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Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it's broken


There's no incentive to fix the system, which was never designed to catch fraud anyway.

The sheer complexity of modern science, and its reliance on customized software, renders one of the frontline defenses against soft and hard fraud useless. It was relatively easy to judge the “wrongness” of an article because you could follow the document from beginning to end, from start to finish, and have all the information you needed to evaluate it right there at your fingerprints. From mistakes that you pass over because you’re going too fast, to using sophisticated tools that you barely understand but use to get the result that you wanted, to just totally faking it, science is becoming increasingly wrong.

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