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by sigmoid10 714 days ago
>This is peer reviewed, accepted science.

This is also something that people outside academia apparently don't understand. Peer review doesn't tell you anything about the validity of the science. It only ensures the methodology was correct. The original Pons & Fleischmann paper passed peer review and was published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry. It only got retracted after other people tried and failed to reproduce it. If you want to know whether science is legit or not, look out for reproduction by independent actors - not peer review.
2 comments
rcxdude 714 days ago
Indeed. Peer review is table stakes for the conversation, not an acceptance criteria for "true". Plenty of things get published that are generally regarded as wrong by those who work in the field.
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adastra22 714 days ago
There's journal peer review, and then there's scientific community peer review which involves acceptance of ideas and replication. They're not the same thing and unfortunately not often distinguished in speech or writing ("peer review" describes both). I thought that on HN it would be clear I was talking about the latter.

In this case, three separate labs have replicated this work. It's solid.

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sigmoid10 713 days ago
Peer review in fundamental science is almost universally understood straightforwardly as part of the process of publishing said science. The other kinds you are referring to (there's actually more than one) are more common in other fields. Peer review in physics is very far from acceptance in general.
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adastra22 713 days ago
Maybe, but that’s a very recent redefinition of terms. Peer review as a standardized mechanism in the 70’s - 90’s depending on the field. Until very close to the present saying “passing peer review” meant something akin to the Popperian notion of “ideas that survive attempts at falsification by the broader community of scientific peers.” In all my interaction with academia pre-pandemic, it meant precisely this. Something wasn’t peer reviewed because it was published (surviving the editorial process), but because it was published and cited by later works without credible refutations emerging.
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