Embed Notice

Peer review is a necessary evil because we’re talking about an institution. The scientific method is an approach to knowledge, but if you want to institutionalize it, you do need, well, an institution to review people’s work. The instant you add people into the mix, you are now in a social situation, not a purely intellectual one.

This isn’t to say that these institutions are automatically wrong, but it is to say that one should approach them with a degree of skepticism. Up until fairly recently, even people within these institutions did exactly that. Research universities did not always claim to be the final arbiters of truth as they do now. That they do now is a bad sign. Holding a credential used to mean that people were filtered on raw intellectual capability at the outset, and then it got honed through rigorous and/or sophisticated formal education over the course of years. Now it doesn’t mean that. Now it means you’re a member of a favored political class, like a certain race or sexual orientation or whatever.

I’ve noticed this sort of attitude among credentialed people that they think their word literally alters reality or some shit. That whichever person or entity with the biggest credential can just declare whatever and it becomes so. That the more credentialed a person is, the truer their words are by definition. This is a sign of decay and it’s partially why they put out such obviously false bullshit. If the institution’s aren’t tested by reality, but instead reality is tested by the institution’s claims, then the institution will naturally feel comfortable playing shutdown games on anybody who disagrees.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, and it won’t be the last. But we are going to live to see these universities get reduced to status symbols for special interest groups to an even greater extent. The decline isn’t over.