CEJ said

Porphyry said

CEJ said

Porphyry said

I was too curious so I did some digging on my own. 

First I found this: ** you do not have permission to see this link **

They discovered a vein of Uranium ore that seems to have undergone natural self-sustaining fission–btw, that this could happen had been predicted years earliers. 

Then I found this (see nu. 14) ** you do not have permission to see this link **

This suggests, enigmatically, that the explanation offered in the first article doesn’t work. 

The snippet says that big wig scientist Glenn T. Seaborg “believes C (no citation of course.) As far as I can tell, he was initially skeptical that the vein could have undergone natural sustained fission, but an initial skepticism at the thesis is a long way from endorsing the idea that it was an artificial reactor built millions of years ago. 

  

Seaborg told the New York Times the ore was “puzzling”. 

** you do not have permission to see this link **

He never said anything like he “believes it wasn’t a natural phenomenon, and thus must be a man-made nuclear reactor”.

But you know who used those **exact** words about Seaborg?

Well, that would be Mohammed Hakim in his goofy book, The Extra-terrestrial Glossary, p. 453 (2022).

Of course Hakim had no cite for his claim either.

Seaborg was a gifted scientist and a humble man who would shared his time freely with all comers.

He should be allowed to rest in peace without nitwits tagging him with such nonsense.

  

Nice work finding the NYT article. 

The quotation from Hakim’s book seems not to be the origin: The webpage I shared appeared with that language back in Oct. 2020; given that the book was published in 2022, it seems like the webpage must either be the source of the quotation or share an earlier source with Hakim. 

Also, I did not expect to start doing source criticism of nutty theories. 

  

Crap.  Who’s pilfering from whom? 

  

More importantly though, do the people making this stuff up actually believe the nonsense and intend for us to believe it too, or are the lying (if so, why?), or are they deliberately writing fiction that they expect us to recognize as fiction, deliberately writing a mythological origin story for civilization? Or is it really a work of apocalyptic history suggesting a new and very serious view of our relationship with alien life, if perhaps a bit imaginative in it’s historical claims?

That’s the real question that must be answered before all others.

Robert said
Nice way to bring two threads together, Porphyry! 

If your questions are seriously intended, I think some people actually believe the nonsense they make up, while others purposefully make up such nonsense and laugh at those who fall for it. Among the latter group there are surely those who expect other tricksters to recognize a comrade in arms.

  

I intended it to be light.

But I do think these sorts of phenomena (conspiracy theories, crazy legenda of the saints, and so forth) are genuinely illuminating cases for understanding how we process information and form beliefs.

Stephen said
Porphyry wrote

I also think there is also a pretty clear herd mentality in the academy and it manifests in peer review. If you try to publish something that goes against the current orthodoxy of the field, you should expect a lot of (often unfair) push-back from reviewers: occasionally someone will have the objectivity to recognize the article’s merits but a lot of times you will get what are evidently knee-jerk, “that is just crazy talk” responses followed by what look like post-factum justifications for rejection. On the other hand plenty of mediocre, weak, and insignificant work gets published, apparently because it conforms to whatever the prevailing trend is in its corner of the academy.

Institutional inertia we have with us always. But isn’t that what we would expect?  Maybe should expect? A scholarly consensus probably should be hard won.  Not easily surrendered.  Minds do change.  They’re changing now.  Prof Ehrman’s generation was certain that Luke and Matthew were writing independently of each other and John independent of them both.  The up and coming generation of scholars doesn’t take that seriously at all.  They stress, think they can demonstrate, literary dependence.  Change is often generational.  Slow.

I don’t think the situation is nearly as dire as you describe.  Of course I would like to see examples.  I do note that the inevitable cry of all fringe groups when their theories are rejected is “Conspiracy!” 

Yes, I agree, upstart theories that try to topple everything we thought we had figured out ought to be subjected to serious, probing scrutiny. That’s how peer review is supposed to work. 

But the key is whether the probing scrutiny is really a scrutiny of the merits or whether it is unfairly dismissive. 

Researchers love to complain about Reviewer number 2. We’ve all gotten reviews at some point we didn’t think were fair. Sometimes that it just a matter of our feelings being hurt or us being blind to deficiencies in our own work. But sometimes it is real. 

This isn’t just conspiracy thinking from fringe groups, or my own persecution complex. It has been studied. 

In ** you do not have permission to see this link **, the authors report on a study in which “75 journal reviewers were asked to referee manuscripts which described identical experimental procedures but which reported positive, negative, mixed, or no results. In addition to showing poor interrater agreement, reviewers were strongly biased against manuscripts which reported results contrary to their theoretical perspective.” 

