Peer Review

Compromised

Peer Review

sorry - I love this cartoon, which reminds me of the nonsensical idea that we all somehow got here as a result of a non-intelligent “Big Bang”, but I can’t remember where I got it. In the case of peer review, I think the popular media should be “more explicit” in revealing their biases. Read on…

In an age where “the science” has become a laughingstock due to reports of fraud, plagiarism, fudged research, research heavily influenced by corporate and government grants, and where disagreeing with the “consensus” can get you kicked off the university path to a PhD, get you fired or de-funded, and black-balled by mainstream publications, so-called peer review is no longer any guarantee of objectivity or honest review. The “peers” doing the review are all too often in on the scam, and who selects which peers to ask for a review? You guessed it - the media operation that is itself biased.

Last year, in “Peer Reviews Block Contrary Scientific Ideas” I mentioned Coffee & Covid’s piece, written 10/3/23:

“…the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place…”

Roger Pielke Jr, in the Honest Broker  writing this week on April 16, 2024 about the corruption of scientific integrity in the media literature, said:  “Leading scientific journals have become increasingly political and partisan in recent years, for instance, Nature endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign][10]and the current editor of Science has opined on the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (a “charlatan and spoiler”)”

Ironically Nature  magazine, which is guilty of biased reporting and going along with the “consensus” at the expense of any contrary views, has now written about how AI could “disrupt scientific publishing”, of all things. So now we not only have to sort through “the science” to see whether any of it is valid or not; we also have to contend with knowing that it may have been at least partially written with artificial intelligence, which is itself suspect for going with the establishment consensus:

“How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing

The idea of chatbots writing referee reports for unpublished work is “very shocking” given that the tools often generate misleading or fabricated information, says Debora Weber-Wulff, a computer scientist at the HTW Berlin–University of Applied Sciences in Germany. “It’s the expectation that a human researcher looks at it,” she adds. “AI systems ‘hallucinate’, and we can’t know when they’re hallucinating and when they’re not.”…A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers are turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to evaluate others’ work… The authors of the study¹, posted on the arXiv preprint server on 11 March, examined the extent to which AI chatbots could have modified the peer reviews of conference proceedings submitted to four major computer-science meetings since the release of ChatGPT…. Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.”

I bolded peer review above because this is another evidence that peer reviews cannot be trusted, in other words, scientific consensus cannot be trusted. Hooray for substack, where objective analyses from scientists who may disagree with the “consensus” can be published without being censored.

Roger Pielke Jr in The Honest Broker  writes in “Climate Cooking”, (which title is I suppose a comparison to the idea of cooking the books), 

“The corruption of climate science occurred because some of our most important institutions have let us down. The scientific peer review process has failed to catch obvious methodological errors in research papers. Leading scientific assessments have ignored conflicts of interest and adopted flawed methods. The major media has been selectively incurious as to the impact of big money in climate advocacy on climate science, assessments, and policy.”

As in investing, where we are responsible for our own due diligence, every mainstream media report or article about science must be taken with a very large grain of salt.

There is a biblical principle that I can’t help but think of at this point: believing a lie and not searching for the truth leads to delusion:

“ ^… and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. ¹¹ For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie ¹² and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” 2 Thes. 2:10b-12