About the Creation of the Peer Review Process
Eric Weinstein: "If you screwed up covid this badly by getting inside of the Lancet and Nature. Peer review is this fake thing that supposedly stretches back to the founding of the Royal Society. And it's very clear from the scholarship around it that it comes out of the period between 1965 and 1975 initiated by the Medicare Act, predicated on the need for editors for the journal expansion, founded by Pergamon Press and Robert Maxwell. By 1975 there's a giant battle between the [National Science Foundation] NSF and both fiscal and cultural conservatives against something called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS), where peer review was born in a Utah clinic. [It] came out of the medical literature because the federal government in 1965 with The Medicare Act picked up the need to pay for so many medical procedures. They wanted to say "Why are we assigning this many medical procedures?" The doctors circled the wagons and said, "We will peer review each other." Then in night, by 1975 the NSF was under the microscope, and they used peer review as a self defense of last resort to say we will be reviewing each other, right? Peer review is a myth."
Digital IDs and Social Credit System Taking Root in EU
Michael Shellenberger reports. No wonder authoritarians of all stripes crave these powerful digital tools :
Greg Lukianoff Discusses Free Speech at TED
Greg Lukianoff began his TED talk with this: "2023 and 2024 were the two worst years for mob censorship and shout downs on record."
He then offered these Four Truths about free speech:
1. You are not safer for knowing LESS about what people really think.
2. Free Speech Cures Violence (Free Speech is the best alternative to violence).
3. Free Speech protects the powerless (free speech is the best check on power ever invented).
4. Even "bad" people can have good ideas (and good people aren't always right). ("Just because I hate your guts doesn't mean you are wrong.") ("The way we figure out truth ... doesn't work if you just talk to people your already agree with.").
Greg ended his talk with this gem:
"To understand the world it's crucial to know what people really think . . . For that, we need free speech."
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