From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Thu Jul 18 2002 - 06:16:29 MDT
[Rafael Anschau]
Well, you have to make sure that people are trying to refute your hypothesis, instead of whatever they may have came up with.
The need to rely on peer's review is not science weakest link. But the need to rely on peer's BIASED review is.
[rhinoceros]
This is fair. I think the price we have to pay because of the necessity to rely on peer review is that we have a little bit more conservative approach to new ideas, but an added bonus is that it helps weed out some "ideas" coming from specific interest groups (e.g. in sciences such as economics and history). Then again, one should expect that the established ideas are also biased towards the dominant cultural staus quo.
But there is also another aspect I had in mind when I posted this. Science has reached a point where it is absolutely necessary for making some kinds of decisions and at the same time it is tecnically impossible for the average person or even the specialist in some particular field to have tecnically valid and usable scientific knowledge of other fields. People have to rely on popular versions of scientific knowledge in the form of maxims to make decisions, such as "economic inflation and unemployment go together".
How can people know what is peer reviewed science and what is propaganda, especially when the peer reviewers are actually journalists? In a sense, it is not so much different from the priesthood of ancienty Egypt.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25695>
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