[baron_harkonnen]

> If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about.

Not only is this correct, but it is the origin of peer review as we know it today.

Despite what most academics assume, peer-review itself is a relatively new concept in science. Nearly all of the most incredible scientific discoveries were not subject to peer review as we know it today.

Peer review was in fact created in as a response to a decrease in scientific funding in the 1970s. It was a deliberate attempt to create credibility in order to bolster funding.

I find it somewhat absurd that the current state of peer review is considered a pillar of "good science", when not only has most of the greatest science done without it, but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis. And in general the vast majority of publish work being questionable garbage that only remains unquestioned because of a culture of fear around question the corner stone of artificial credibility created solely to increase funding.

[justinpombrio]

> but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis

The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized that ~half of published results in many fields fail to reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My impression was that this goes back as far as you care to look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to reproduce. So the only new thing is that we noticed this, which is a step forwards, not back. Is there reason to believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?

[MacsHeadroom]

It's not that older studies tended to be more accurate. It's that peers worked together in seclusion via lots of back-and-forth letters and collaboration over years, only "publishing" when they and their peer group were sure they had something worth sharing with the wider community.

This is how science was done up until some time in the 1970s. This is how real groundbreaking science is still done. The publishing prestige economy is of little actual value.