At the same time, you claim that we don’t know what the outcome of peer review has been or will be. If we’re to ‘look to the outcome of a policy, rather than its stated objective’, well, we have to know what that outcome is. You are suggesting that peer review was a conspiracy, but that nobody knows, exactly, what that conspiracy set out to achieve.

So, which is it? It’s a plot to achieve a very specific outcome, or it was a rushed experiment, the outcome of which we do not know?

Vague conspiratorial murmurings are best avoided for this reason. They offer an attractive way to repackage the world, and make it simpler, so that every effect has a cause that is human in origin — rather than simply accepting that, most of the time, we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, and unintended consequences rule our lives. Which seems to be the case here.

The government did push peer review, but they didn’t have some long-term vision for how it would make the scientific class subservient to the political class. All the time we unleash things into the world that exceed our control or even understanding. The idea that this was just a hamfisted, unmethodical graft onto science, because the government wanted to make sure it was giving its money to credible researchers, seems like the more natural explanation. It sounded good, and failed in practice. Common occurrence.

And anyway I find you hard to understand. On another post, you were chastising another person for saying essentially the same thing that you are saying here. It was a long and funny exchange, but still.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I got a copy and started reading it. The author starts by trashing Bem and applauding Wiseman. I distrust Wiseman so I might be biased against the author. But of course, Wiseman and the author are probably biased against Bem.

When one comes to terms with the fact that things more or less are as they was meant to be by the men with the power to make them be, one begins to appreciate the fact that all effects have causes, and that most causes are rooted, ultimately, in the acquisition or retention by such men of money, power, or money and power.

It follows that, only by blinding ourselves to the stated intentions of a policy and observing the actual outcomes of the policy, can we draw appropriate conclusions as to the purpose of the policy. In this case, the question of peer review, it is observed that, after World War II, a newly-spun social “tradition” or “practice” or “construct” was grafted onto the scientific establishment.

What was the nature of its implementation? Was it applied selectively, with experimental and control groups, and observed scientifically, to determine whether it yielded results superior or inferior? No: it was simply imposed, everywhere the same, all at once.

What were its outcomes? We don’t know, scientifically, because it wasn’t applied scientifically—from our perspective. We can only follow our intuitive powers of reason.

But we can be reasonably confident that the outcomes are about what were intended by those who engineered the underlying incentive structure.

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” — Edward Bernays

Almost anyone who has ever been involved in “peer review” has a large dose of contempt for the process. It seems the underlying cause is what President Eisenhower warned about in his long-ago Farewell Speech — the baleful influence of government funding. Publish-or-perish researchers need to toe the political line to get grants, and then they need to publish to get more grants. Meanwhile, universities dependent on government money need a stable of academics with stacks of publications.

The fact that most publications are hardly ever read and do not meaningfully advance science does not matter.

Solution is to kill the government funding.