Peer Review Quotes

Roosevelt was a genius at mass communications, and his speechwriters deferred to his reviews of their drafts, not so much because he was the president, but because when a text required the perfect word, the exquisite or incisive phrase, or exactly the right tone, he was the best. And when it came to delivery, he had no peer.

The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con."...As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called “radical” or “progressive” people don’t hear enough “buzz” words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings).

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

Religion demands complete conviction, but science advises against that. It demands understanding instead of belief, so it must be based on verifiable evidence; it must explain related observations with a measurable degree of accuracy; it must withstand continuous critical analysis in peer review; and it must be falsifiable too. If it doesn’t fulfill all these conditions at once, then it isn’t science. If it meets none of them, it could be religion.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.

Nothing is more seductive that a nice string of data, a single bell curve, or a seemingly peer-reviewed scientific study. After all, it can’t be racist if it is a “fact.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley.

What do we want? EVIDENCE-BASED CHANGE. When do we want it? AFTER PEER REVIEW.

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world’s leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer’s Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction. Is that why Alzheimer’s is expected to quadruple?219

Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.

The heart of responsible medical research is algorithm-driven, adaptive, bias-free, open review processes rather than the traditional peer-reviewed medical research and publication processes.

Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.

four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

Bitterblue took this information straight to the library. "Death?" she said. "Do we have birth records for the seven kingdoms for the year Leck would have been born? Will you review them for someone with a name that sounds like Eemkerr?" "A name that sounds like Eemkerr," Death repeated, peering up at her from his new desk, which was covered with smelly, scorched papers. "Lady Fire says that Leck told her that before his name was Leck, it was Eemkerr." "Which is a name she remembers from almost fifty years ago," Death said sarcastically, "spoken to her, not spelled, presumably not a name from her own language, and conveyed to you mentally fifty years later. And I'm to recall every instance of a name of that nature in all the birth records available to me from the relevant year for all seven kingdoms, on the extremely slim chance that we have the name right and a record exists?" "I know you're just as happy as I am," said Bitterblue. Death's mouth twitched. Then he said, "Give me some time to remember, Lady Queen.

Probably the greatest challenge to humanity is not climate change or global warming, but the misuse of the power of medical research.

Proof' is the hallmark of religion.

In mathematics you had peer review, definite proofs and answers, but war was nothing but uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty.

male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women,

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence," Harry explained. "It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance.

When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world’s leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison about the checks and balances in a democratic government, and that is how other institutions steer communities of biased and ambition-addled people toward disinterested truth. Examples include the adversarial system in law, peer review in science, editing and fact-checking in journalism, academic freedom in universities, and freedom of speech in the public sphere. Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

Peer review was an excellent system by which academics could either anonymously censor others with whom they disagreed, or hide from controversy after they signed off on truth that the public couldn't stomach. 

In science, however, “God did it” is not a testable hypothesis. Inquiring minds want to know how God did it and what forces or mechanisms were at work. “God works in mysterious ways” will not pass peer review. Even such explanations as “belief in God” or “religiosity” must be broken down into their component parts to find possible causal mechanisms for the links between belief and behavior that lead to health, well-being, and longevity.

Asked to elaborate, Lisak explained, “One of the things that is difficult for most of us, frankly, to understand about a rape, is that there doesn’t have to be a gun to the head, there doesn’t have to be a knife present, there doesn’t have to be a verbalized threat for the act itself to be enormously terrifying and threatening….There is a difference between sexual violence and other forms of assault. Sexual violence is so intimate.” When your body is penetrated by another person against your will, Lisak said, it often induces a uniquely powerful kind of terror. According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes “actually feared they were going to be killed,” even when “there was no weapon and no overt violence.

While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.

It would be good if peer review actually worked, if it actually challenged and questioned what scientists write. Did you know that the Koran is peer reviewed by 100% of Muslims and always receives a 100% pass mark? Funny that! Who in their right mind would claim that peer review is an intrinsic good? Nobel laureate Max Planck said that science progressed funeral by funeral. So much for peer review. You actually need the peer reviewers to die before new ideas can be entertained! Peer reviewers are in fact the midwit, careerist paradigm enforcers. They shut down all new thinking.

