🔋Peer Review
🔋Peer Review
The current peer review system is severely flawed and stunts real ingenuity and scientific progress.
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In December, an article titled, “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help” was released in one of the most prestigious journals, Nature. I am all for open dialogue and the freedom to publish ideas freely even if they are hundreds of year old ideas that don’t work repackaged in a nice bow. Even more, degrowth motives such as sustainability and less consumerism may even be virtuous endeavors. The journal has come a long way from the 70s when its editor, John Maddox, was a vocal critic of Malthusian ideology and similar ideas brought forth by catastrophists like Paul R. Ehrlich at the time with his book The Population Bomb.
Degrowth theory argues that economic growth measured by GDP should be abandoned as a policy objective. Policy should instead focus on economic and social metrics such as life expectancy, health, education, housing, and ecologically sustainable work as indicators of both eco-systems and human well-being.
Shortly following that doozy from Nature, scrutiny of plagiarism in science caused presidents of major universities like Harvard to step down, amidst a sea of controversy. My point in highlighting these is to show at the core there is an ideological possession that has taken hold of academia and peer review journals. Other instances include Nature articles that declare no competing interests, but behind closed doors have received billions of dollars. Further, there is a comical series of fake articles being pushed into journals to show the ideological absurdity that has occurred in certain journals. While these examples do a good job of showing the deterioration in one of the most prestigious Western institutions, ideology is not and does not reveal the fundamental reasons why.
Peer Review
Throughout my time in university, the peer review system was held up as a pillar of achievement and an institution to be lauded. A system of rigor and validation that your work has been deemed important by other scientific experts. Only through the current system can we be truly confident that the information you read is important, accurate, and trustworthy.
Researchers will target certain journals based on the field, novelty, and impact of the work. Once a manuscript is constructed it is sent to the editor who decides whether it is potentially fit for that journal. If yes, it is sent out to other experts in that field to review and ask for revisions. This process may happen multiple times before the manuscript is finally accepted or rejected by the editor who is considering what the reviewers said about it as well as keeping in mind what types of work they want in their journal.
Each scientific field is different, but for the most part, the peer review system does increase the trustworthiness of an article, but it has some fundamental flaws that are sewing the seeds of its downfall. The funding mechanism for research and the nature of the peer review process are the fundamental reasons why there has been a stark deterioration in fundamental scientific discoveries over the last 50 years.
Incentives
While it is catchy and easy to point out when political ideologies creep into and influence science which is supposed to be truth-seeking and politically agnostic, these are just the manifestations of deeper-rooted issues with the current system.
Philanthropists used to throw money at scientists and give them the freedom to research what they wanted which often resulted in deep understandings that had a great impact down the road. With today’s system, funding sources often require details about what the research is about and only awarding funding to predetermined fields of study, resulting in little hope for new inventions outside the prescribed realms of research.
Before World War II, the government was rarely involved in funding research. The primary funding mechanism was local industry, philanthropy, and universities themselves. Today, the government makes up the lion’s share of funding for scientific research. On top of this, many universities are public and most students are funded through federal loans. In every case, someone is incentivized to cater to whom they receive funding, and the question is how much trust, freedom, and leeway is the researcher who is the expert in the given field granted to truly explore areas of personal interest and importance. Today, the monetary incentives lie in the hands of the government at every step of the way, through funding students and the universities by extension, all the way down to determining who gets research grants.
Einstein among others was a vocal critic of the modern peer review system.
We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere. - Physics Today
Fundamental Problems
The birth of modern peer review was initiated by the British government when they took an interest in the publishing of scientific articles. They paired Butterworths(now Elsevier) with Springer and began funding research at an accelerated pace. Political entrepreneur Robert Maxwell was a pioneer in transforming journals into massive profit-making machines. These profit machines were dependent on government funding, which at the time was just ramping up. We know now, over 50 years later that it has not and shows no signs of slowing down, meaning these toxic entities can continue to thrive.
It is interesting and worth noting that Maxwell is the father of Ghislaine Maxwell who along with Jeffrey Epstein were engaged in sex trafficking minors on a large scale. Epstein was known for his affiliations and large philanthropic donations to the scientific community, especially Harvard. As you can imagine this is a rabbit hole in itself, one in which I have not fully explored, nor intend to. Coincidence or not, it should at least raise some suspicion that these are the people who became wealthy and were instrumental in the creation of the modern peer-review journal system.
