertheless, I strongly believe “science is friendship”
> Sounds like a recipe for serious inequity to me
If it works better, it works better. The problem with the society method is it didn't work better than a decentralised scientific system.
One of the weaknesses to such a system is human nature. We want to believe, which leads to farces like Piltdown man, which was a farce by a man called Charles Dawson (not Darwin, not the natural selection guy, though I did a double take at first), against the Geological Society and society at large. The farce wasn’t definitively disproven until 41 years later, which is quite the downside risk of the gentlemen’s club research group gatekeeping scholarly research, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. This is a good thing which seems like it’s in response to grumblings about irreproducibility and bias, but those issues will likely always be with us and must be considered anew each time an experiment is designed, and each time a print run is cut.
I’m having trouble finding a downside besides vote buying or voting rings, now that which way one has voted is now attributable. Can you think of any risks under the new system?
That model had some major issues. Too many opposing theories to the "established norm" were dismissed, among things we now know were wrong all along.
Although it could raise the standard of the process itself (methodology, writing) to very high levels, it restricted innovative ideas or unpopular outcomes.