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I read it is a broken systemYou read correctly. The “peer-review” system is an absolute disaster. Don’t take my word for it. Read the words of three top journal editors (BMJ, NEJM, and Lancet) and a Nobel laureate in http://www.pseudoexpertise.com/ch-1a.pdf.You can read in the next link a crucially important paper which the BMJ and Nature have chosen to suppress with cheap lies “not interesting”, “not in our style”, “unable to publish”, “unable to enter into correspondence”. Meanwhile they have no hesitation in filling their pages with Lysenkoian pseudoscience charlatanism as long as it is in line with the Big Money agenda. http://www.pseudoexpertise.com/clarke-covld3.pdfPeer review guarantees nothing whatsoever except the censorship of the most important science, as shown here. It is a charlatans’ charter.The facts of the huge malfunctioning of the “science” system are also censored from the mass media, with the result that most outsiders are completely clueless about it. Numerous books have been written about it but never get mentioned by the Big-Money-controlled pseudo-information system. A good example is Professor HH Bauer “Science is not what you think, why it has changed, why we cannot trust it”. Another is Experts Catastrophe, see below.~~~~~~~~~Excerpts from Chapter One of Experts Catastrophe:The strange facts they aren’t telling you about expertise…..And the following further quotations will be useful here to advance your understanding of some key facts about expertise. (“Peer review” is the system by which science bureaucrats decide which scientific discoveries are allowed to be published in “scientific” journals.)“There are many problems with the peer review system. Perhaps the most significant is that the truly imaginative are not being judged by their peers. They have none! .... what has been demonstrated by this study is .... reviewer and editorial incompetence. .... In my Nobel lecture, I published the initial letter of rejection by the Journal of Clinical Investigation of work that was to prove to be of fundamental importance to the development of radioimmunoassay.”– R.S. Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine“The concept of peer review is based on two myths..... [of which the second is] that in those rare instances in which someone who is exceptional does appear, the ordinary scientist always instantly recognises genius and smooths its path. No one who knows anything at all about the history of science can believe for one second in either myth.....”“Peer review is an open invitation to the crooked....”– David F. Horrobin, Editor, Medical Hypotheses“....a gravely pathological situation, calling for further serious inquiry and radical remedy.”– John Ziman, H. H. Wills Physics Laboratory, BristolThose quotations are from Harnad, ed., (1982), as detailed in the reference list at the end of this book.Note that in the preceding sentence I have included a reference to a source (“Harnad, ed., (1982)”). If you are to make good progress in learning to unpick the true expertise from the sham, then you will need to learn to pay attention to such references, also called citations. I’ll say more about this further on. Meanwhile here’s two more quotes you might usefully ponder (Smith, 2014; Horton, 2000):“Things are badly wrong with journals and the research they publish.” “The problem doesn’t arise from amateurs dabbling in research but rather from career researchers.”– Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal“We know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”– Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet……….Information relating to many aspects of health and illness is available from many books, websites, and other sources. But there is radical disagreement on many important points.So wise persons will necessarily find themselves asking the question of how they should decide between these conflicting assertions.Some will think I am posing a rather stupid question here. It is obvious, they will reason, that the views of a person with a relevant doctorate or professorship must outweigh the views of a person with only meagre qualifications or none. And that a peer-reviewed report in a prestigious scientific journal must outweigh the assertions of a group of ordinary people who consider themselves victims of some sort of medically-caused harm. The hierarchy of such expertise is well-known, with professor ranking above PhD doctorate ranking above graduate ranking above non-graduate and suchlike.Do you see how that makes sense? Well, if you do, then you might wish to consider the facts of Lysenkoism in Stalin’s Russia.Trofim Lysenko is now universally understood to have been a charlatan, a purveyor of pseudo-science rather than of genuine biology and agricultural science. And yet for three decades he and his acolytes prevailed unchallenged in all the universities and institutes of the great USSR, honoured as the most distinguished professors and so on. So it must have been they that were surely the experts, just as for instance Professor Simon Baron-Cohen must be the real autism expert today as he is the head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. Meanwhile, the genuine-ly outstanding geneticists, agronomists and other biologists were either executed or sent to slave-camps in the bone-chilling wastelands of Siberia. Or perhaps they surely weren’t the experts, rather the charlatans. You aren’t going to find the true, most out-standingly distinguished scientific experts recognised only as status-less barely-surviving salt-miners, are you? And yet the great biologist Vavilov, who created the first ever seed bank, starved to death in prison. This corruption of science did not end until years after the death of Stalin, by which time the false science of Lysenko had caused immense damage to Soviet agriculture.But could it be that Lysenkoism was just something that happened in a peculiar far-off country 70 years ago, under a total-itarian regime in the grip of a false ideology – whereas of course now we have the modern uncorrupted world in which everything has been sorted into its proper place? Well, I invite you to consider some further historical facts which I have excerpted from the book Genius by the late Prof. Hans J. Eysenck, the most-cited-ever scientist (back then at least). The excerpts are in the frame below.