Peer Review – the Route to Truth or another Echo Chamber?

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In the US legal system, the accused party has the right to trial by a “jury of peers.”

Every MD I’ve spoken to about it feels cheated that the MD is always forced to face a jury of “non-peers.” That is, non-medical people who lack advanced education in physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, neuroanatomy, pathology, surgery, clinical practice, etc.

It feels grossly unfair from this side of the table.

But can you imagine how often a jury of MD’s would side with a patient claiming to have been victimized in some way by an MD? I suspect guilty verdicts would be rare. I hope I’m wrong, and I certainly could be.

Though most MDs probably see themselves as the proverbial hens with the (personal-injury) lawyers as the wolves, many, if not most non-medical US citizens would never put MD’s in charge of bringing malpractice fairness to patients.

Common sense says that such a setup would mean well-intentioned wolves guarding the hen house, a conflict of interest, or at least an echo chamber designed to keep truth and justice away from angry patients.

Like every conflict, this one has two sides, each deserving a voice. But common sense tends to win in the end, so “non-peers” judge us MD’s in court.

Hmm…

What if we carry this flavor of common sense over into the peer-review process of the scientific literature?

In that priestly realm, the professors’ former students become the gatekeepers of every scientific journal on Earth. Sounds like an echo chamber.

But it wouldn’t resemble wolves guarding the henhouse if all currently established scientific views were accurate.

Sadly, even the firmly “established” views in every field tend to eventually change. We can probably assume they always will.

Without the option of infallible knowledge, the peer-review process could avoid the reality of a systemic conflict of interest if only the journals’ gatekeepers could become, by-and-large, open to radically new ideas, concepts and technologies of the sort that render “settled science” obsolete or mistaken.

Unfortunately, history demonstrates the opposite situation.

These brilliant minds appear to be closed. Peer-reviewing gatekeepers live in a status-quo bubble, like a lay person who watches only one side of TV “news” or allows our virtual-demons, the internet AI’s, to select their reading materials, podcasts and videos.

This opaque peer-review bubble extends beyond the gatekeepers to encircle government research grant money in one-sided ignorance.

History clearly tells us that breakthrough ideas are routinely blocked. It’s old news, but not fake news.

If objective truth had no independent or transcendent power of its own, I suspect modern humanity would still be paying our priestly scientists to bring us ever-tinier details on the Earth’s cosmic centrality and its false illusion of roundness.

Since academic reality in the West is “publish or perish,” scientists must think within the established thought-boxes and paradigms of their professors, otherwise their papers will be rejected by the system’s consanguineous gatekeepers. When paper rejection happens too often, the young scientist who has devoted her life to the sacred hunt for truth suddenly falls from grace and must scramble for a new career to avoid homelessness — literally.

It’s a high-risk game.

Being a young research scientist is a bit like owning a restaurant in June, 2020, except that the scientist’s debt is an enormous education loan hanging overhead forever without the exit option of bankruptcy. The risk is high. Survival for most of them requires finding a safe route that increases the odds of publication.

The modern peer-review process is part of humanity’s ancient search for infallible literature. Too bad it’s a futile search (as far as I know, though I could be wrong).

Love it or hate it, the echo-chamber review process is all we’ve got now.

Perhaps we could improve it by allowing non-scientific people, or maybe just scientists from unrelated fields, into each journal’s review process, reflecting the way a jury of “non-peers” decides the fate an MD and her patient in a court of law. Common sense?

Sometimes the experts closest to a technical issue are the people furthest from objectivity. Trees hide the forest, if nothing else.

Cross-pollination would also improve research grant money distribution. Mixing scientists and artists in the decision making processes would help a great deal, I suspect, while excluding career politicians entirely. Can I get an amen from the back?!

And perhaps an “open-mindedness quota” should be presented to the tax-payers for a vote:

“Vote YES if you want the government to reserve 10% of the relevant part of your tax money (the grant money) for projects that virtually any tenured professor would condemn without a real thought.”

The list of such government-favored (but normally taboo) “quota” projects might include things like…

  1. building a zero-point energy device,
  2. documenting extra-sensory perception,
  3. studying physical materials believed to have come form extraterrestrial space craft,
  4. studying the evidence of intelligent design in genetics,
  5. projects that don’t equate “scientific materialism” with fact,
  6. projects seeking evidence of a fundamental element of reality that is NOT reducible to matter and energy.

Like the rest of us searching for answers that improve life rather than degrading it, peer reviewers of science journals must open themselves to the distinct possibility that reductive “scientific materialism” is not the only rational option for researchers in pursuit of scientific truth.

…

Common-sense love,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

 

 

Alien Reproduction Vehicle

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In real life, we tend to think in binary, black-and-white terms. The good guys versus the bad. It’s simple and ingrained.

