It would be a much better idea if double-blind peer review were a default. See "Nobel and Novice: Author Prominence Affects Peer Review": https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4190976
In those domains, everyone knows everyone else. Even if you hid the name, looking at the writing style, the subject, the choice of analysis software, the type of study. etc would largely give away who the authors are. For example I bet you could figure out that Richard Stallman wrote a particular paper, even if I removed his name from it. Or on HN, how many times have you read a comment and gone, "that sounds like..." even without fully noticing who posted it.
Every time this is raised, inevitably people will pipe up and say "Oh, you're just not a <specialist in field>, that's why you can't read the paper!"
For example, a new particle discovery paper was being debated in a forum and several people raised the issue that the paper was impenetrable, and was followed with the usual retorts of "you're not a particle physicist!". There was also a response from a particle physicist who works at CERN. He basically said that he himself could not understand the paper, despite working on a similar experiment on a different instrument. His office was down the hall from the office where the paper was written, but each team has their own terminology, jargon, and instrument-specific calibrations. Essentially, they can review their own papers, but nobody else can meaningfully validate it, or even understand it in a useful way!
The problem with how modern science is performed is that it rewards the act of publishing a paper, not the utility, validity, or comprehensibility of the paper.
In fact, writing papers to superficially look more 'serious' is rewarded, so papers that start off quite readable are often edited to be more obtuse and full of unnecessary symbols, terminology, or equations.
I noticed this in Computer Science, where earlier papers in the field from the 60s and 70s were very readable, but then slowly started getting filled with Greek symbols and obscure terminology for no reason. There is no long history of Ancient Greek Computer Science that needs to be preserved for continuity with papers published hundreds of years ago! This is pure intellectual wankery, and has resulted in people like me unable to follow some modern CS papers on topics that I'm already familiar with.
PS: Imagine the quality of "open source libraries" if everyone got accolades for publishing their code to GitHub, NuGet, or NPM, but no reward for anything else. No in-place updates. No direct usage. No pull requests. No feedback other than a one-time rubber stamp. No issue tracker. Nothing. Just... publish your code once and walk away, you get a cookie. Doesn't even matter if it compiles. Doesn't matter if it's pseudo-code you made up yourself. Just get on there, and you get something. But you get nothing for anything else.
Picture that.
That's modern science.
Right now we have papers simply filled with nonsense (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12517-021-08021-2) and papers on midi-chlorians (https://www.livescience.com/59927-midi-chlorians-paper-accep...). Even without the needlessly over-complicated writing, some papers may really only be able to be meaningfully reviewed by a small number of experts, but that won't be a huge number. Really I'd be happy if we managed to catch the papers any child in grade school could spot as phony.
Maybe we shouldn't be asking if peer-review is a good idea based on it's performance so far until we give it a serious effort.
Yesterday I started looking for a token embedding method, and my search turned up word2vec and GLoVe. After skimming both papers I am leaning toward word2vec solely because it was easier for me to understand the big idea, even though GLoVe may perform better.
Personally I would rather see code than a LaTeX-typeset equation. With typeset equations, the author has plausible deniability that you didn't interpret their notation just right, or oops that was supposed to be a boldface capital X, which implies a different data type. But if you provide code, anyone can run it and independently verify the results.
Maybe the fact that no one can independently verify your equations/pseudocode is a feature, not a bug.
I was a PC member for what is now called NeurIPS, and I remember one particular disagreement with a conference co-chair who advocated blinded reviews.
I have since come to believe that the above objections to blinding are mistaken, and that things should generally be moved to double-blind where at all possible.
What happened is, I participated in blinded review processes (for proposals and for conferences) and they turned out to be different. Just that level of de-coupling -- where you aren't 100% sure that the author/proposer is who you suspect -- turns out to matter a great deal psychologically. It changes the framing. And more important, the results seem better.
You can't do much.