Comment by yummypaint

Comment by yummypaint 6 months ago

Have you personally reviewed a non-zero number of papers? What is this statement based on? For a thread ostensibly about science, the comments are disappointingly lacking in evidence and heavy on vibes.

Maybe people could learn about what peer review is before posting their strong feelings about it? The purpose certainly isn't to replicate people's experiments, that happens after publication and not by referees. One of a reviewer's duties is to look at whether the study could be replicated given the included information. That is a very different thing.

Also, just because something has made it past peer review also doesn't mean it isn't controversial in the field.

jostmey 6 months ago

I’ve only peer reviewed a few papers. I’ve submitted my share of papers for review

This is my academic profile https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bxn78bkAAAAJ&hl=en

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mike_hearn 6 months ago

He isn't saying the purpose of peer review is to replicate work. And yes I've personally reviewed quite a lot of papers (from outside of academia), also occasionally reviewed peer reviews.

What he is saying is that peer review is treated by academia as a close to gold standard, when it's really more like a bronze standard. It's a bit like finding a software company that exclusively uses volunteer post-commit code review with no unit tests or static typing, and in which the only testing process is to push to production and see if anyone inside the company complains.

It's not useless as a concept, and it's generally better to have a paper that's reviewed than one that isn't unless the field has been captured by ideologues. But there are so many common problems it can't fix, not even in principle.

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