Anonymous correspondent: “Peer review is elitist and oligarchic; adding a web-based post-hoc system would be democratic. It is often non-specialists, or Pro-Ams, who expose quackery.
Aristotle, by the way, taught a monarch, studied under Plato (who advocated oligarchies), and then lived in the Athenian democracy. He concluded that the democratic method was the most effective.
See Aristotle on Smart Mobs!“
On peer review: I agree completely that adding a web-based post-hoc system would not only be democratic but a dramatic, powerful new safeguard on validity. Don’t forget that post-hoc commentary is and has been my bandwagon all along: it’s what motivated “scholarly skywriting” and drew me into Open Access!
But the critical point is that it is post-hoc. It is not a competitor to peer review but a complement (“not a substitute but a supplement”). It is when people propose post-hoc commentary as a substitute for (rather than just a supplement to) the advance correction and filtration by answerable, qualified experts provided by peer review that I (appear to) go into opposition to the very thing I am fighting for — post-hoc skywriting — (but that is a misunderstanding).
Nothing is lost, and everything is gained, in putting a global, open commentary system at the tail end of expert-vetted work. But when it comes to medical treatment for my loved ones, I don’t want their medicine to be administered on the basis of a net-based straw poll or free-for-all alone. You see how rumour and ignorance and superficiality also propagate on the Web. A prior phase of closed, answerable vetting by qualified specialists is essential, otherwise we may as well treat patients on the basis of the latest in wikipedia. (And science and scholarship are surely not that much less important than health!) Entrusting all that to populist polling and vigilantism is a form of gaussian roulette.
On expertise: To put it another way: I really think we need to re-think, or think through, exactly what we mean by “elitist” and “oligarchic” in this sense: Is it elitist to have certified cardiologists decide what should be published as being a safe healthy operation to perform, rather than having it voted on by a Gallup Poll or swayed by persuasive blogsters? Is it oligarchical (to put it even more luridly) to keep hobbyists out of the operating theatre?
On specialised division of labour: I pick these melodramatic examples only to bring out the fact that there really is something at stake, and that it’s commonsensical: We cannot, in the modern world (of the past tens of thousands of years of civilization!) each be self-sufficient jacks of all trades. We rely on division of labor, and division of expertise, for everything from our food and shelter to our health and security. Our cumulative, collective knowledge and expertise (our “Creative Commons”) is also dependent on this distributed, complementary expertise.
So I ask: is that division into complementary expertise “elitist”? Is reliance on it “oligarchical”? Should we (like our failing education system) declare everyone equally expert as a matter of birthright, and cede judgment to democratic opinion polls in all matters instead?
On re-thinking “elitism”: Without for a moment denying that qualified expert judgment is fallible too (but recognizing also that mass inexpert judgment is no remedy for that, just a useful check/balance), I really think the rhetorical buzzword “elitism” needs a serious rethink — especially where it is in fact referring to specialized expertise, skill, knowledge that a minority have, and have worked hard to attain, whereas the majority have not…
In a sense, representative democracy involves something like this division of labour too: It is only that the tyranny of the daily opinion poll is sadly constraining the work of our elected representatives. Democracy, too, used to be “post hoc”: We would vote for those we considered to be provisionally best qualified to represent our interests (alas not always noble interests, but that’s another matter) and then let them do their job, until it’s time to vote again on whether they deserve re-election.
On mass micro-management: But now, with pervasive media and instantaneous polling, we hardly let them exercise any expertise they may have, or may have acquired on the job (for we hardly vote for experts either, preferring ignoramuses like ourselves, as more flattering and congenial!): we look over their shoulders daily, not only at their sex lives and their expense accounts, but at their daily professional judgments. We insist on a day-to-day participatory democracy, and we get what we insist on: a fashion show of trends and opinions: capital punishment ok today, not ok tomorrow, abortion yes, no, veils in schools, on, off, etc. etc.
Since many of these are matters of opinion anyway, perhaps it doesn’t matter if it is the winds of fashion or rumor rather than the wisdom of trusted electees that decides. But sometimes it does matter. And the catastrophic “popular” (at the time!) Iraqi war is one such result. The rest seems now to be putting out daily forest fires (still on the basis of day-to-day public opinion).
We not only blindly trust “populism” (and condemn “elitism”) — thereby ceding judgment to the vagaries of the “normal distribution” (“bell curve”), which, at best, guarantees regression on the mean; but at worst, or meanest, it is the occasional but inevitable burst of noise, or worse, closer to the tail end [the extreme] of the distribution, which sometimes manages to appeal to the mean, and become mainstream.
On more sinister background forces we also trust: Today we are also blindly trusting another unquestioned “force,” rather akin to the ponderous inertial mass of populism, and that is the inexorable march of capitalism: global military-industrial interests being inexorably — indeed psychopathically, as the excellent movie The Corporation, showed — pursued in the background (the Cheneys behind the Bushes).
It is as unfashionable today to be anti-capitalist (in anything) as it is to be anti-populist (in anything). It is axiomatic that what is good for the market is good, and good for everybody, and what is judged good by the majority is good, and good for everybody.
On the wisdom of time: I beg to differ; and to be allowed the time to show that what appears momentarily to be right either to prevailing public opinion or to the corporate bottom-line, may not be right at all. It’s all a matter of time, after all. What allegedly sets our species apart is our capability of deferring gratification and deferring judgment, even deferring to the judgment of those who may be better qualified to judge. Yes, let’s have post-hoc controls on all that, but let them be “post” enough to give experts the chance to do what they are best qualified to do…
On Aristotle on collective wisdom: As to Aristotle on the latent collective (“whole is better than the sum of its parts”) wisdom, morality and ethics of mobs — that might be true of the audience of Hellenic Theatre, it might occasionally coalesce in the conscientiousness of juries (though one thinks of OJ Simpson) , but it hardly seems true when it comes to lynch mobs, Danish cartoon hysteria, or American voting patterns! Nor, for that matter, the mean value on which pop music has regressed, with the extinction of connoisseur elites (there, you can pillory me on that one!).
Aristotle may feel at ease facing a crowd, and deferring to its judgment. I am terrified; utterly terrified. Only demagogues can “reason” with crowds, particularly online, in real time.
I cannot share the feeling of many that the accolade “most popular” is synonymous (or even remotely related) to “best quality.” My own default reaction (sometimes wrong, I admit, but born of experience, not native conviction!) is the exact opposite: Most popular? Then chances are it is rather superficial, uninformed, and trashy…