The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions.

কীভাবে এলোমেলো, উদ্দেশ্যহীন, চেতনাহীন মৃত প্রক্রিয়া, কেবল পদার্থের অণুসমূহ একে অন্যের সাথে সংঘর্ষের ফলে বুদ্ধিমত্তা, প্রাণ, চেতনার উদ্ভব হতে পারে? এমনকি Peer Reviewed গবেষণাপত্রে (নাস্তিক) বিজ্ঞানী হুবার্ট ইয়োকি (Hubert P. Yockey) গবেষণার দ্বারা প্রমাণ দেখিয়েছেন যে বিজ্ঞানী মহলে প্রাণের স্বতঃস্ফূর্ত উদ্ভাবনের প্রচলিত বিশ্বাস কেবলই অন্ধবিশ্বাস।

He called it a proteinaceous infectious particle, or prion. Prusiner’s paper fared well in peer review, but the editors of Science hesitated for months before publishing it, afraid of a backlash. The idea was outlandish—​but it was also right. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for his heresy in 1997. Further work by Prusiner and others revealed that prions behave something like the secret weapon from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut imagined a form of water called ice-nine, a “super-crystal” that froze at room temperature and turned any normal water it touched into itself. A single crystal would set off a chain reaction, causing the oceans to ice over, ending all life on Earth.

In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy—truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

As of yet, there is no peer-reviewed data on the efficacy of journaling by candlelight.

They have based research off those like me. It’s been peer reviewed. It‘s very reliable. They have learned quite a lot. The odds of a neural mismatch that bad have gone down, and everyone knows that if someone says that it‘s 95% odds, that means no one you know will get it. Because surely you don‘t know twenty people. You are not one in twenty people. Surely.

Even the editors of main journals themselves recognise that peer review may not be the best system ever devised by mankind. Here is what Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, has to say on the matter: “The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”39 The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis’s hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings claimed in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves.40

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.

According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes “actually feared they were going to be killed,” even when “there was no weapon and no overt violence.” Thompson

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.

[On Love After Love by Derek Walcott] I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, "enough". Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It's like the embrace of an old friend. He brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything we have. I have read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying, which always, unfailingly, makes me cry.

In the cases of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, substantial evidence is now emerging that these syndromes may result from unusual infectious microorganisms that are not detected by the typical laboratory tests. Special, sophisticated lab tests such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests can, however, detect these invaders. A growing number of peer reviewed papers are now confirming the presence of these microorganisms in these particular illnesses.

The literature [Nobel] laureate of this year has said that an author can do anything as long as his readers believe him. A scientist cannot do anything that is not checked and rechecked by scientists of this network before it is accepted.

Some 200 peer-reviewed studies (C19Study.com) by government and independent researchers deem HCQ safe and effective against Coronavirus, especially when taken prophylactically or when taken in the initial stages of illness along with zinc and Zithromax.

Science itself is a quasi-religious faith, and is full of dogmas relating to its current paradigm, and any scientists who do not agree with the establishment are kicked out of science altogether – like heretics, freethinkers and blasphemers in religion.

A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

An endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from any belief that members of the occupational guild called 'science' are particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief -- its signature practices (including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods) are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, 'the first principle (of science) is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

One of the best-kept secrets in all of health care — understood by few doctors — is that the peer reviewers, medical journal editors, and guideline writers, who are assumed to be performing due diligence to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data reported from company-sponsored studies, do not have access to the real data from these trials. The published reports that doctors accept as fully vetted scientific evidence can be more accurately described as unverified data summaries prepared largely by or for the sponsoring drug companies.

most peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that the Bible is a collection of numerous different texts composed by different human authors centuries after the events they purport to describe, and that these texts were not assembled into a single holy book until long after biblical times.

Critics may find this hard to believe, but students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty or fifty years ago. People who doubt this should review the textbooks in common use then and now or look at the tests then and now.

Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the same reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming. Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn’t publish it either. But ordinary journalists repeatedly did.

