[_pius]

actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.

Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out …

actually, having read what you wrote, saying that “journal clubs are vicious … everybody’s got their … knives out” undermines your argument by implying that even good papers will be “roundly critiqued” in that setting, making this about as weak a point as anybody can make.

—

on further reflection, what I do find to be a strong point but in favor of Loeb’s argument is the fact that it triggered the scientists who wrote this comment and its grandparent to underscore the point of the article by more or less heaping scorn on the author, listing their own credentials, and proceeding to make — forgive me — non sequitur arguments from authority instead of substantively refuting the claims.

if this is what happens to a former department chair at Harvard when they question orthodoxy, it indeed does not augur well for less-credentialed researchers, regardless of the merit of their work.

[dekhn]

the only good papers are the ones that survive multiple rounds of critiquing from a wide range of experts. Even great papers have problems, the point of journal clubs is to argue out all the varying reasonable lines (not the fringe ones) of ways the paper could be making a false conclusion (typically due to bad experimental technique or mistaken data analysis).

[mannykannot]

How would that have worked out in the example you have given, prior to a successful delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment? Would Bell's theorem have been consigned to the scrap heap? Would delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments then have been performed when they were?

By these standards, Darwin should have been rejected on the grounds of his faulty model of biological inheritance.

There needs to be some slack, because sometimes critics are more convincing than they are right.

[dekhn]

No, the point of delayed choice quantum eraser is that it's the first really simple experimental setup that non-physicists can understand, and see how it violates the simple assumption of classical physics. It's sort of the Hershey Chase experiment, but for QM. If DCQE hadn't been done, Bell would have been fine, as the last of the no-loophole experiments are being run now.

[mcint]

To compress further, journal clubs [war game a paper's methods, results, and conclusions], so to speak.