Unfortunately Martin is looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist.
There are too many cases where scientific concensus has been wrong. Although
quarks and Higgs bosons may exist, phlogiston and W-rays do not even though
they were once well-accepted physical concepts. As for current climate
issues, I don't see any easy way to resolve the controversy. Of course we
discount the testimony of experts who work for the oil industry just as we
did the medical researchers employed by tobacco firms, but how far does this
get us? I subscribe to a fisheries list where most of the subscribers feel
that any research funded by the Pew Foundation is automatically biased.
R. Bruce Lindsay taught me that we never truly know anything, the best we
can do is construct the best possible models of what we observe. When you
read a scientific paper you are not reading facts, you are reading about a
model that the author has constructed to explain observations. It boils down
to your ability to evaluate models.
Fortunately the fields where we are least able to judge the quality of
research are usually not of great concern to us. Martin's world will not
collapse if the Higgs boson is not found.
Bill Silvert
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Meiss" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] "real" versus "fake" peer-reviewed journals
Yes, Dr. Greenberg, I concede your point. In one's immediate research
one must go far beyond having faith in the publishing process.
By the way, do journals keep accurate data on their rejection
rates,
on re-submission rates, etc. This would be the sort of information that
could be used to distinguish between legitimate journals and journals with
political agendas.
However, at least in part, my remarks were directed toward our
acceptance of work well outside our field. I would like to hold
intelligent
opinions on climate change, for instance, without having to understand all
the climatology, meteorology, oceanography, paleontology, modeling, etc.
that truly enlightened opinions are based on. I would like to believe
that
the voodoo-sounding stuff and the particle zoo that physicists talk about
is
well-founded in theory and experiment, but I don't understand their
mathematics and I never will. So when physicists say they have found the
top quark, or that there ought to be a Higgs boson, I have to take that on
faith, or perhaps, as Dave Raikow suggested in an earlier post, we should
call it "confidence." Condidence that those guys know what they're
talking
about, that their journal editors and reviewers aren't nuts or corrupt,
confidence that their mathematics isn't black magic.