………(One of the numerous cases which Eysenck did not mention here was that of Ludwig Boltzmann, whose discovery of statistical thermodynamics – fundamental to most modern technology – was ridiculed by professors for ten years till he took his own life.)It should be apparent from these facts that a similar situation to Lysenkoism, in which the foremost experts were likewise side-lined and oppressed into obscurity by second-rate “distinguished experts”, has prevailed in many times and places throughout history. And should we be so confident that our here-and-now scientific communities are somehow different? In this book I will present evidence and reasons to the contrary.For that purpose let us first step back to the important basics of how our world, of us and knowledge and other people, works. About the first thing we learn as a child is the immensely important fact that some people are more knowledgable (expert) than others, and that the way to get on in life is to learn from those more know-ledgable people. We learn this on our first day at school, but we learn it before then from our parents, and indeed, arguably we have already been programmed to assume it by our genes.And thus we start our climb up the Ladder of Knowledge. The child learns from the teacher. The teacher learns from the college lecturer. The college lecturer learns from the university teaching professor. The teaching professor learns from the research professors. But at this point, the sequence breaks. From whom do the research professors learn? Do they receive Tablets of Truth handed down from God?Well of course the research professors learn directly from the reality don’t they? The history researchers learn from direct studying of dusty ancient archives and muddy archeological excavations, and likewise the medical researchers learn from direct studying of the reality of healthy and unhealthy people and the molecular processes involved. Or is it really so simple?One reason it might not be so simple could be that the researchers are not well-engineered truth-discovering robot devices, but instead human beings with dodgy psychologies sometimes deflected from the truth by personal motivations and quirks and societal incentives or pressures. In connection with those distorting factors, it could be useful to consider how persons come to become research professors (e.g. “Principal Investigators”) in the first place, or how they get selected. So let us examine a further notional ladder up from childhood, this time the ladder of developing expertise, or at least the ladder of growing authorisation.The way it works in the UK is similar in essence to most other modern countries. A child progresses through school up to age 16 to take GCSE exams, and only after success in those exams can they move on to take A-levels, and only after success in those further exams can they enter a university to take first year exams, and only after success in those first-year exams can they take second-year exams, and only after success in those second-year exams can they take their finals exams to get a first degree, and only after success in the first degree exams can they then progress to a masters degree, and only after success in the masters exams can they enter to study for their doctoral “thesis”, and only after success in their doctoral thesis (which is the obligatory minimum qualification to be a researcher) can they progress to a postdoc position, and only after that can they hope to become a lecturer or thereafter a professor.Many people talk about the “top universities” and the “best graduates”, as if this system is self-evidently a well-founded means for selecting the best minds for the job. But is it? Where is the criterion of validity of “best”? In reality, there is reason to believe that something has gone very wrong here. And yet this system of “meritocracy” is rarely if ever subjected to any coherent criticism or even questioning. And that could be because it is in the nature of the resulting society that those in a position to be heard and to be influential are those who have themselves found success in that “meritocratic” selection process, and consequently are strongly inclined to admire it. The awarding of a degree can be seen as a biasing bribe, incentivising its recipient to believe that it is some sort of valid indicator of their hard-earned intellectual superiority over others less deserving.The exams system does indeed at first appear to make sense. It is rather obvious to any child that their parents and teachers do indeed have more knowledge and understanding than themselves, and are not teaching them a load of rubbish. And it is rather obvious to the child that those exams do indeed give fair indications of those who have “worked harder” and or learned more or less of what they are being taught, or have become more or less skilled in solving mathematical problems, playing musical instruments and so on. I recall my own pride / smugness about my own easy excellence in grammar school exams, and my notion that anyone who didn’t have a maths A-level must be somehow mentally handicapped. I’m glad that gas heating fitters are required to score 100% in their exams. The system of exams clearly works in many ways as an essential component of seemingly every advanced civilisation in memory.And yet.Scientific research is very different from maintenance of gas heaters. Ideally the gas fitter will confine their creativity to dealing with the customer, and will do the actual technical work with resolutely uncreative rule-following avoidance of interesting experi-mentation in your home. By contrast, competent research requires extreme creativity, at every turn thinking up the questions that no-one