Peer Review

Adam Mastroianni of Columbia, starting off his interview with Razib was talking about an essay of his that had gone viral when he declared the peer review system, at least in his field of Social Psychology, as useless. There were veiled threats that important people might recommend him out of jobs over the idea.

Rule of thumb: when people misrepresent what your argument is, it means they haven't paid attention, or they would prefer to argue against something else, or both. If they had a refutation of your actual point they would stick with that. In this case, his claim is that peer review doesn't accomplish the indications of quality it is designed to. Too many articles spread over too many specialties with too few people qualified to judge them. In many cases the reviewer can tell who the author is because there are only six people who do this, and he knows it's not from his lab, so it must be from the other one. 

The emperor has no clothes.* But whoever points this out is seldom thanked. His critics are essentially claiming that he is arguing clothes have no use. Typical. 

I don't know how it is in other fields.  there may be places where this (relatively) new system of peer review, even with its overloading in the last twenty years, is useful.  But it is not the first time I have read this argument.

*Instead of the assistant village idiot, I originally wanted the model for this blog to be "that kid who said the emperor had no clothes."  But I could build a catchy title around that. My other possible name, which I still think of wistfull as a great blog name, was "Do I Have To Pull This Car Over?"