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by guax 21 days ago
> Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants

Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.

So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.

1 comments

Alzheimer’s research would probably be the easiest one to point to.

And I’d argue all fields could use more dissenting opinions and new options. I don’t know if this would be the path to that but keep in mind there have been many things historically where someone needed to take a leap of faith to go against the current dogma.

Academia is full of dissenting opinions, it is the wet dream of any tenured professor to break tradition and create a new field or area of research and become the lead in it.

Consensus is a thing, but science is not one institution, is a bunch of different warring factions of people trying to get published and cited and funding.

This should be done by lessening the feasibility metric in grading grants. If you want to escape incrementalism, you have to not punish scientists who ask for funding to do hard things with a higher chance of failure.