To be a successful academic, it is not enough merely to have mastered the craft of writing intelligibly. You must also be creative enough to produce original research, persuasive enough to convey the significance of your findings to others, prolific enough to feed the tenure and promotion machine, confident enough to withstand the slings and arrows of peer review, strategic enough to pick your way safely through the treacherous terrain of academic politics, well organized enough to juggle multiple roles and commitments, and persistent enough to keep on writing and publishing no matter what. So how do academics gain this formidable set of skills, if not through formal training?

Science could potentially do a better job explaining the meaning of life if scientists devise experiments that can weed out the best answers from the worst. The principle difference between religion and science is as follows: the religious make stuff up to explain what they don't understand. Scientists do the same, but scientists run their ideas through a very rigorous filter that consists of logic, experimentation and peer review. Such a filter eliminates the worst ideas and preserves the best. So if a scientist answers the question, "What is the meaning of life," his answer, at the very worst, is no less valid than an answer that comes from the highest witchdoctor or priest.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need at least to investigate carefully our favourite sources of information – be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network or a person. In Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information – pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: ‘I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange, you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.’ Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: ‘You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has got many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think that the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.

What she did know was that he had little time for feelings, a condescending patience for intuition, and scoffed openly at talk unsupported by peer-reviewed scientific studies or statistics. Still, he was a good man, a caring man, whom she appreciated very much, despite everything. She was, after all, prone to indecision, doubling back on things she had once felt but had since come to feel differently about. She was prone to anxiety, to worry, to a sensation in her chest that her heart might explode. She ran hot, She buzzed. Either she needed to keep busy or else she needed to lie down and sleep. Her husband, on the other hand, needed nothing whatsoever. No wonder then that they deferred to his judgment, his good levelheaded judgment, his engineer’s evenness.

The journal articles that Willett’s team wrote to establish the pyramid were not subject to the peer-review process that scientific papers normally undergo; they had only one reviewer, not the usual two to three. This was because the papers were published, along with the entire 1993 Cambridge conference proceedings, in a special supplement of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition funded by the olive oil industry.

I discovered this tie several years ago when reporting on an FDA source’s tip about the suspected link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. The FDA official told me that the agency was contemplating requiring a breast cancer warning on antiperspirants based on several studies suggesting a possible link. But some inside the FDA felt that industry opposition would be insurmountable. It was an inside debate that would interest many in the public. As I pursued the story, the cosmetics industry wouldn’t do an interview but referred me to the American Cancer Society, which, they assured me, would defend their interests. Indeed, the American Cancer Society was all too happy to agree to appear on camera debunking any idea of a link between antiperspirants and breast cancer. But in my pre-interview with the Cancer Society’s chief doctor, I discovered he hadn’t read—and apparently didn’t know about—the latest peer-reviewed, published studies suggesting a link. That’s when I thought to ask the Cancer Society if it got funding from the cosmetics industry. The answer was a very defensive “Yes.” But the charity wouldn’t disclose how much and said they wouldn’t go through with the on-camera interview unless I agreed not to ask about the antiperspirant industry funding. I forwarded the studies to the American Cancer Society’s doctor. When he did the on-camera interview with me, he reversed his earlier position that had claimed the antiperspirant–breast cancer link was a “myth.” Instead, he answered my questions by deflecting—repeatedly stating, when asked about the latest antiperspirant studies, that women have more important things to focus on, such as getting regular mammograms.

If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart. And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist. If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing. Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits. By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship. When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers. When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

The Heartland Institute is known among climate scientists for persistent questioning of climate science, for its promotion of “experts” who have done little, if any, peer-reviewed climate research, and for its sponsorship of a conference in New York City in 2008 alleging that the scientific community’s work on global warming is a fake.75 But Heartland’s activities are far more extensive, and reach back into the 1990s when they, too, were working with Philip Morris.

