alt Hacker NewsI'm not the person you replied to, but I think that in the lay world, people do indeed think that peer review is as you've described. If it's not, then maybe it should be?
Research gets cited constantly in public debates and is used for policy decisions, so the public should be able to quickly separate the good from the bad, the "maybe this is true" from the "this is empirically proven."
The public has lost a lot of trust in Science because research papers have been used to push political agendas, which can then never be questioned because doing so means arguing with a supposed peer-reviewed scientific consensus.
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> public has lost a lot of trust in Science because research papers have been used to push political agendas, which can then never be questioned because doing so means arguing with a supposed peer-reviewed scientific consensus
The public has lost trust in science because 10 to 30% of it is scientifically illiterate [1]. (Tens of millions of American adults are literally illiterate [2].)
That's what lets activists and politicians cherrypick bad science that supports their position or cast a scientific consensus as unquestionable.
[1] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...
> I'm not the person you replied to, but I think that in the lay world, people do indeed think that peer review is as you've described. If it's not, then maybe it should be?
It is not, and it cannot be. It is unrealistic to expect a referee working in their free time to confirm studies that often cost millions of dollars. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what peer review is and why it is useful in popular or heavy vulgarised science.
Politicians, journalists, and university press offices are guilty of this, and they are those abusing peer review to give some studies more weight than they deserve.
Nothing is ever “proven”. There is simply more or less support for a theory or proposition.
Replication and meta-analysis are an important part of this.
Most scientists are in fact very conservative with how they claim their results - less so university PR departments and “study shows” clickbaiters.