[derektank]

You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?

Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.

[Retric]

Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.

In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.