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals. Now I mean, people are trying to do something, but I think it’s not publish or perish, it’s publish in the okay places [or perish]. And this has assembled a most ridiculous group of people. I wrote a column for many years in the nineties, in a journal called Current Biology. In one article, “Hard Cases”, I campaigned against this [culture] because I think it is not only bad, it’s corrupt. In other words it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really have no reason to exercise judgment at all. And that’s all been done in the aid of commerce, because they are now giant organisations making money out of it.

KF: Are you saying that if one changes their diet from animal-based protein to plant-based food that the disease process of cancer can be halted and reversed? TCC: Yes, this is what our experimental research shows. I also have become aware of many anecdotal claims by people who have said that their switch to a plant-based diet stopped or even reversed their disease. One study on melanoma has been published in the peer-reviewed literature that shows convincing evidence that it is substantially halted with this diet.

In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one “side.” Imagine providing “balance” to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information. These matters were long ago settled in scientists’ minds. Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the same reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming.

These interviews emphasize an important point: Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. This observation may come as a surprise for those of us who have long basked in the glow of the passion hypothesis. It wouldn’t, however, surprise the many scientists who have studied questions of workplace satisfaction using rigorous peer-reviewed research. They’ve been discovering similar conclusions for decades, but to date, not many people in the career-advice field have paid them serious attention.

Following this rejection, and Sagan’s failure to secure tenure at Harvard, scientists developed a new term: the Sagan effect. One’s popularity with the general public was considered inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of one’s scientific work, a perception that, in Sagan’s case at least, was false. He published, on average, once monthly in peer-reviewed publications over the course of his thirty-nine-year career—a total of five hundred scientific papers. More recent research suggests that scientists who engage the public tend to be better academic performers as well.

By my latest count, there have been 340 peer-reviewed articles published on TM,1 many of which have appeared in highly respected journals. For those unfamiliar with scientific publishing, “peer-reviewed” means that each article is subjected to scrutiny by independent reviewers who are authorities in their field. Even if the reviewers deem the article worthy, they typically suggest changes; only after these recommendations have been addressed does the paper get published. As a researcher who has been both reviewer and reviewee, I can vouch for the large amount of work that goes into this process.

Since Frank was diagnosed eight week previously, I had spent my free time amassing an encyclopaedic knowledge of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. There was practically nothing left about it that I didn`t know. I graduated way past the booklets they printed for sufferers and onto the hard medical texts, online discussion groups for oncologists, PDFs of recent peer-reviewed studies. I wasn`t under the impression that this made me a good daughter, or even that I was doing it out of concern for Frank. It was in my nature to absorbe large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intelectuall dominance.

Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview.

The second rule of thumb is that if some issues seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has gotten many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think the science scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least you know the scientific theories you are rejecting , and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.

They write the steady stream of editorials that appear in local and national newspapers to reinforce the hackneyed orthodoxies of the pharmaceutical paradigms—“all vaccines are safe and effective,” etc. They root out heresy by sitting on the state medical boards—the “Inquisition” courts—that censure and de-license dissident doctors. They control the medical journals and peer-review journal literature to fortify Pharma’s agenda. They teach on medical school faculties, populate journal editorial boards, and chair university departments. They supervise hospitals and chair hospital departments. They act as expert witnesses for pharmaceutical companies in civil court and the federal vaccine court. They present awards to one another.

We underestimate the power of science, and overestimate the power of personal observation. A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes. Our own eyes can deceive us. People can fool themselves, hallucinate, and even go insane. The controls on publication in major journals are more trustworthy than the very fabric of your brain. If you see with your own eyes that the sky is blue, and Science says it is green, then sir, I advise that you trust in Science. This is not what most scientists will tell you, of course; but I think it is pragmatically true. Because in real life, what happens is that your eyes have a little malfunction and decide that the sky is green, and science will tell you that the sky is blue.

It’s a famous bull, and when they see him on the road, the passersby marvel at his size. They admire him from a distance: with the bow of his horns, he could toss any man high in the air, like an arrow—if, indeed, he hasn’t already done so. As gentle as a lamb when it suits him, he can fly into sudden rages when he feels so inclined, and people standing near him never know what’s going to happen next. The angler is peering at him sideways, out of the corner of his eye. “If I try to run away,” he’s thinking, “the bull will catch up to me before I have time to get out of the meadow. If I throw myself into the river, I’ll drown because I can’t swim. If I lie down and pretend to be dead, they say he’ll just come over to sniff me and leave me alone. But can I be quite sure? And what if he doesn’t go away? How dreadful! Best thing is to pretend I’m not worried, even if I am.

Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: “I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.” Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: “You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service.” Now the deal suddenly sounds tempting to hundreds of millions of people. Don’t follow their example. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has gotten many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim. Scientists, for their part, need to be far more engaged with current public debates. Scientists should not be afraid of making their voices heard when the debate wanders into their field of expertise, be it medicine or history. Of course, it is extremely important to go on doing academic research and to publish the results in scientific journals that only a few experts read. But it is equally important to communicate the latest scientific theories to the general public through popular science books, and even through the skillful use of art and fiction. Does that mean scientists should start writing science fiction? That is actually not such a bad idea. Art plays a key role in shaping people’s views of the world, and in the twenty-first century science fiction is arguably the most important genre of all, for it shapes how most people understand things such as AI, bioengineering, and climate change. We certainly need good science, but from a political perspective, a good science-fiction movie is worth far more than an article in Science or Nature.

One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

In 2017, Greg Duncan, the education economist, along with psychologist Drew Bailey and colleagues, reviewed sixty-seven early childhood education programs meant to boost academic achievement. Programs like Head Start did give a head start, but academically that was about it. The researchers found a pervasive “fadeout” effect, where a temporary academic advantage quickly diminished and often completely vanished. On a graph, it looks eerily like the kind that show future elite athletes catching up to their peers who got a head start in deliberate practice. A reason for this, the researchers concluded, is that early childhood education programs teach “closed” skills that can be acquired quickly with repetition of procedures, but that everyone will pick up at some point anyway. The fadeout was not a disappearance of skill so much as the rest of the world catching up. The motor-skill equivalent would be teaching a kid to walk a little early. Everyone is going to learn it anyway, and while it might be temporarily impressive, there is no evidence that rushing it matters.

We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. (b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man. (c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read. (d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy. (e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. (f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’ books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears. (g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of. (h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.

The nudge movement spawned by Thaler and Sunstein has been spectacularly successful around the globe. A 2017 review in the Economist described how policy makers were beginning to embrace insights from behavioral science: In 2009 Barack Obama appointed Mr Sunstein as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The following year Mr Thaler advised Britain’s government when it established BIT, which quickly became known as the “nudge unit”. If BIT did not save the government at least ten times its running cost (£500,000 a year), it was to be shut down after two years. Not only did BIT stay open, saving about 20 times its running cost, but it marked the start of a global trend. Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Nonprofit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030.32

I am glad when we enter the conference room that Chihiro made sure I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey. I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room –originally the formal dining room- is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds –doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks – roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts... My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of department meetings.

When the pandemic started, most of the other medical practices in the Detroit area shut down, Dr. David Brownstein told me. “I had a meeting with my staff and my six partners. I told them, ‘We are going to stay open and treat COVID.’ They wanted to know how. I said, ‘We’ve been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can’t be any different.’ In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We’d have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone. We nebulized them with hydrogen peroxide and Lugol’s iodine. We only rarely used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We treated 715 patients and had ten hospitalizations and no deaths. Early treatment was the key. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about successes. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine. When we talked about it, the whole cartel came for us. I’ve been in litigation with the Medical Board for a year. When we posted videos from some of our recovered patients, they went viral. One of the videos had a million views. FTC filed a motion against us, and we had to take everything down.” In July 2020, Brownstein and his seven colleagues published a peer-reviewed article describing their stellar success with early treatment. FTC sent him a letter warning him to take it down. “No one wanted Americans to know that you didn’t have to die from COVID. It’s 100 percent treatable,” says Dr. Brownstein. “We proved it. No one had to die.