has ever asked before, and questioning every sacred assumption they have dutifully learnt. Myself being a person to whom scientific research was as inevitable a “career choice” as composing must have been to a Beethoven or Bach, I recall only too well the BPS advice booklet saying that research posts would require the “highest intellectual standing”. And yet it made no attempt to unpick that psychological atom into its sub-component electrons or protons.In all manner of respects, our modern societies have far advanced from one or two thousand years ago. And yet the fundamental social mechanism of selection by exams is virtually unchanged over those millennia, except in that writing and box-ticking now predominates over face-to-face viva-voce interrogation and defence.What talents do exams measure? Arguably they almost entire-ly measure the ability to learn the facts and notions and standard skills being taught. They reflect the ability to read, remember, recall, and rewrite, with sufficient speed and facility between 9am and 1pm on one particular hot summer day not of one’s choosing. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because here it is “from the horse’s mouth”:“As a Cambridge medical graduate it always saddened me to see so many able-minded people struggle through our medical course. The sheer volume of information we were expected to memorise was mind-boggling.” (Gundroo, 2014)“The medical curriculum is so overloaded with information that you just have to learn what you hear, as you hear it.” (Humphries & Bystrianyk, 2013)“I was good at exams, and so I bloody well should have been. The system was set up for people like me – thorough, plodding, uncreative, capable of taking in great mounds of received wisdom and regurgitating them, undigested, unquestioned, unprocessed in three-hour bursts of neat handwriting.” (Mangan, 2014)“The school system is now finely focussed only on exam success and the exam game has very very little to do with success in real life. In business and other parts of the real world the skills that get you on in chosen area are ones such as:- admitting you don’t know something and going out to find it out;- finding someone who knows more than you and working with them to create something bigger and better;- going out on a limb, flying a few kites, taking a bit more time over the really difficult issues.In an exam situation this is either called cheating or will ensure you fail. Life is very very rarely like an exam situation – it is surprisingly a lot more like the coursework that is being consigned by Gove and his fellow conservatives to the scrap-heap.” (Edwards, 2014)((Some readers are claiming that the information quoted above is out of date, so I’ll add yet more here. Firstly some words from the brand-new book “So You Got into Medical School... Now What?” (Paull, 2015): “....the sheer amount of information....”; “A popular analogy likens the medical student’s efforts to absorb all the information presented in class to trying to drink from a fire hose.” “Every medical student feels the strain of information overload. So what to do with the colossal amount of information being forced upon you daily?”. And finally some latest words from a 16-year-old (Vogt-Vincent, 2015): “Suddenly, the creativity I’d brought to all my school projects wasn’t accepted anymore. Instead I had to memorise facts and statistics.” “One bad result makes you a failure. Success is measured by how well you remember”.))And now, what talents are demonstrated by a person obtaining a doctoral PhD qualification? Generally the candidate has to be able and willing to stick for several years to a particular project or at least field of research, and at the end of it produce a sufficiently long sequence of words to impress the existing experts, while not contradicting any established beliefs too uncomfortably.And meanwhile what talents are required for excelling in genuinely scientific research and discovery? Or at least functioning as a competent researcher? Arguably the ability to question one’s prior learning and assumptions, to creatively think of new questions and possibilities, and to make reasonable judgements of what is more likely to be truer or more credible or effective.And arguably the best researcher is one who is constantly open to the possibility that the line of research they are following may not be the best, and so they should dump it and move to something better. And they should learn to present their work in not too many words. Because whereas the PhD thesis will fail if it isn’t more or less book-length, in contrast the journals demand that their papers be kept below a rather tight length. For instance as the geniuses at the Lancetstate, “If you can’t express your idea [and by implication a useful amount of evidence and explanation] in less than 1500 words it probably isn’t a Hypothesis [and so we will bin it]”. (And note that you have just now read the 4055th word in this book, and Chapter 2 is approx 12,600 words, and Chapter 7 is approx 18,000 words.)In my experience, the predominant intellectual shortcoming of the human race is not deficient ability to learn, but instead is deficient ability to unlearn that which has already been learnt in error. Once your brain has got a faulty notion etched into its neurons, it can be much harder for that faulty notion to be removed and a corrected notion to be substituted in its place. And the education and selection systems of exams strongly favour uncritical learning unencumbered by too much inefficiency-creating doubt giving capability for unlearning.There probably hasn’t been any research on the question, but it seems rather self-evident anyway that a disposition towards quest-ioning and doubting of information would tend to interfere with the headlong rush of hyperactive memorising which has evidently be-come a prime preoccupation of those in the business of supposedly nurturing the world’s greatest intellectual excellence. It’s a bit like a cycle race going up a mountain pass, in which having no brakes on your bike