Editing 19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC

'''Eric:''' OK? -It used to be that the editor of a journal took responsibility for the quality of the journal, which is why we had things like Nature crop up in the first place, because they had courageous, knowledgeable, forward thinking editors. And so I just want to be very clear, because there's a mind virus out there that says ‘peer review is the <em>sine qua non</em> of scientific excellence, yada, yada, yada, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit’. And if you don't believe me, go back and learn that this is a recent invasive problem in the sciences.

'''Eric:''' I want to back up because I think this is a really important part of the story. What you're saying is that if you take an organism that has an expected, let's say, 40-year lifetime, it's very expensive timewise to say, ‘We ran this experiment and found that there was no immediate damage that was visible, but towards the very end of their lives we saw a marked increase in morbidity,’ or-

'''Bret:''' Your eye cells don't. Now note, all of the tissues I've just mentioned-when's the last time you heard about anybody having cancer of the cartilage, of the knee, cancer of the heart?

'''Eric:''' Look, you see the same thing with like string theory because none of the reporters are actually string theorists, so they're dependent upon this. You saw this with the woman alleging that she had the Epstein story three years earlier, but that the editors said, well, we might lose access to the baby pictures of the Royal grandchildren, you're seeing this with catch and kill. There's this, I mean, I want you to take this seriously. You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. We have 50 years of such stories, and it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, there's a committee meeting, or there's a blue ribbon commission, or there's a peer review process, or there's a-what do they call them-the panels—study groups, for grants. That's where the DISC lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science. It's an autoimmune disease, where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts, by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication. Because look, if you're wrong about this stuff, there's a cost.  It's not cheap.  

'''Bret:''' Yeah. And I'm shocked because she's told me they're keeping it <em>in-house </em> and instead they've got a paper [and] that they are-she says-in final revisions. They are that day submitting their final revisions to nucleic acid research with their paper. And I say, Carol, can I see the paper? And she says yes. And she sends me a manuscript, not the pre-print of the paper. She sends me a manuscript of the paper, no acknowledgements, no figures. And I contact her and I say, can I see the acknowledgements and the figures? She sends them to me, and I contact her and I say Carol, I'm disturbed. This was my hypothesis that you were testing. I should probably be an author on this paper, but at the very least I need to be an acknowledgement in this paper so that I can go back and point to it and say that was-