I’m not saying the article is incorrect in any way, just that if peer review is a good thing and should be the standard one aspires to, then that’s exactly what it should be. A lack of peer review doesn’t imply anything negative about any particular report, article, paper, or whatever, although it’s certainly true that peer review will catch some mistakes and generally raise the quality of publications in terms of their factualness and analytic quality (though it will also keep out some perfectly fine papers that don’t meet some standard of newsworthiness or robustness, even if they are true and accurate).
I do think that this illustrates a major problem with a robust implementation of the scientific method in the tech context, though: they move at very different speeds. Peer review and the like takes time and money. And if you want to treat tech like public health, consider the major time and expense of getting FDA approval for drugs: 10 years and a billion dollars isn’t uncommon. This might be an extreme example, but try to imagine Cory’s beloved startups in Silicon Roundabout being forced to negotiate these sorts of hurdles. These are not considerations that young entrepreneurs want to be forced to go through, especially when they’re scrounging pennies and want to get something to the market as quick as possible.