But, as you know, if you spend a few years trying to become a fiction writer, you learn that villains can’t be all bad, and good guys can’t be flawless. Otherwise your characters are flat, unrealistic and boring.

In the UFO community, binary thinking dominates. The “evil” people of the “Cabal” (the super-dark aspects of the military-industrial complex) are supposedly all sociopaths whose only motivation is to continue hiding free energy technology and advanced propulsion technology from the public so they can line their pockets in petrodollars while petting a black cat.

The feeling is, if only we could get rid of these misanthropes, we’d have free energy, clean air, no more world hunger, and vacations to Andromada.

Maybe so, but…

Actual life is not like TV politics. The good guys are not limited to your political party, backed by the truth on the news stations you watch. The bad guys are not all members of the opposite political party, backed by the fake news on the outlets you dislike.

Real life probably isn’t even reflected in any fundamentalist religious or anti-religious group’s version of truth that puts God (or no God) on their side, while the falsehoods of other religious or anti-religious groups put Satan (or no Satan) in charge of them.

Here’s a video that describes in great detail one sincere, honest-sounding man’s insights into a 1960s flying saucer, allegedly built by Skunk Works.

Personally, I’m about 95% convinced that humanity actually has this type of technology now. Your mileage may vary. 🙂

But the thing I’m not convinced of is that the entire UFO community has an accurate assessment of the bad motivation of the insiders, the “evil sociopaths” who seem to hide and control this technology.

Let’s think about it…

Imagine you’re a fiction writer trying to get into the head of your “villain” to make her/him more of a realistic, rounded character. You need to find a legitimate reason for this person to hide zero point energy and electrogravitics from the rest of the world.

Here are some possibilities that jump out at us:

1. The technology behind zero point energy, like the technology behind nuclear power, can be used in weapons of mass destruction in addition to warming water for clean electricity production.

2. There may be some negative health or environmental side effect to the use of zero point energy. So far, nearly every technological advance we’ve made has brought an unintended negative consequence or three. A few examples: antibiotics save lives but create superbugs, all pharmaceuticals bring symptomatic (rarely causal) relief but cause lists of possible negative side effects (rarely fatal), the internal combustion engine made transportation easier but brought pollution and the megacity’s impersonal culture with ironic human isolation, diminished eye contact and a near absence of smiling… the list of examples is endless.

3. The unelected “Cabal” within the free world’s governments considers zero point energy and electrogravitic technologies to be their highest military advantages over their perceived enemies in the communist dictatorships. They are therefore loath to surrender these military advantages.

4. The use of small zero point energy devices in the houses and cars of billions around the globe might affect climate change or something much worse. All publically available energy devices generate heat as a byproduct. Perhaps a zero point energy device that could run a person’s home would not only make the grid obsolete (a wonderful thing) but also elevate the average temperature of the earth to a detrimental degree, or worse yet, warm the interface of the Earth’s crust with its core allowing the crust to detach and tilt due to the centrifugal force acting upon the heavy polar ice caps (an idea detailed in a scientific context at SuspiciousObservers.org).

5. Unlimited free energy would mean that food could be grown hydroponically in virtually inexhaustible quantities, the limitation being only in the technology of liquid fertilizers, grow lights, and the vertical stacking of crops. Ocean water could be desalinated at little cost and freely pumped to the distant corners of every desert. While this would eliminate world hunger, (yeah!) it might also eliminate humanity’s primary motivation for working. It’s difficult to speculate with confidence about this, but work seems to be essential to most people’s mental health (including children), just as exercise is essential to everyone’s physical health (including children). If free energy were to vastly diminish our need to work, it might become an extinction-level evolutionary stressor for us, or worse yet, a negative force upon the average person’s integrity. “Idle hands are the devil’s playground.”

6. The term “alien reproduction vehicle” implies the existence of literal aliens, of course. While the average person nowadays knows very little about the existence of UFOs, let alone the technology behind them, we know even less about the motivations of any alleged alien species. Stepping around the knee-jerk binary thinking of the respectable Dr. Steven Greer versus the rest of the UFO community (including my favorite UFOlogist Richard Dolan), it seems unlikely that all alien species with the capability of contacting humans would have purely benevolent or purely malevolent feelings about us. (Sentient reality, like biology, is rarely binary.) This would leave the door open to an infinite variety of motivations that the human “Cabal” might have for keeping zero point technology and electrogravitic transportation secret. For instance, perhaps an alien species has told them that secrecy is essential because widespread knowledge of these technologies leads primitive warlike species (like us) to certain self-destruction. Or perhaps aliens have threatened the “Cabal” with something terrible if they blab what they know to the public.

If you’re thinking of other possibilities, I’d like to hear them.

Anyway, the point is, the UFO community might want to look carefully and humbly at their assumptions about the binary evil of “Cabal” secrecy before stampeding downhill on their current path of public disclosure at any costs.

Non-binary love and hugs,

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD