"Peer review is the independent assessment of your research paper by experts in your field. The purpose of peer review is to evaluate the paper’s quality and suitability for publication. As well as peer review acting as a form of quality control for academic journals, it is a very useful source of feedback for you. The feedback can be used to improve your paper before it is published."

Thus sayeth one scientific journal publisher to its authors or potential authors about the purpose of review. Quality and suitability for publication. Not "whether or not a paper's results and/or conclusions are correct."

I must have reviewed hundreds of papers in my research career. I can't recall ever saying a paper was "wrong". Nor did any reviewer ever say any of mine were wrong. Reviewers might claim the experimental methods were inadequately described or the analysis faulty or the results did not support the conclusions or the English was poor (very common), but not that the authors were "wrong".

Scientific papers and journals are proliferating. If reviewers could exclude incorrect work from publication there might be fewer. They can't and they generally don't try, in my experience.

So don't hope for higher exclusion rates of false findings. Anyway, what really caused COVID policy failure was simple blind panic. And this resulted from huge recent increases in journalistic hyperbole and speed of global transmission of bad news. This is a fatal combination. And by definition rational efforts to keep it in check cannot succeed because irrationality beats them hands down

Hi TomBie,
Your comment has reminded me of a movie I watched the other night.

The Man Who Knew Infinity
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787524/

It was on on SBS and anyone can watch it here on demand.
http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/movie/the-man-who-knew-infinity/1482206787555
I recommend it, it was an enjoyable movie.


Your comment above was well demonstrated in this movie.
The fellows were not so much interested that he was right, but in him providing proofs that showed how he'd come up with the mathematical answers that he did.

It seems his mind was a machine, and he could figure things out; or that the answers would just come to him, without him knowing what the exact method was that his mind used to come up with those answers.

So true Graham, but good luck with getting any of the reasoning being used by academia or governments.

Thanks for the well thought out article GY. Kudos.

Classic non science, but a socio-political response, with fossil fuels Koch Network via think tanks and faux experts dismissing Covid science like climate science, joined at the hip:

'How the UK's Climate Science Deniers Turned Their Attention to COVID-19. The coronavirus crisis quickly divided the population between those putting their trust in public health experts and others quick to question the science...

A close look at commentary on both COVID-19 and climate change reveals significant crossover between unqualified voices casting doubt on experts recommending action.

Why?

“There’s nothing mysterious about this,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive science, who studies the persistence of misinformation in society at the University of Bristol.

“I think COVID is just climate change on steroids in a particle accelerator,” he says. “The same forces are happening: you have the inevitability of a virus which is the same as the inevitability of the physics. And opposing that you have politics which motivates some people to deny the inevitables and instead resort to bizarre claims.”

https://www.desmog.com/2020/08/10/how-uk-climate-science-deniers-turned-their-attention-coronavirus-covid-19/