** you do not have permission to see this link ** tracked submissions to three of the most respected medical journals. “Of the 808 eventually published articles in our dataset [note: eventually published anywhere, not just in these three journals–Por.], our three focal journals rejected many highly cited manuscripts, including the 14 most popular; roughly the top 2 percent.”

Robert said

The basic findings of this article are positive:

We found that editors and reviewers generally made good decisions regarding which manuscripts to promote and reject.

Correct. The review process at these leading journals generally works very well, and the statistics that the study generated show that they are overall doing a good job distinguishing the best research from the rest. The problem arises at the extreme–looking at very most significant papers, the system seems to fail miserably. 

There are literally thousands of medical journals. One should expect that any survey of a few journals, especially high-tier journals (Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, and The Lancet), will find that journals have their own preferences for what they think is most relevant to or of greater interest to their particular readers. These decisions are not intended to be a strictly objective measure of scientific merit.

I’m not sure the issue of fit can explain the results. Top journals tend to be pretty general, and I find it hard to think that they just happened to think the top 2% of papers (by subsequent citation) weren’t of interest to their readership. I think it is telling that the system seems (as you note) to work pretty well for most articles: how an article fares under peer review at these elite journals is a good predictor of how heavily cited they will eventually be. The journals tend to publish the most heavily cited articles, and even the articles they reject tend to get more cites if they got further along the review process. It is only when you get to the extreme that it really falls apart.  

There’s another issue that figures importantly with respect to medical journals. Many submitted articles are supported by pharmaceutical companies with a huge financial interest in getting their research published in a high-tier journal. Some of these articles may end up being published elsewhere but will nonetheless be disproportionately cited for commercial reasons. Some of the worst pay-for-play journals, exercising a formal but non-rigorous peer review process, have a high impact factor for this very reason.

  

It’s still early and I’m just finishing my first cup of coffee, but I’m not following the explanation offered here. Are you saying the pharma companies are paying people to cite their studies and are you suggesting they bribe enough authors to cite their studies to push those studies into the top 2% routinely?

By “pay-for-play journals” do you mean predatory OA journals? So is their relevance that pharma cos can place any study they want with these low quality journals (they can easily afford the access fee) and then pay researches to cite those questionable studies that they already funded?

I’m not in medicine and can’t really speak with any authority to how publishing works in that field, but this article was published in PNAS, which is a pretty respectable journal. If there were simple factors that could render these results meaningless, I wouldn’t have expected it to get published there. 

Anyway, my conviction that this is an issue is based on a few things:

1) confirmation bias is a thing. It makes sense that it would apply to peer review too. We might like the idealized vision of the academy as a collection of entirely objective, over-educated, and smart people who only pay attention to the data and the argument, but in reality, they are fully human and subject to all the biases that affect us as a species, and they can and do get very personally invested in their own theories. As a group, they are generally more aware of those biases and that does help considerably, but they are not immune to those biases. 

2) I’ve seen this pay out. Both in informal, open situations (where academics have proven that they can have really thin skin and blind spots), and in formal blind review situations (where reviewers have raised criticism that is simply, factually wrong and clearly unfair to a paper that challenges a point of orthodoxy within the field–I realize this probably won’t be persuasive, since you are going to have to take my word for it). And it isn’t just personal experience; there are lots of anecdotes about e.g., watershed papers that were hard to publish. 

3) Studies like the above (btw, I think they support each other–one of them demonstrates a causal explanation for an effect the other measures) that document that these issues are real.  

4) Finally, the idea that the academy is subject to herd mentality is really reinforced for me by looking at history–this speaks to the more general point that all this started with; I don’t take this as having direct application to the contemporary issue of peer review filtering out stuff that rocks the boat too much. Look at something like the de auxiliis controversy in early modern Catholic theology. It was a very very difficult and subtle issue, some very very smart people devoted themselves to it with tremendous passion over the course of centuries, and they defended very different solutions. Each side had objectively strong arguments against the other sides solution. And yet, the division between these authors, lines up almost perfectly with which religious order these people belonged to. And keep in mind, most of these people were joining the religious orders they did at a relatively young age, prior to getting much training in theology, so it hardly seems like self-selection can explain this coincidence. Moreover, if you read their extensive writings on the subject, they seem blind to the force of the other sides arguments against their own school’s solution. These very smart people–despite some of them being the intellectual elite of their day–seem to have been utterly incapable of overcome the prejudices they inherited from their order. 

MikeV2020 said
I think I have been canceled. A post I made is not to be found. Does one receive a “Violation” notice if they say the wrong thing? I find that I do not have a Profile either. Oh well …

  

I see this post. I can confirm you have no profile 

Edit–it looks like all profiles have been made inaccessible.