Publishing a paper in a fake journal does damage the validity of the claims. Papers with sufficient evidence for their claims can get published in journals with strict peer review policies. By choosing such a crap journal the authors are essentially admitting that Nature or Science would never accept their arguments.
Do you have any evidence that this is actually true?
Yes. Every few months I see a new study about how academic research grants are handed out more or less at random, how journals are heavily biased toward positive results, how journals are biased toward authors with previous citations, etc.
All this seriously challenges the claim that if you have sufficient evidence you will get published by a top journal.
Similarly, is there any evidence for the claim that, "If n observers each detect a falsehood with probability p then the probability of missing the falsehood is (1-p)^n."
Go ask Kitty Genovese about the validity of this formula.
http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/uploads/MarkLevine200706...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037%2F0003-066X.62.6.555
From the abstract:
> Using archive material we show that there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive.
(Further, why mention the bystander effect at all? It's a little confusing)
Re: the formula (1-p)^n. It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution . If the observers are independent then the formula holds. If they're not then it holds approximately according to how dependent the different observers are.
What you said originally was that if the author's evidence was sufficient then he would have been able to get in published in a better journal. But if you're admitting that journals are biased, then surely you must see that your original assertion doesn't always --or maybe even often-- hold. Maybe it's true, but I'm certainly not willing to accept it on faith.
"If the "better" journals have more accurate reviewers or more reviewers then yeah, they will publish fewer falsehoods."
Your definition of 'better' journals sounds like a tautology. How do you know that 'better' journals have better reviewers? Can you actually prove that having better reviewers is what makes 'better' journals better?
I'd certainly be willing to be persuaded by evidence, but right now I believe that the best journals are the ones with the best vetting process about as much as I believe the best vodka is the one that costs the most, the world's best author is the one with the most sales, etc.
The journal that a paper is published in should absolutely affect our assessment of the facts in it - if the journal tends to publish only bullshit, we should mark any article that appears in that journal with a pretty high bullshit factor. That's not to say that it can't be overcome, but it's still a mark against.
I'd personally argue that the a priori likelihood of us finding a rock that fell to earth from outer space that happens to contain bacteria inside it (given that we know life is relatively rare) is so low that, coupled with the shady journal it's published in, the claim is so extraordinary that it would be very difficult to provide certain enough evidence to make me think it's true. As in, I'd probably put the probability that this is a straight up fraudulent hoax higher than the probability that this is actually true evidence of alien life.
It effectively does. Suppose the author had good, convincing evidence of bacterial life. He wouldn't send the data to a third rate journal.
If the journal is not credible, has published unreliable science in the past, has a stated agenda, and does not have an above-board peer-review process, then it is no more worthy of trust than the World News Daily.
Undermining the credibility of the journal a paper is published in is fair game when the credibility of the journal is the only reason any credibility is assigned to the paper.
Again, I'm not saying that the paper is any good. I'm just saying that people should refute the claims in the paper instead of attacking the delivery method.
> I'm just saying that people should refute the claims in
> the paper instead of attacking the delivery method.
But in 90% of all cases, the paper-journal quality correlation works rather well.