Thread by @phl43

The reception of this post has been very positive, thanks a lot to everyone for your kind words and for sharing it, but I also got some of the same criticisms I get every time I publish something, so I wanted to address them quickly. 1/n

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1334892503930187777

So one complaint I get almost every time is that, if I think I'm right, then I should try to get my work published in a peer reviewed journal. The suggestion is often that, if I don't, it's because I'm afraid it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny. 2/n

There are many reasons why I generally don't want to submit my work to peer reviewed journals, some of which I discuss below, but let me start by saying that my fear of the towering intellects who run Nature and saw no problems with Flaxman et al.'s paper is not one of them. 3/n

First, if you follow me, you know that I regard pre-publication peer review as the eleventh plague of Egypt, the one that was so terrible that the Bible's authors thought preferable to omit it, lest it give God a bad name for unleashing it on mankind. 4/n

I think pre-publication peer review is terrible for science. It's a massive waste of resources, prevents interesting ideas from being published and getting discussed, makes various biases worse, etc. 5/n

Eventually, I plan to make the case against pre-publication peer review at length, but in the meantime you can read this excellent blog post by @RichardHanania (cspicenter.org/welcome-to-csp…) which explains many of the things I don't like about pre-publication peer review. 6/n

For instance, in my post on Flaxman et al.'s paper, I didn't shy away from most of the nasty details, but I also tried to write it in such a way that even people without a technical baggage could follow the argument. This would have been impossible in a scientific journal. 7/n

For another take on why pre-publication peer review is bad, you can also have a look at @lastpositivist and @remcoheesen's paper on the topic. There is no lack of arguments against this antiquated system! 8/n academic.oup.com/bjps/advance-a…

In any case, if my ideas don't stand up to scrutiny, anyone is welcome to criticize them. There is no need for pre-publication peer review for that. But if I were you, I wouldn't be holding my breath... 9/n

I'm not going to waste my time writing a paper that will not be as good as what I can publish on my blog because I would have to deal with bullshit constraints and will most likely be rejected for bad reasons anyway. I prefer to do something more productive with my time. 10/n

There are some things I plan to write and submit to peer reviewed journals, but that's just because I want them to have an impact on policy and, given the irrational fetishism of peer review among scientists and journalists, they won't unless I do that. 11/n

As some people suggested, I could just send a letter to Nature and explain the problems I found in Flaxman et al.'s paper. This would not take as much time as writing a whole paper and it could still help correct the record. 12/n

I did think about that, and I'm still not ruling that out entirely, but I'm not sure I will because I fear it will also be a waste of time. I just don't trust Nature's editors to judge my work on the merits, especially since it's not flattering for them and I'm a nobody. 13/n

Note that I did send a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medecine a few months ago to explain my concerns about Boulware et al.'s study on HCQ, but it was rejected even though I was clearly right, so I just wasted my time. 14/n necpluribusimpar.net/hydroxychloroq…

If someone with the relevant credentials wanted to co-author a letter to Nature, I might consider it because then we'd be taken seriously, but nobody is paying me to do this stuff and I can't spend too much time on something that I think has a very low chance of success. 15/n

Anyway, I understand scientists who submit to journals, they just have to play this game if they want to have a career in academia. But I have no desire to become a professional epidemiologist, and don't care enough about this topic to invest more time in it, so I won't. 16/n

Finally, there is the inevitable "you're a philosopher and you're arguing against scientists who published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world" argument. 17/n

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1329212161856516097

I agree with the critics that it doesn't seem fair for a philosopher to criticize epidemiologists. However, I was alone and there were 15 of them, so I'd say the game was, if not equal, at least not as unequal as this initial description made it sound 😏 18/n

More seriously, I get this "argument" every time I publish technical work that's critical of the published literature. Every. single. time. If you don't have anything interesting to say, just don't say anything, don't embarrass yourself like that. 19/n

I could point out that many philosophers do technical work and are totally capable of understanding scientific papers, which is true but irrelevant, because the truth is that any intelligent person who is sufficiently interested in a scientific question can do that. 20/n

Obviously, I'm not saying that credentials don't mean anything (though I think in some fields they're actually a negative signal of quality, as @knrd_z was saying recently), I'm just saying that the ad hominem fallacy is, well, a fallacy 🤷‍♂️ 21/21

By the way, I said that nobody is paying me for that stuff, but it's not strictly true since I put a tipping form at the end of my post the other day and several people have sent me something, so let me take this opportunity to thank them all.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1335344882827845636

Yes, I completely agree with this, like I said above I don’t think credentials mean *nothing*. But some people think not having any is automatically disqualifying and that's just stupid.

https://twitter.com/neipate96/status/1335348019902996482