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Comment by Whoppertime | Hacker News Reader

Peer Review seems like a system designed to encourage group think. The findings of Copernicus that the Earth rotated around the sun instead of vice versa would not pass peer review. Nor would Louis Pasteur's Germ Theory.

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Physicists have been using preprint servers for decades, which means anyone can put a paper on the internet for everyone in the field to read and evaluate. So this idea that Copernicus would be suppressed under the current system is absurd. Einstein and Bohr's ideas passed peer review, as radical as they were. Every physicist is hoping for data that contradict our current theories. It was a huge disappointment when the only result of the LHC was to confirm the standard model.

For all the flaws of academic publishing, we are still in a much better place than when church dogma was the gatekeeper of knowledge.

If I understand correctly, only one of Einstein's papers was ever subjected to peer review. He didn't like it. [0]

There are some situations where peer review has led to groupthink. The one that comes to mind is the amyloid hypothesis. [1]

[0] https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-ein...

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the level of peer review of physics journals in the early 20th century. Note that Annalen der Physik was publishing 90-95% of submissions, so there was still some review process. I also wonder how much of that had to do with the average quality of a researcher working in physics back then, since physics was still a specialized pursuit of a very small number of people. We have orders of magnitude more people working in science today, so it might not be feasible for journals to publish 90-95% of submissions without a significant drop in quality. I think the solution is for more fields to adopt the model that most of math/CS/physics already follows. Put everything up on preprint servers and allow people to cite preprints. That way the community can accept ideas and build on them regardless of whether a specific paper makes it into published journals.

Yeah I agree. The only good system is one where I judge the validity of the work. Especially if its something I don't know about because then I have no baises.

You may think it’s a joke. But it’s pretty much the core idea of the Enlightenment (that everyone can think for themselves and don’t need priests to tell them what to think). The motto of the Royal Society is “Nullius in verba”, “take nobody’s word for it”.

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