Peer Review II

[I Envy JTEM]

So Peer Review is gone. It was never perfect, never
very good but it's already gone, replaced by automated
censorship. What this means is, coming in the face of
RoboApproval, is that it's more important than ever for
people to finally realize what "Peer Review" is and when
it is valid as a form of argument.

Before the owners of what you think of as science
invented RoboReviews, eliminating the peers, it really
just came down to one or more people -- and I think
more than two would have been unusual -- going over
a paper and deciding if it was sound or not.

And lots of "Mistakes" happened. Lots & lots & lots of
mistakes.

The easy mistakes to identify are when junk is published.

They publish it, it gains a wide audience and people can
see that it's junk. So it gets exposed. The garbage that is
often published under Peer Review gets exposed.

Sometimes it's been done on purpose. Meaning, people
have submitted garbage to show that Peer Review lets
through garbage. Worthless babble has been submitted
under prestigious names, demonstrating that it's not the
work but the person who often counts. Total junk authored
by machine has been submitted, demonstrating that even
sheer nonsense will pass muster so long as it sounds
sciency.

But let's pretend Peer Review wasn't terrible made even
worse by eliminating the peers & going with AI. Let's
pretend that there is a decent intention, at least, in all
cases.

PEER REVIEW WOULD STILL BE A FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT.

"A nameless faceless authority didn't like the paper so it
has to be wrong."

So whenever you cite "Peer Review" you're making a fallacious
argument. But this doesn't mean that "Peer View," pretending it
still exists, couldn't ever be used in a legitimate way...

YOU NEED TO READ THE PEER REVIEW!

If you can access the "Peer Review," if you can read it and
identify WHY it rejected a paper, AND YOU CAN CONFIRM
THAT IT'S REASONING IS FACT BASED AND NOT MERE
OPINION, then that Peer Review would have been very
useful to you in an argument. Because it wouldn't be a
fallacious argument relying on the invocation of nameless
faceless authority, it would be based on facts.



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