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Comment by yupitsme123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not the person you replied to, but I think that in the lay world, people do indeed think that peer review is as you've described. If it's not, then maybe it should be?

Research gets cited constantly in public debates and is used for policy decisions, so the public should be able to quickly separate the good from the bad, the "maybe this is true" from the "this is empirically proven."

The public has lost a lot of trust in Science because research papers have been used to push political agendas, which can then never be questioned because doing so means arguing with a supposed peer-reviewed scientific consensus.

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Nothing is ever “proven”. There is simply more or less support for a theory or proposition.

Replication and meta-analysis are an important part of this.

Most scientists are in fact very conservative with how they claim their results - less so university PR departments and “study shows” clickbaiters.

I approve of this comment.

I wish this comment was more representative of my personal experience in science.

Instead I got PIs happy to say that weak evidence "proved" their theory and to try suppress evidence that negatively impacted "fundablity". The most successful scientists I worked with were the ones who always talked like a PR puff piece.

What field, may I ask?

Applied physics. I'd prefer not to get too specific. Most of my peers are working for the US DoD or DoE now.

I wonder if what you described is due to the money incentive?

I did theoretical physics (no money) and my experience totally matches what the other person described.

> public has lost a lot of trust in Science because research papers have been used to push political agendas, which can then never be questioned because doing so means arguing with a supposed peer-reviewed scientific consensus

The public has lost trust in science because 10 to 30% of it is scientifically illiterate [1]. (Tens of millions of American adults are literally illiterate [2].)

That's what lets activists and politicians cherrypick bad science that supports their position or cast a scientific consensus as unquestionable.

[1] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

That's certainly true but I think there's also a very real issue as described by GP. Research gets cited in a political setting as a rhetorical tool. That cycle does a lot to erode trust in the establishment because it incentivizes non-scientists (who are otherwise uninvolved) to behave as though the process is a partisan effort to be interfered with for the benefit of one's "team" rather than an objective pursuit to be funded at arms length for the betterment of society at large.

Obviously reproducing results as part of peer review is not a workable (or even coherent) solution. I don't pretend to have any idea what a solution might be. The obvious issue is that academic publications were never intended as political tools and should not be made into that.

On several occasions I've had interactions with laymen where I found myself thinking "if only you hadn't had access to pubmed and way too much motivation we'd both be better off right now" yet I firmly believe that free and open access to information is a huge net benefit to society on the whole.

> I'm not the person you replied to, but I think that in the lay world, people do indeed think that peer review is as you've described. If it's not, then maybe it should be?

It is not, and it cannot be. It is unrealistic to expect a referee working in their free time to confirm studies that often cost millions of dollars. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what peer review is and why it is useful in popular or heavy vulgarised science.

Politicians, journalists, and university press offices are guilty of this, and they are those abusing peer review to give some studies more weight than they deserve.

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