would give you a faster time up the hill. And yet in a real world which includes the corresponding downhills your bike without brakes would soon result in your death rather than any time records.Thus the extreme relentless selection of supposed excellence falsely defined in terms of hyperactive learning would also be extremely selective against any talent for unlearning.And it is arguably that unlearning ability which is the path to wisdom and to competence as a great researcher and discoverer, and hence a great true expert. I see so many persons of high intelligence who have taken one or more intellectual wrong turnings early on and consequently ended up far from the truth they thought they were heading towards. Their “super-bike” without brakes left the road to reality on one of those downhill bends.One of the most important wrong turnings appears to be that “fact” which we learn first and most persistently. That is that the experts, namely the more “qualified” more senior people, know best and that any less-qualified inferiors who challenge them can be dismissed as wrong. All through childhood and formal education we get reinforced in that notion. And those of us who are awarded degrees and the like are all the more strongly reinforced (effectively bribed) into this cultist belief. All this time we lack a proper appreciation of the flaws in the Ladder of Knowledge pointed out in the preceding paragraphs here. The thing is that some of what we learnt from our teachers may have been wrong, because the researchers or discoverers it came from were wrong in the first place.In conclusion then, there is reason to believe that our academic selection procedures, far from selecting the most suitable intellects for research careers, ironically instead block at every turn those most talented to be researchers and discoverers. Producing even a great discovery does not in the slightest require being able to read at the highest speed, learn “facts” at highest speed, recall at high speed, wake up and attend a course or exam before 10 am yesterday, or stick at completing a rubbishy boring thesis with sufficient tenacity.…………….Having successfully completed the 20-year high-jumping marathon of ex­ams and got your PhD doctorate at last, you still have no chance of being recognised as a leading expert until you have first developed a sufficiently extensive and impressive publication record. And the published items have to be not self-published but instead accepted by “leading” “prestigious” “peer-reviewed” journals or else they don’t count at all in the authoritarian bureaucracy-loving pecking-order competition that is institution-alised academia.Building up your publication record usually requires some succeeding in the “peer preview” system of assessing research grant applications, and invariably requires sufficient succeeding in getting your publications accepted into journals through the “peer-review” system of volunteers the journals operate. And it helps if your publications don’t later get “retracted” – retrospectively asserted to be unfit for publication.There is so much wrong in this context, so much fallacy, that it is difficult to know where to start on demuddling it.The mythology is that genuine science is that which comes from universities and is published in peer-reviewed journals, while anything else is merely unproven rubbish from a nobody. The univ-ersities were all personally founded by God/Allah for the accurate enlightenment of His subjects, and peer-review involves sending verification emails up from the universities to Heaven and back.In reality, human beings tend to gather into convenient ideological lobbying groups (universities and their departments) and devise systems for efficient back-stabbing of rivals and for mutual back-scratching of collaborators (“peer-review” and “peer-preview”).Not the least of the myths about “peer review” is that scientific publication has just about always used it. In reality “peer review” did not exist until recent decades, with the rise of the mass-production professionalised publish-or-perish career “publication record” corporatised science that now dominates every field. Einstein’s ultra-famous non-professional publications were not subject to “peer review” (so we’d better dump them in the trash for a start). Indeed when one of his later papers was sent to a reviewer Einstein objected and got another journal to publish it instead (without “peer review”).………………“Peer review” and “peer preview” have a number of severe faults in common. But basically, if you have made a great discovery, you can only get it meaningfully published (or get a research grant to progress it) if your anonymous deadly enemy rivals first give their anonymous endorsement of it being worth the bother. Consider the following scenarios which are precisely analogous to how the so-called “peer-review” system works in scientific publishing.The Uruguay football team are selecting their players for the 2014 World Cup, and they obtain an anonymous peer-review from Wayne Rooney who anonymously says that Suarez is really lacking in any ball-kicking skill and not talented enough to play in a national team. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!) So Suarez receives a letter telling him he’s not hot enough to participate in international football.The Democrats party are selecting their presidential candidate and obtain an anonymous peer-review from Hillary Clinton which anonymously tells them that Barack Obama is far too foolish and incompetent to ever function as a US president. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!) So Obama receives a letter telling him he hasn’t qualified for the presidential contest.Wimbledon are sorting out who should play the 2014 games and they seek an anonymous peer-review from Venus Williams who anonymously says that Maria Sharapova is really past it and not remotely competent to play tennis any more. