[slowmovintarget]

I've found it interesting to hear about the history of peer review, which started as a way to keep out "the unqualified masses" from the review process, and also as a way to sell more journals. The really interesting part of this is that "peer review" wasn't a formal thing before the 1960s. This means that the lion's share of what we consider the greatest advances in scientific endeavor never went through "peer review" in the sense it's meant now. Not Newtonian mechanics, not Maxwell's electromagnetism, not Einstein's relativity, not quantum mechanics... Peer review became about segmenting and exploding the number of journals universities had to purchase to be "current." It was really a publishing company coup on the scientific process.

Eric Weinstein talks about this in his critique of the whole Terrence Howard kerfuffle.