William M. Briggs, statistician to the stars, has a few things to say about the “peer review” process, and they aren’t pretty,
I am a scientist and I have lived around fellow scientists for many years and I know their feeding habits well. I therefore know that the members of our secular priesthood are ordinary folk. But civilians were blind to this fact because our public relations department has labored hard to tell the world of our sanctity. “Scientists use peer review which is scientific and allows ex cathedra utterances. Amen.”
But the CRU “climategate” emails have revealed the truth that scientists are just people and that peer review is saturated with favoritism, and this has shocked many civilians. It has shaken their faith and left them sputtering. They awoke to the horrible truth: Scientists are just people!
Now all the world can see that scientists, like their civilians brothers, are nasty, brutish, and short-tempered. They are prejudiced, spiteful, and just downright unfriendly. They are catty, vindictive, scornful, manipulative, narrow-minded, and nearly incapable of admitting to a mistake. And they are cliquey.
Thus, we see that the CRU crew define a “good scientist” as one who agrees with them, a “bad scientist” or “no scientist” as one who does not agree with them, and a “mediocre scientist” as somebody who mostly agrees with them. Further, these judgments are carried to the peer-review process.
Claiming lack of peer review was once a reasonable weapon in scientists’ argument armamentarium. After climategate, all can see that this line of logic is as effective as a paper sword.
For example: the CRU crew publicly cry, “If our skeptics had anything to say, let them do it through peer review, otherwise their claims don’t count.” Never mind that this parry is a logical fallacy—an argument is not refuted because it was uttered outside a members-only journal. Pay attention to what they say privately:
Proving bad behavior [about peer review] is very difficult. If you think that [Geophysical Research Letters editor] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.1
They say that this journal or that one, because it dared publish peer-reviewed work that did not agree with the CRU consensus should be banished from the fold, and that its editors should resign or be booted, and that everybody should agree not to cite papers from those journals, and so on.
In other words, use muscle and not mind if you don’t like the results. Get rid of the editor and put an agreeable apparatchik in his place.
Peer review – the last refuge of a scoundrel?
Seriously though, I encourage all Netizens to read the whole thing, he makes quite a number of good points about this whole sordid turn of affairs.
In many ways, it is very good that this scandal came out and that this all is being revealed. Please keep in mind as I say this that I myself am a scientist. The peer review process for most scientific journals is a joke. In many cases, “peer reviewing” simply amounts to editing/proofreading to make sure that submissions conform to the style guidelines of the particular journal. In other cases, such as the ones Briggs is decrying here, peer review becomes an excuse to institute political censorship of controversial topics.
But yes, the old canard that something isn’t “science” because it isn’t published in a “peer reviewed journal” is bogus. The ultimate peer reviewing is not whether other scientists agree or disagree with the theory and choose whether it should be published or not, but whether they can falsify it via their own research. And this applies across the board (including, I might add, to questioning evolution – nothing ought to be “sacrosanct” in science).
Yet, this seems to be one of the striking features of the modern scientific establishment today – the reliance upon “science by consensus.” Personally, I think this is a feature of the fact that most science done today is by committee and collaboration. Sorry to disabuse the romanticists out there, but the days of the lone wolf scientist, sitting in his lab, mumbling to himself in an arcane tongue while scribbling random equations and whatnot on a chalkboard are long gone. Science today is a collaborative effort – which is good because it pools resources and improves the rainfall from brainstorming sessions (and let’s face it – equipment is expensive), but also has the downside that it encourages consensus thinking which discourages dissenters from trying (or sometimes even being able to try) to pursue ideas that differ from the mainstream.
This has been the case in the “global warming” debate. Because some of the leading climatologists back in the late 1990s decided early on that global warming is real, dissenters from this were shut out. Because so much money is on the line, and because the issue was cast in stark, eschatological terms to the point that we either “do something” or we “all die,” the pressure to suppress dissent was even greater than it would have been for a less politically and emotionally charged topic. Hence, Chicken Little was put in charge of the peer-review process and we’ve wasted untold billions of dollars on climate research that was based upon a fallacious premise and had to be supported by professional dishonesty, as the email wad from the CRU server testifies.
Tags: Global Warming, Science