In the beginning, even once the government started getting into funding science during and following WWII, they were giving free rein for research until the early 1970s when they cut down on funding and increased disclosure and transparency on what was being researched. With this explosion in government funding, like most things, once the government becomes involved, inflation ensues. The number of publications and Ph.D.s exploded right along with the funding mechanism. In Austrian economic theory, economic interventions spur misallocations of capital and are less productive uses of capital. If this explosion in Ph.D.s was because many more qualified students deserved them and many more worthwhile articles were necessary, we should’ve had a greater scientific impact and output than we have had over that time frame. Instead, I’ve argued there has been less.
Psychology
The profit-seeking motives of journal publishers aside, it is human psychology to perpetuate this flawed system. Humans are tribal which is pretty clearly established, which means they tend to act along with the group. When many people agree on something or authority figures suggest something to be true, people are more likely to accept it. Peer review journals play off these key psychological realities of human beings to keep themselves alive. Instead of verifying whether something is true, or doing work to prove the contrary, people can just trust that the panel of experts agreed this is true. While this is fine most of the time as most people are trustworthy, there can be group-supported fraud as well as suppressed truth. While the former can be thought of as ideology pushed on the masses, the latter is where truths are suppressed and discouraged. This can either be because it would negate one of the other reviewers’ thesis, it goes against the journal or reviewer’s financial interest, or simply because the theory is too advanced for any of the editors or reviewers. You can bet many of the groundbreaking discoveries would have been labeled heinous and struck down because it goes against conventional thinking. In fact, there is already a long track record of this happening over the years in science, astronomy, and even archeology.
Journals are supposed to be an avenue to showcase and publish groundbreaking research. Academia is supposed to be open source and not be like industry where companies often seek to hide discoveries under intellectual property. Today, most journals suck. They are all paywalled and anyone in the field knows that you either rely on your university access to literature, pay an exorbitant amount of money for each journal, or use third-party programs that “steal” articles and hope they have already scrubbed the article you’re looking for. Anyone who has to deal with this knows that journals clearly do not provide a good product to the world.
Often students are judged on the number of articles they have published and the ability to get into more prestigious journals with a higher impact factor. While showcasing a student’s industriousness, it also showcases the perverse incentive placed upon professors and passed down to students. Not everyone is cut out to be a scientist or researcher, but many institutions are training Ph.D.s to be engineers rather than true scientists by maximizing quantity over quality.
More recognition comes to those who tackle things like an engineer by solving application-specific problems, chasing government money, and publishing more papers. A true scientist who is solving a long 10-year-plus time horizon problem and hasn’t put out any articles is going to have a hard time keeping their job and getting into a big journal if anyone realizes it is groundbreaking.
There has also been a lot of talk about some literature not being accepted because it doesn’t fit with the narratives of journals. When this is the case, there is less incentive to research these truths in the future, because so much rides on getting published for the sake of one’s career.
Conclusion
Government involvement in science is not a good thing. Most people believe that government grants for science are good and for science to grow and improve, there should be even greater allocation in this way. While this would increase the size of the science industry, it would not improve it. I have already shown here the deterioration in quality from the increase in government funding for science.
It would be painful to cut government funding, just like it would be for healthcare, unemployment, social security, military, etc, but it would promote the stronger long-term health of science and spur more fundamental physics and science discoveries. Unfortunately, it is not likely that any politician nor most voters have the appetite for this, which is why the exorbitant debts and deficits will continue in their exponential increase which is a fundamental thesis of mine if you have been a reader of mine.
In an attempt at brevity, I didn’t include the value of money which is also integral to this thesis as I’ve discussed it in greater length before. In short, the devaluation of currency causes a decrease in time preferences. Over the long term, this reduces the quality of many things, raises the government's share of the economy, and reduces economic productivity.
Overall, the monetary incentives in place both explicit and implicit in research, the fundamental origins of peer review, and the psychological trappings of peer review lead this flawed system to be heralded as a prestigious institution instead of the chains holding back human ingenuity and scientific progress that it is. Until next week,
-Grayson
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