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Even so, it was a good demonstration of the point above: the peer review process in journals is not designed to keep out garbage, and is incentivized to apply less scrutiny when the subject is politically convenient.

Peter Thiel in this recent talk argues by inference that this problem is likely deeper and more pervasive in hard sciences than in the humanities. https://youtu.be/lO0KH-TgvbM?t=22m20s

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That's my issue with it, really - I think it was widely presented and received as having "demonstrated" something, but if you look closely, by reasonable standards it didn't.

Actually if you dig up the authors' initial article about it, IIRC at the end there's a line like "so what does any of this actually prove? Well, we'll leave that for you to decide." If the authors can't say what their experiment proved, I think it's reasonable to conclude it didn't prove anything :D

Any evaluation metric is subject to political influences. Whatever the exact mechanism, it's people who are evaluating the papers, and people have political views.

The time Thiel pines for is simply the time when the US government spent more money funding science, so that there was less competition to get funding. https://ssti.org/blog/changing-nature-us-basic-research-tren...

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