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!) So Sharapova gets a letter saying that she isn’t good enough at tennis and won’t be allowed to play there.A record label seeks an anonymous peer review from Mick Jagger which anonymously informs them that Paul McCartney really has no talent for music such as is worth making recordings of. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!) So McCartney gets a letter telling him his music isn’t good enough for recording.A classical music recording company seeks an anonymous peer review from Karajan who anonymously says that his contemporary Sir Georg Solti is vastly overrated and his conducting is worse than an average drunk. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!)The international chess federation are sorting out the upcoming championships and obtain an anonymous peer-review from Bobby Fischer who anonymously informs them that Kasparov is too thick to play chess even with babies. (Oh, but it was from an expert unpaid peer volunteer!)And the means by which the genuinely most excellent science gets published (or more likely is prevented from getting published) (in any meaningful form) is exactly like those examples above.You may of course think that those examples are bonkers. But yes, indeed the “peer review” system is an absolutely stark raving bonkers way for supposedly selecting the best discoveries in science for publishing.Consider it from another angle. You may have heard of the Olympic Games, in which the world’s top sportspeople compete. Anyone who attends or watches the Olympics can see for themselves who runs the fastest, jumps the highest, and so on. They can see for themselves what the scores are and who is actually the world’s greatest. Meanwhile there could be what we might call the “Science Olympic Games”. To be a champion in the Science Olympics is a much more important achievement than all those sports golds and silvers put together. A great scientist’s work is creative and valuable whereas no-one really needs high jumpers and fast runners (who can’t even do that after about age 30 anyway). And yet, the way the “science olympics” (aka “peer review”) works is rather peculiar. That’s because – we are required to believe – the only persons capable of “seeing the score” and discerning who is the champion are the deadly rivals of that potential champion. So it’s exactly like as if Wiggins could only win the 2012 cycling gold medal if Cavendish testified that Wiggins had indeed been faster than himself. And what any “non-qualified” person claimed about who cycled fastest was of no consequence.Now let’s have a guess as to why the great scientific geniuses of the past ceased to keep emerging at exactly the same time as corporatised “peer-reviewed” science developed.Peer reviews are not 100% bad. I have been invited to do six myself and in the process seen the reviews from six others, and also seen numerous reviews of my own papers including of course the ones which got them accepted. Often the unpaid volunteer peer reviewers do contribute to improving published papers and weeding out defective ones. But that positive is utterly outweighed by the vast negative that my examples above here should make clear. The most important thing in science publishing is that the most groundbreaking discoveries should not be completely suppressed from entering the scientific discourse and public record. And yet that outrageous outcome is what the so-called peer review system is perfectly set up to achieve. It is completely unaccountable and wide open to abuse and that abuse very regularly happens as I will show you in detail further on. And I remind you of the five quotations at the start of this chapter.Not only is there that problem of corrupt hostile rivals suppressing great discoveries, but also there is the problem of even well-meaning “peer” colleagues being unable to make the mental adjustments to appreciate great new “paradigm shifts” replacing flawed conventional wisdoms with radically improved ways of seeing the same things. And there are also bad commercial reasons for disfavouring inconvenient discoveries.Another fault of the peer review system is in the opposite direction, giving favourable treatment to outright rubbish. I myself was requested to peer-review a paper about the “Fractional Autism Triad Hypothesis”. I recognised this (non-)concept as the complete and utter dis-logicality it was and explained this in detail in my review (Clarke, 2012). But strangely the other two reviewers went on about how “important” and “valuable” the paper was and that it should therefore be published. (The editor decided to refuse the paper despite those two favourable reviews, presumably because of my own outrightly terminal critique.) The problem is that the “expert” specialists on the “Fractional Autism Triad Hypothesis” would be those working as specialists on that same particular pseudic theme and therefore inclining to say(/?pretend?) what “important” “valuable” research it was. I think the editor was canny enough to see that my own, “non-fractional”, viewpoint about autism would mean I could give an alternative (if not entirely disinterested) view of the matter. So you can see that not only can the peer review system hideously block the most important discoveries, but it meanwhile can allow through the most timewasting of rubbish unchallenged if there is a professional community of publish-perish “specialists” to support it.My comments above about peer review don’t come out of a vacuum. Numerous published authors have complained about the absurdity of the system. (I’m also such a published author myself I should make clear.) Numerous articles have been published discussing the same, such as for instance Eysenck & Eysenck (1992) and Horrobin (1990). Others have commented how Einstein would have had no chance of getting his famous works published nowadays. And here are the words of Dr. Marcia Angell, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years:“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009)A further severe problem in medical research is a huge hostility to new ideas. There has accumulated an enormous amount of data ([End of excerpts]