Denyse points to this article about peer review.
It’s headlined as a call for transformation, but it starts from a fake premise. The authors are puzzled that peer review doesn’t do what it was “supposed to do”.
They do show a beautifully exponential timeline of the tenure fraud, and they bring out an important landmark that I hadn’t heard before. The landmark explains why peer review was sparse and relatively harmless before the ’70s, then turned universal and nasty in the ’70s.
Exponential is important. When you see an exponential curve you know you’re seeing an abstraction without any feedback or consequences. Negative feedback always yields a sigmoid or tanh pattern, rising to a level of maturity or perfection and staying there. The number of published papers rises exponentially because the published papers aren’t causing any real development. They aren’t causing any real development because they aren’t being read.
The landmark was an attempt to defend the closed monopoly of Deepstate and Big Science from the fake pork-busters** like Proxmire.
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In response to the controversy, a House subcommittee held a hearing on the NSF’s peer review process in July, 1975. The result is this fantastic 1000-page document filled with scientists, historians, sociologists, Congressmen, and NSF employees talking about what they thought peer review was for and why it was important for science. The hearings make it clear that the NSF was relying on the idea that peer review is crucial to good science to justify rejecting some of the proposed Congressional oversight. And it worked — the NSF had to make some changes to the way it handled referee reports, but the congressional oversight proposals were dropped.
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So the myth of “quality control” was designed to fence out and tinfoil the heretics who dared to criticize the wealth and power of popes and priests.
Monopolies always mount propaganda defenses against unions or regulators or boycotters who might weaken the monopoly. We can see it today with Sammy defending bitcoin, and with Satan Altman and his cohorts defending AI.
The 1975 date agrees with the timeline graph and also agrees with my experience. My father wrote one of the first criticisms of tenure in 1959, but he was ahead of the curve. The united front of fashionable orthodoxy showed up clearly in the ’70s, both on campus and in the mags like SciAm.
By no coincidence at all, the conference that launched the “global warming” genocide was ALSO in 1975.
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** Porkbusters like Proxmire and Coburn are pluponents. They pretend to oppose an evil while really enabling and strengthening the evil. Coburn always singled out USEFUL or TRIVIAL science for mockery. He bashed solid agricultural problem-solving that sounded dumb to city folks, or tiny speculative studies that cost only a few thousand dollars. Coburn NEVER criticized DARPA or NSA or other Deepstate monstrosities that spend TRILLIONS making war against humanity.
Polistra's Mill 