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People’s stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

As an author writing about software engineering, I am committed to providing the best grounding for any factual claims I make or support. To that end I will: only cite papers that I have in fact personally read refrain from indirect quotation (or other ‘telephone game’ variants) make it clear whenever I’m citing opinion or indirect quotation, as opposed to original research cite page and section numbers when available, and always when citing books whenever possible, cite papers freely available online in full text versions refrain from citing obscure or non peer-reviewed sources check that the data I’m citing actually supports the claim look for contradictory evidence as well as supporting, to avoid confirmation bias only make prudent claims, and present all plausible threats to validity.

Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did. “To be a dissenter was to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism,” George Mann had written in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1977.

How can you say one thing when your data shows something else. One doesn't know what was on the authors' minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawyers. If the jury buys it, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. In scientific publishing, the jury are the reviewers and the editors. If they are already convinced of the conclusion, if there is no voir dire, you will surely win the case.

Her comparison of grass-fed versus conventional production, published in leading peer-reviewed journals, found that, pound for pound, grass-fed beef had an overall carbon footprint that was roughly 20 percent higher than feedlot production.53

This is not a mystical adventure. You are not the protagonist. You're seeing and doing things which are having profound emotional effects on you. You're being irrational. You're not thinking things through, you're not working things out. You're going on mental arithmetic instead of paper arithmetic and you're going on gut instinct instead of worked, peer-reviewed results.This is not good science.

All knowledge in life is an ongoing theory and practice. A scientist deems something a "fact" because it has been experimented with and come up as a constant. However, as a quantum physicist for more detail on scientific "fact" and the game changes almost entirely. That which was formerly seen as simple then gains a broad new perspective of complex microcosmic parts whose interactions and origins are still a mystery. However, the hypothesis of scientific theorists are much more rational and educated than absurd suppositions made by both early man and contemporary theism. The truth is that you cannot simply put your trust in science alone to give you irrefutable answers to life's questions and nature's mysteries. If you are not the person doing the research and conducting the experiments, or part of the jury of peers that review the evidence then you are in fact practicing blind faith in scientific disclosure.... Relying on others for information is akin to faith, as faith is accepting without questioning. One should instead learn to question, yet be adaptable and change as new evidence arises... While everyone may know something that you do not, that does not mean you shouldn't question what you learn. A Satanist questions everything and this should include his own beliefs and self acknowledged truths. Everything is subject to change, and beliefs should not be exempt from this fact. ~ John M. Penkal, Truly Satanic Volume I: Satanism

In John A. D’Elia’s recent biography of George Ladd, he notes how, at the height of Ladd’s academic career, a harsh review of one of Ladd’s books by one of his peers completely devastated him, even to the point of alcoholism.

It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack

It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack on Santer and the IPCC, not Mother Jones.

Peer Reviews Many accountants are asking whether preparation of financial statement engagements trigger a peer review requirement. Here are three questions and answers to help clarify whether your CPA firm is subject to peer review. Question 1 Are public accounting firms required to participate in a peer review program if they only issue financial statements using the preparation guidance in SSARS 21? Based on the AICPA’s rules, the answer is no. But check with your state board of accountancy. Some states require participation in a peer review program even if the AICPA does not. Question 2 If my firm participates in a peer review program, will the financial statement work performed under the preparation guidance be subject to potential review? Yes, the financial statements prepared using the preparation guidance will be included in the scope of the peer review. Question 3 Will compilations be included in peer reviews? Yes. When a peer review is performed, compilations will be included in the scope of the engagement. The issuance of a compilation report does trigger the requirement for a peer review. AICPA Guidance The February 2015 Peer Review Update, a monthly AICPA newsletter, included the following: “On November 18, 2014, the Peer Review Board (PRB) issued an exposure draft, which proposed that firms that only perform preparation engagements under AR-C Section 70 – Preparation of Financial Statements (issued as part of Statement on Standards for Accounting and Review Services (SSARS) No. 21, Statement on Standards for Accounting and Review Services: Clarification and Recodification) would not be required to enroll in the AICPA peer review program (Program). However, it also proposed that a firm’s preparation engagements would be included in the scope of a peer review when the firm either elects to enroll in the program (e.g., to comply with licensing or other requirements) or is already enrolled due to other engagements it performs. This proposal was issued in order to address the effect of these engagements on the scope of the Program. The PRB considered comments raised by the peer review community about the proposal and elected to adopt the proposed guidance changes. The changes are effective for peer reviews commencing on or after February 1, 2015.” Tracking Preparation of Financial Statement Engagements Since the preparation service will be included in the scope of peer reviews, consider that firms enrolled in a peer review program need to track the number of preparation services provided. Otherwise, the peer reviewer will not be able to determine the firm’s mix of work; the peer reviewer uses the total population of a firm’s work to select the sample of engagements to be reviewed. Create a method to track financial statement engagements performed under the preparation standard as early as possible. Peer reviews commencing on or after February 1, 2015, are to include preparation engagements. Given the nature of the preparation service—one that gets turned around quickly—it would be easy for a firm to lose track of how many financial statements were issued using this option. Peer Reviews - A Simple Summary •According to AICPA rules, firms that only perform preparation of financial statement services are not required to enroll in the AICPA peer review program (check with your state board of accountancy to see if their rules are different) •For accounting firms subject to peer review, preparation engagements will be included in the scope of peer reviews •Set up a method to track your preparation engagements; peer reviewers need to know how many preparation engagements your firm issues

