Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer review has issues too at the moment. From what I've read, it worked when the world was a smaller place, basically. Now, peer review is another broken cog in a machine that grew organically out of past practices and which no one really intended and no one knows how to fix.
As someone who does peer review for 2-3 conferences a year, I will say that peer review is still better than any alternative proposed so far. In my circles (Computational Linguistics), getting your paper approved means that you convinced at least three PhD students with a published paper (or higher, all the way up to Professor) that your paper is good PLUS the area chair(s) considered it worth publishing. All of this…
This is a recursive definition of scientist "A scientist(t=n) is someone approved by scientists(t=n-1)". If you have a good initial condition maybe it can work for a while, but it seems that time may be coming to an end.
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.