Over at Statistical Modelling, Andrew Gelman makes a very sensible point about peer review: it is as only as good as your peers. Why do psychologists worship p-values? Because they approve it in peer review. A few choice quotes:
In short, if an entire group of peers has a misconception, peer review can simply perpetuate error. We’ve seen this a lot in recent years, for example that paper on ovulation and voting was reviewed by peers who didn’t realize the implausibility of 20-percentage-point vote swings during the campaign, peers who also didn’t know about the garden of forking paths. That paper on beauty and sex ratio was reviewed by peers who didn’t know much about the determinants of sex ratio and didn’t know much about the difficulties of estimating tiny effects from small sample sizes.
And:
To put it another way, peer review is conditional. Papers in the…
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