AICPA peer review checklists are free and can be obtained by Googling “AICPA Peer Review Checklist.” Use the most recent checklist (they often change). Minimum Documentation SSARS 21 states that the minimum documentation requirements are as follows: Establish your firm’s minimum work paper documentation. What work papers are required for each type of engagement? Will your firm require the preparer to sign off on each work paper? When the partner or manager reviews the work papers, will she initial each reviewed work paper or just a summary review sheet? Authority to Issue Determine who has the authority to issue financial statements and compilation reports. Here are a few questions to consider: •Who has authority to issue financial statements using the preparation guidance? •Who has authority to issue financial statements using the compilation guidance? •Will your firm require a second partner review of each initial preparation engagement? •Will annual compilation reports be reviewed by a second partner? Quality Control - A Simple Summary •Well-designed templates will: ·Enhance your firm’s compliance with professional standards, and ·Increase your efficiency •Create templates for those work products that you expect to issue most often (e.g., tax-basis preparation financial statements) •In developing your templates: ·Include the minimum required work papers and reports ·Vet your templates using the AICPA peer review checklists •Determine who has the authority to issue different work products (e.g., preparation, compilation, monthly, annual)

What makes it reasonable to accept anthropogenic climate change is not the fact that 95% of all climate scientists agree. It’s why they agree. Even non-experts can figure out that the experts agree: a survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change’ published between 1993 and 2003 showed that not a single paper rejected the position that global warming is largely caused by human behavior. Climate scientists are not arguing about whether global warming is happening. They’re not arguing about whether humans are largely responsible for global warming. They may be arguing about what action to take. In that case, they should be considered as advisors by those who make policy. Unfortunately, many of those who make policy seem to be ignoring the climate scientists in favor of beliefs pushed by gas, oil, and other corporate interests. Those interests should be considered, but not to the exclusion of the science experts. A

One exemplar of that pending disruption is teenager Jack Andraka, who at the age of fourteen single-handedly developed an early-stage detection test for pancreatic cancer that costs just three cents. His approach (awaiting peer review) is 26,000 times cheaper, 400 times more sensitive, and 126 times faster than today’s diagnostics. Big Pharma has no idea how to deal with Jack, who is one of many wunderkinds emerging globally, all of them with the potential to disrupt great companies and long-established industries. The Jacks of the world bring exponential

Most of us would not consider visiting a scientist’s laboratory to investigate whether he or she was following the procedures and methods described in published papers. In fact, scientific journals do not routinely send out investigative teams to investigate the honesty and integrity of scientists whose papers are accepted for publication. Peer review does not include a review of laboratories. The process is based on trust. It is assumed that scientists will not cheat, though it is known that occasionally a small number of scientists in any field will. Catching cheaters happens occasionally, but it does not usually happen by journals sending out investigative teams to laboratories. Once