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Comment by D-Machine | Hacker News Reader

> The naive public does not believe anything in particular about peer review

You'd need to provide evidence or an argument for this. The media reports on things in part based on journal prestige, and likely when questioned, people will say they can trust such things because good scientists have looked at the work and say it is good. This would be an implicit belief that peer review is generally working well, even if they don't use the term "peer review".

> You seem stuck somewhere in the middle, caring deeply about a system you don’t seem to fully understand.

Extremely presumptuous, as I work in this system, and have provided plenty of evidence for my claims. You've provided only sneers.

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You've provided evidence that prominent journals experience retractions, fraudulent results, etc. All true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to decide what gets published.

You've provided evidence that peer-reviewed science often turns out to be incomplete, inaccurate, wrong, fraudulent etc. All true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to assure completeness, accuracy, or freedom from fraud.

A peer reviewer reads a paper and make comments on it. That's it! They don't check primary data, they don't investigate methods, they don't interrogate scientists, they don't re-run experiments just to double check. They assist a journal's editors in editing--that's it.

The check on published scientific results is the scientific process itself, not the publishing process. Prominent results attract further investigation, which confirms or disproves the reality of the underlying phenomena. Again: that's not the job of peer review.

Do some people ascribe too much authority to peer review? Yes, for sure. IMO your comments in this thread are exacerbating that problem, not addressing it.

> A peer reviewer reads a paper and make comments on it. That's it! They don't check primary data, they don't investigate methods, they don't interrogate scientists, they don't re-run experiments just to double check. They assist a journal's editors in editing--that's it.

Um, what? I have done all these things in reviews, and know other academics that have done these things as well. More confusingly though, if you are saying most reviewers don't do these things (which I agree with), this would only strengthen my point?

I'll let readers decide if it is my comments that exacerbate the problem, or if, perhaps, it is apologism for journalistic peer review that might be causing bigger issues in the present day.

Would be interesting if you would be willing to share a paper you reviewed and detail your review process of it. I don't see how one could check primary data or interrogate scientists in a blind review process, for example.

This is IMO just bad faith sealioning, you can look at the whole replication crisis in psychology and social science (esp. the work of people like Nick Brown and the GRIM test, or Uri Simonsohn), or sites like Retraction Watch, and see clear evidence of everything I am saying. There are endless papers in ML research going into issues with test datasets and data duplication, etc. In plenty of cases all data and code is made open, so it is trivial to check data issues and methods.

Also, review is back and forth, and has rounds: you almost always interrogate the scientists of the paper you are reviewing, this almost like the definition of peer review. I don't think you have any idea of what you are talking about at all.

EDIT: Heck, just hop on over to https://openreview.net/ and take a look at the whole review process for some random paper (e.g. https://openreview.net/forum?id=cp5PvcI6w8_)

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