Not true. First of all, peer review applies to purely observational and experimental studies which will be taken seriously regardless of established theory. There’s nothing about peer review that would eliminate anomalous observational or experimental results. For studies dealing with purely empirical results peer review will address possible methodological shortcomings – which is exactly what we want to do with anomalous data: see if there are explanations for it that the researchers hadn’t considered. A perfect example was the “superluminous” neutrinos.
Second of all, new theories are proposed all the time and new theories necessarily “deviate from established theory.” That’s exactly the point of proposing a new theory.
Not true. First of all, I haven’t created anything in this context. Second of all, peer review isn’t a “system for slowing innovation in science” – it’s a system for slowing the spread of bullshit through science.
Science can only progress or innovate when it is building on reliable data. If you don’t have a filtering process (or if your filtering process isn’t selective enough) you end up trying to generate theories to explain observations and data that aren’t actually true in the first place. You end up with theories that predict garbage because you accepted the garbage as legitimate in the first place.
Pure ad hominem bullshit. You seem to be taking the fact that I disagree with you about scientific methodology very personally. I said something in general about swallowing every bit of fringe science that ends up on the internet; why would you take that as directed at you in particular? Could you please try to get your ego out of the way and make this about the ideas instead of about the people involved?
More ad hominem nonsense. You don’t know anything about me so how do you plan to support these assertions about me personally? About you don’t bother and stick to the ideas instead of trying to make this personal?
And of course, besides being ad hominem and unsupported it’s false. I’m always willing to listen to new explanations and theories. I think they’re interesting.
The problem is that we can’t take every idea we hear seriously so where do we draw the line?
And yet most scientists seem to agree that peer review is a worthwhile institution that helps to ensure that scientific studies yield useful results. Open-mindedness is important: so many scientific discoveries have been serendipitous that it only makes sense for scientists to try to be aware of results that confound their expectations. So many modern scientific theories are so wildly counterintuitive that they would have been missed by anyone with a truly closed mind.
What you keep missing here despite it having been stated pretty clearly already is that once you’ve done all the open-minded navel gazing you still have to make judgments about what is and isn’t most likely to be true given the evidence at hand. That’s where peer review comes in. It’s a filtering process. Open-mindedness is required to generate ideas but you also need to eliminate ideas that aren’t working out so well. That’s where adversarial peer review comes in.
