Me: Do you agree reviewers aim to only accept valid papers, and care more about validity than interestingness?
I’ve reviewed papers. I didn’t spend copious amounts of time checking the proofs. Some/most reviewers may claim to only accept “valid papers” (whatever that means), but the way the system is set up peer review serves mainly as a filter to filter out blatantly bad papers. Sure, people try to catch the obviously invalid papers. And sure, many researches really try to find mistakes. But at the end of the day, you can always get your results published somewhere, and once something is published, it is almost never retracted.
If retractions were common, surely you would have said that was evidence peer review didn’t accomplish much!
Sure, let me retract my previous argument and amend it with the additional statement that even when a paper is known to have mistakes by the community, it is almost never retracted.
2: Some amount of trust is taken for granted in science. The existence of trust in a scientific field does not imply that the participants don’t actually care about the truth. Bounded Distrust.
I don’t think that this refutes my argument like you think it does. Reviewers don’t check software because they don’t have the capacity to check software. It is well-known that all non-trivial software contains bugs. Reviewers accept this, because at the end of the day they don’t comprehensively check validity.
because the latter would have rubbed you the wrong way even more
No, I think that peer review at a good journal is worth much more than peer review at a bad journal.
I think our disagreement comes down to the stated intent being to check validity, and me arguing that the actual effect is to offer a filter for poorly written/ not interesting articles. There is obviously some overlap, as nobody will find an obviously invalid article interesting! Depending on the journal, this may come close to checking some kind of validity. I trust an article in Annals of Mathematics to be correct in a way that I don’t trust an article in PNAS to be. We can compare peer-review with the FDA—the stated intent is to offer safe medications to the population. The actual effect is …
I’ve reviewed papers. I didn’t spend copious amounts of time checking the proofs. Some/most reviewers may claim to only accept “valid papers” (whatever that means), but the way the system is set up peer review serves mainly as a filter to filter out blatantly bad papers. Sure, people try to catch the obviously invalid papers. And sure, many researches really try to find mistakes. But at the end of the day, you can always get your results published somewhere, and once something is published, it is almost never retracted.
Sure, let me retract my previous argument and amend it with the additional statement that even when a paper is known to have mistakes by the community, it is almost never retracted.
I don’t think that this refutes my argument like you think it does. Reviewers don’t check software because they don’t have the capacity to check software. It is well-known that all non-trivial software contains bugs. Reviewers accept this, because at the end of the day they don’t comprehensively check validity.
No, I think that peer review at a good journal is worth much more than peer review at a bad journal.
I think our disagreement comes down to the stated intent being to check validity, and me arguing that the actual effect is to offer a filter for poorly written/ not interesting articles. There is obviously some overlap, as nobody will find an obviously invalid article interesting! Depending on the journal, this may come close to checking some kind of validity. I trust an article in Annals of Mathematics to be correct in a way that I don’t trust an article in PNAS to be. We can compare peer-review with the FDA—the stated intent is to offer safe medications to the population. The actual effect is …