Re: OT: about peer review

It's a book that is designed to appeal to Cursitor Doom and other fans of fatuous conspiracy theories.

"Science is getting more complex over time and is becoming increasingly reliant on software code to keep the engine going. This makes fraud of both the hard and soft varieties easier to accomplish."

One has to wonder how.

Not that Jan Panteltje can cite any. Peer review isn't perfect, but it works better than anything else that anybody has come up with. It's very good at cracking down on stuff that is obviously wrong. I haven't refereed all that many scientific papers, but rejecting the ones that were obviously wrong was remarkably easy, and took a lot less work than finding and explaining more subtle errors.

Cursitor Doom does like to think that. It's all part of his addiction to fatuous conspiracy theories. He's too dim and too poorly educated to learn much about science, so he deludes himself that he doesn't have to bother because it isn't worthy of his attention.

Actually Einstein did that, and his relativistic corrections are a necessary part of the GPS system. His insight into the curvature of space-time was what made it possible for smarter people than you to understand what was going on with rather more precision than you can grasp.

As moronic puns go, this has to be the pits.

Usually post-graduate students who can be dragooned into working for free. My wife did edit a couple of scientific journals at one stage, and finding referees was a big part of the job.

Rather before peer-reviewed journals had been invented.

There's a whole industry claiming that humans don't cause global warming, paid for by the fossil carbon extraction industry. Only dim-wits like you and Cursitor Doom and John Larkin take them seriously

Try to make sense of spectroscopic data without it.

He may have persuaded you, but so did Le Sage.

The obviously wrong ones don't get published - at least not in peer-reviewed journals. The masses get a lot of their information from the mass-media, which is more into getting people's attention than it is into educating them.

Dutch science journalism is a whole lot better than English-language science journalism, but it clearly hasn't been able to educate you.

Every now and then someone writes a totally nonsense paper, basically a parody, and gets it reviewed and published. AI take the work out of even that.

It is the usual paranoid righttard rant against science. There are a few bad apples now and then typically in the life sciences. Blondot's N-rays was the last really bad example of truly appalling fake science in 1903.

What he claims about software not being available isn't true either. All the major observatories swap staff and codes and today a lot of their raw data is also publicly available along with the open source code on Github.

There has never been more easily available public access for citizen science since the advent of the internet.

You live a work of make believe sometimes. Einstein was correct (or at least more correct than any of the other competing theories to date).

Science is ultimately self correcting - nature is the final arbiter.

One well designed reproducible experiment that gives an unexpected result can still refute the most strongly held elegant theory.

If we lived in an ideal world, yes. However, we don't and big money/ special interests dictate what new research is allowed to reach the ears of the Great Unwashed. And with individuals like Bill Sloman claiming to act as Gatekeepers, you can *guarantee* igonrance will prevail.

Some of the parodies are so good that they get deliberately reprinted. One such that I can find on ADS in full is:

"On the imperturbability of Elevator Operators", Candlestickmaker, S. (after the style of astrophysicist Chandrasekhar)

Another I can vaguely recall was "Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown" and another one that Dirac thought so hilarious he paid to have it published in the exact layout of a specific learned journal.

Random Walk in Science has a few of them in.

This is an hypothesis. Cursitor Doom hasn't a clue how he might test it in way that might convince a disinterested observer that it was correct.

I have refereed a few papers for publication in the peer-reviewed instrument literature. Editors have trouble finding people to do that kind of unpaid work, and they spread their nets pretty widely. I wasn't any kind of gatekeeper - more cannon-fodder.

Curistor Doom's idea of ignorance is having an opinion that he doesn't share. Since his opinions do seem to be selected to allow him to stand out from the more or less rational crowd by being deliberately fatuous, this isn't to be taken seriously.

Not that John Larkin can cite an example.

But they do tend to be deliberate jokes, recognised as such by the referees who review them and editors who publish them. Science doesn't always take itself all that seriously.

Most scientific papers are published in for-profit journals or equivalent conference papers. The financial incentive is to accept most anything fast.

"Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" (Einstein and Rosen)

Einstein Versus the Physical Review

Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later in 1936. That much has long been known, at least to the editors of Einstein's collected papers. But the story of Einstein's subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community. Last March, the journal's current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume, and his colleagues uncovered the journal's logbook records from the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that referee's identity. Moreover, the story raises the possibility that Einstein's gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein, who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to be valid. ...

Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under the title "Do Gravitational Waves Exist?" with Rosen as coauthor. Although the original version of the paper no longer exists, Einstein's answer to the title question, to judge from his letter to Born, was "No." It is remarkable that at this stage in his career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant, Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was valid.

(excerpt)

Danke,

One fairly well known fake was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Alan Sokal submitted to see if "a leading North American journal of cultural studies" would publish it. They did.

But high prestige journals are worth more than run-of the mill journals, and careful refereeing is what lets them retain their high prestige.

No surprise there.

Selective editing of live interviews with real scientists does produce a lot of nonsense, and the kind of nonsense that nit-wits like you find seductive.

The kind of science journalist who produce written stuff for the Volkskrant and the NRC Handelsblad do much better, and much better than their US and UK equivalents.

Bit over your head, though.

But a whole lot less about what it means.

Of course not. It is over your head.

Russia is still busy trying to invade the Ukraine, which makes them war-makers rather than war mongers. Russia Today does spread the propaganda that Putin wants spread, so they are obviously war mongers, even if you haven't noticed.

You would.

"Cool" in that it holds the interest of a brain damaged geriatric.