Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

On Aug 9, 3:33 pm, James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Kris Krieger wrote:
James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
8x0nk.402$ZV1.380@trnddc07:">news:8x0nk.402$ZV1.380@trnddc07:

bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Aug 7, 3:53 am, Joerg <notthisjoerg...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
James Arthur wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
[...]

 I haven't noticed Steve McIntyre, or
anybody else with concerns about the quality of refereeing in
scientific journals, ever coming up with scheme for paying
referees for the time they put in on reading and trying to
understand other people's papers. At the moment the people who put
in the time get very little back for their work, and this time
could more productively be invested in work that will get them
publications, grant money and promotion.
"... that will get them publications, grant money and promotion".
That is a nearly perfect description for a publish-or-parish gravy
train mentality. And that's part of this whole problem. or in plain
English: Selfishness.
We happen to live in a selfish society.
Publishers like Elsevier who charge big bucks for the academic
journals they publish, while paying nothing to the referees who do
the quality control that makes the journals worth those big bucks,
presumably also rate as selfish.

That's the most damning description of peer-review I've heard.
If the reviewers aren't interested and don't have the time, maybe
they shouldn't do it.
Exactamente.
Nevertheless, enough people do it, and do it well enough, that we do
seem to have a growing body of useful scientific knowledge.

If you don't like the system, you are welcome to devise a scheme that
might work better, and spend the time, effort and money required to
get it working in competition with the existing structure.
No Bill, what you describe is a corruption, a sham, not peer-review.

Peer review is no guarantee of quality or accuracy--as it's intended
to be and as you've touted it--if the reviewers aren't actually
examining the data, methods, and checking calculations for errors.

By your description peer review is worthless; a Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval would be better; at least those products are
checked for quality before being endorsed.

Cheers,
James Arthur

I know someone who's published a number of scientific papers, and it's my
understanding that the people who review papers on a given topic are
knowledgeable enough so that they don't *have* to redo everything - they
can spot methodological problems, wrroneous calculations, disjuncts of
logic, and other erros without literally sitting down and redoing it all.

Part of being an expert is having a certain dataset pretty much committed
to memory.

That's not the case here.  The reviewers didn't have the data and
authors weren't giving it out.  T'was secret.  That's my gripe.

Nor were the methods disclosed.  So there's no way reviewers could
have actually checked the articles they supposedly checked.

And, it turns out, there *were* a whole bunch of mistakes, which
wasn't discovered until 8 years later when some non-climatologists
managed to get, then add up the numbers.  And they didn't add up.

There weren't a "whole bunch of mistakes". There were quite a few
things that McIntyre didn't like, but by no means all of them qualify
as mistakes. There was one serious error in the way that Mann weighed
his data which based the weighing only on the variablility within a
particular time period, as opposed to the entire period covered by
that data - I myself don't know why this was wrong, but the
statisticians don't like it at all.

McIntyre claimed that this meant that random data treated in this way
would give you a hockey stick, which may be true, but in half the
cases the steep bit would be at the start of the period, and in half
the cases the steep bit would point down rather than up, which he
fails to mention. As far as I can tell, the hockey stick persists in
data that has been analysed in ways that statisiticians do approve of,
so McIntyre got himself excited over a fairly trivial point.

Eeyore doesn't seem to understand this, and carries on as if McIntyre
had derailed the whole anthropogenic global warming apple cart. The
deniers who show up on web-sites that have had covert funding from
Exxon-Mobil should understand this, but aren't going to let that stop
hem blowing up a minor controversy in the hope of discrediting the
whole scientific case, in the style made popular by the pro-smoking
lobby some twenty years ago.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

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