There is an excellent Substack article by Adam Mastroianni, that dives fairly deep into why "peer review" in science is not only useless, but often worse than useless. Continuing in the tradition of the legendary John Ioannidis, he notes how this process, which should really be called "pal review" or "gatekeeping", not only does NOT keep even glaring junk science findings from published, but actually ends up rigging the game in favor of the rich and powerful, and propping up mainstream narratives above the truth. Peer review as we know it is really only about six decades old, and it can be considered a failed experiment. The scientific method has clearly NOT improved since then, to say the very least.
Woe, you mean that turning science into little more than a popularity contest at best, and a pay-to-play at worst, has not made science objectively any better, and likely made it worse? Gee, I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! Who could have seen that coming?
And while he doesn't discuss the utter abomination that passes for research on the 21 drinking age, we at Twenty-One Debunked note that this is probably the most salient example of the failure of peer review. The pro-21 crowd basically has their own "citation mill" of the same old MADD affiliates and fellow travelers to prop up their faulty narrative, constantly moving the goalposts when eventually debunked, while anything that contradicts their narrative is censored or delayed for publication in mainstream journals. It was truly a miracle that Miron and Tetelbaum (2009), Asch and Levy (1987 and 1990), Mike Males (1986 and 2008), and literally anything by Darren Grant ever even got published at all, and Dee and Evans (2001) probably only got published by "nerfing" their findings a bit first. And forget most meta-analysis and reviews, as those (except for Darren Grant in 2011) have been hopelessly rigged, padded, and cherry-picked beyond all recognition.
And then they have the GALL to call the anti-21 researchers "merchants of doubt" or (usually falsely) claim that they are funded by Big Alcohol. Riiiiight.
It's time to end this utterly failed experiment.
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ReplyDeleteJustification for a legal drinking age of 18 should also be justified with science. Science does back a legal drinking age of 18. People who are 18 years old are old enough and responsible enough to make decisions when it comes to alcohol. They are old enough to avoid damage to their brains if they drink responsibly. They are old enough to make decisions when it comes to alcohol and their behavior. When put into this approach, a legal drinking age of 18 makes sense. We shouldn't necessarily need to cherry-pick studies which say otherwise, we simply need to back the real science to support the idea.
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