Midwest Chick's Place

In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokol wrote a paper for a (non-peer reviewed) journal that was specifically designed to flatter the editors to see if it would get published.  It did and he then revealed that his paper was a hoax.  Much egg on faces.

In 2018, a group of scholars wrote several hoax papers on ‘grievance studies’ and got them four of them published. 

And here was are in 2021.  Higher Education Quarterly published a ‘peer-reviewed’ paper with the premise that academe has been taken over by conservatives.  The paper had glaring errors in the data, the names used for the authors didn’t exist at the universities they purported to be from.  One political scientist tweeted its findings out.  In short, it was a pile of doo-doo, but it said what academics want to hear.

What it does show is that peer-review is not an assurance of quality or veracity even though the scientific community makes a big hairy deal about it.

If someone likes the author, if the paper meets a meme, if it ‘corroborates’ a statement, chances are it’s going to get published.

That’s why the hockey stick environmental studies stood for so long.  Anyone with a different study and conclusion couldn’t get published.

We’re seeing it with masking, vaxxes, therapeutics.  

And that doesn’t take into account that those who are paying the piper are calling the tune–Pfizer sponsors a LOT of studies.  So do the NIH and the CDC.  If a person gets money for a study and the results are not what’s wanted, it’s sidelined, ridiculed, and memory-holed.

There’s so much corruption that the scientific method has died and has been replaced with the words demanded by the patrons and sponsors.  If the patrons all agree on a result, then that’s all that will be seen.