Shannon Love

Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process

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In reading this post by Megan McArdle, it occurs to me that most people outside the sciences don’t understand what “peer review” actually is. They have a wildly exaggerated concept of how thorough and detailed the process is. My spouse pointed out that most lay people imagine that the experimenter presenting a paper for peer review is forced to cower before a bench of a half-dozen or more of his peers who then mercilessly grill the experimenter about every facet of his work.

In short, they imagine that peer review looks something like this:

galileo-inquisition_large

…when in reality peer review looks like this:

ScientistAtHisDesk

By the way that proponents of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) wave it about as a talisman to ward off criticism, a lay person could be excused for thinking that peer review is a rigorous process that is central to the functioning of science and that verifies the conclusions of a scientist’s research.

Peer review is nothing like that.

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Scientists Are Not Software Engineers

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The real shocking revelation in the Climategate incident isn’t the emails that show influential scientists possibly engaging in the disruption of the scientific process and possibly even committing legal fraud. Those emails might be explained away.

No, the real shocking revelation lies in the computer code and data that were dumped along with the emails. Arguably, these are the most important computer programs in the world. These programs generate the data that is used to create the climate models which purport to show an inevitable catastrophic warming caused by human activity. It is on the basis of these programs that we are supposed to massively reengineer the entire planetary economy and technology base.

The dumped files revealed that those critical programs are complete and utter train wrecks.

It’s hard to explain to non-programmers just how bad the code is but I will try. Suppose the code was a motorcycle. Based on the repeated statements that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming was “settled science” you would expect that the computer code that helped settle the science would look like this…

SuzukiBiplaneMotorcycleConcept-3

…when in reality it looks like this:

leannag-frankenbike

Yes, it’s that bad.

Programmers all over the world have begun wading through the code and they have been stunned by how bad it is. It’s quite clearly amateurish and nothing but an accumulation of seat-of-the-pants hacks and patches.

How did this happen?

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No One Peer-Reviews Scientific Software

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Recent revelations that the peer review system in climatology might have been compromised by the biases of corrupt reviewers miss a much bigger problem.

Most climatology papers submitted for peer review rely on large, complex and custom-written computer programs to produce their findings. The code for these programs is never provided to peer reviewers and even if it was, the peer climatologists doing the reviewing lack the time, resources and expertise to verify that the software works as its creators claim.

Even if the peer reviewers in climatology are as honest and objective as humanly possible, they cannot honestly say that they have actually preformed a peer review to the standards of other fields like chemistry or physics which use well-understood scientific hardware. (Other fields that rely on heavily on custom-written software have the same problem.)

Too often these days when people want to use a scientific study to bolster a political position, they utter the phrase, “It was peer reviewed” like a magical spell to shut off any criticism of a paper’s findings.

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The Media Have Always Been Biased

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From one of my favorite Bloom County Strips:

Milo: “Senator? This is Milo Bloom at the Beacon. Will you confirm that you sunk Jimmy Hoffa in your backyard pond?”
Senator Bedfellow: “What? Of course not!”
Milo: “Find, I’ll go with ‘Sen. Bedfellow Denies That Pond Is Where He Sunk Hoffa.’ ”
Senator Bedfellow: “That’s not true!”
Milo: “Okay. ‘Bedfellow Did Sink Hoffa in Pond.’ ”
Senator Bedfellow: “I don’t know where Hoffa is!!”
Milo: ” ‘I Lost The Body’ Says Bedfellow.“

Hitting the Sweet Spot

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In business, or anything else, you can go just as wrong by being too early to market as by being too late. A case in point:

I worked for a little known company in Cambridge, MA called BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman) that sold a program called “email” to GTE for a few bucks because no one ” got it” at the time.

From the comments in this post on Google’s Wave.