The main problem is that it is a censorship board which must, inherently, tend to (consciously or otherwise) be an advocate for the status quo. The bar tends to be set higher for unconventional ideas, and lower for accepted ones. This results in a system where scientific progress is retarded, and errant conventional wisdom is retained overlong, or even promoted because it is politically correct but starts with no scientific support at all.

When I was a consultant in Washington, DC, I had a friend who was head scientist on a key weather-related scientific project. He complained to me, regularly, that he was finding specific evidence against “global warming” and human-caused ozone depletion. We would discuss, in detail, why these two things were false, from a scientific standpoint.

And yet nothing he published contained any of this information. In fact, he was forced to focus his attention on the data which, taken in isolation from the parts he excluded, could be broadly interpreted as circumstantial support for human-caused global warming.

Why?

Peer review. If he published the data without massaging it to support global warming and/or ozone depletion– nevermind actually presenting the logical conclusions to which they led — his work would be rejected by peer review, and as a result his funding cut, and probably his job endangered.

The implication of the article, and presumably most critics of peer review, is that it should be fixed. That authoritarian censorship is somehow necessary, even good, and it’s simply not been done right so far.

But, in reality, authoritarian censorship is always wrong and harmful.

As Thomas Jefferson once pointed out, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Peer review undermines both aspects of this fact. It attempts to ban “error”, claiming to be intolerant of it…and yet of course it also leaves reason unfree to combat error which is already favored by the system.

But peer review is, in effect, what got Galileo condemned for claiming the sun centered our system instead of the earth.

One need only examine ideas which currently have evidence as significant as the conventional wisdom, yet which are nearly banned from peer-reviewed publication, to see how the system undermines progress. These ideas may, or may not, actually be correct. But they are at least arguable, and yet are — or were until recently — effectively banned by peer review.

Examples, off the top of my head, include nanobes and nanobacteria — completely dismissed by the establishment because of a purely arbitrary decision that 200nm was the minimum size of cellular life. It took a decade of snowballing evidence for a few publications to finally allow any counter-argument into print, and yet the evidence is indeed snowballing, and it may well turn out that the largest source of biomass on the planet was ignored by conventional wisdom for decades. Anyone presenting evidence of cellular life below 200 nanometers was told by peer review “we’re sorry, this is not possible; we all know it” and, in effect, censored.

Likewise, in anthropology, for years anyone who even simply said “I looked beneath the 12,000 year stratum and found human artifacts” was interrupted with “but why did would you look below 12,000? We all know that humans did not live in the Americas before that time”. And it didn’t matter what they’d found; it was assumed to be bad science. Yet now evidence is snowballing that European and Afro-australian humans settled the Americas as many as 20,000 years ago, and were simply displaced 12,000 years ago by humans from Asia.

There are other cases, without as much evidence in their favor /yet/, but which have enough evidence to not be rejected, or at least an utter lack of counter-evidence to justify dismissing out of hand. The influence of semi-aquatic lifestyle on human evolution, for example. There is not actually any evidence for the famous trees-down theory of human evolution purely on dry plains — neither hard evidence nor even circumstantial, but because it was accepted first, no alternative is even considered. You absolutely could not get an article seriously considering the aquatic ape hypothesis published, period. Your methodology and logic, good or bad, would be irrelevent. Yet any assumption of a plains origin in an article is simply accepted without examination, because it’s the conventional wisdom.

Peer review is censorship. It doesn’t matter if the motive is good, same as any other censorship.

–
Words of the Sentient:

The Constitution on which our Union rests [should] be administered…
according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain
understanding of the people of the United States at the time of its adoption
– a meaning to be found in the explanations of those who advocated, not
those who opposed it, and who opposed it merely lest the construction should
be applied which they denounced as possible.
— Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Address, 1801.

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