[barry-cotter]

We know peer review is unnecessary for quality and progress in science because it only became a standard after WWII. Einstein published one peer reviewed paper.

There are multiple fields that have routed around peer review; everything that works on preprints and working papers. It takes more than two years to get an Economics paper published. If it took that long for things to get eyeballs progress would be exceedingly slow.

Peer review may have some good points but it certainly isn’t necessary to modern advancements in knowledge and understanding.

[dijksterhuis]

That one economics paper, as an example, could have made one seemingly innocuous assumption that might be overlooked by later work.

Let's say a paper that relies on the preprint take that assumption for granted. And then another paper references that one. And again. And again.

Then the fifth paper gets adopted by a government in some esoteric policy, which causes their economy to implode.

May not be necessary to just publish "stuff", but it is necessary to mitigate against the dangers of invalid assumptions.

[barry-cotter]

Peer Review has not stopped the situationyou describe from occurring in multiple fields. Social Psychology is particularly bad but cancer biology isn’t great either.

——-

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced. Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/5103048...

Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18

An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-hi...