As we've seen in several examples on this blog, so-called "peer review" for The Interpreter is little more than "peer approval." Otherwise the obvious errors of fact and logic that we've observed would not have gotten through to publication.
This is a problem in the scientific community as a whole, as discussed in this analysis:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
My favorite example of this in the realm of M2C is the "stylometry study" of the anonymous 1842 Times and Seasons articles that purports to claim Joseph Smith wrote the ridiculous articles linking the Book of Mormon to ruins in Central America.
The authors of that study have refused to make their assumptions, data, or software available publicly for replication, yet M2C advocates throughout the Church continue to cite the articles and both the Interpreter and Book of Mormon Central continue to retain them on their web page (while also refusing to allow my criticisms and responses).
Their rationale?
They love the outcome of the study because it confirms their bias, so they are uninterested in critiques, replication, etc.
It's a beautiful piece of obfuscation on the part of the M2C intellectuals. And consistent with their overall approach to "scholarship."
Here's a relevant excerpt from the BBC article:
This is a problem in the scientific community as a whole, as discussed in this analysis:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
My favorite example of this in the realm of M2C is the "stylometry study" of the anonymous 1842 Times and Seasons articles that purports to claim Joseph Smith wrote the ridiculous articles linking the Book of Mormon to ruins in Central America.
The authors of that study have refused to make their assumptions, data, or software available publicly for replication, yet M2C advocates throughout the Church continue to cite the articles and both the Interpreter and Book of Mormon Central continue to retain them on their web page (while also refusing to allow my criticisms and responses).
Their rationale?
They love the outcome of the study because it confirms their bias, so they are uninterested in critiques, replication, etc.
It's a beautiful piece of obfuscation on the part of the M2C intellectuals. And consistent with their overall approach to "scholarship."
Here's a relevant excerpt from the BBC article:
"Replication is something scientists should be thinking about before they write the paper," says Ritu Dhand, the editorial director at Nature.
"It is a big problem, but it's something the journals can't tackle on their own. It's going to take a multi-pronged approach involving funders, the institutes, the journals and the researchers."
But we need to be bolder, according to the Edinburgh neuroscientist Prof Malcolm Macleod.
"The issue of replication goes to the heart of the scientific process."
Writing in the latest edition of Nature, he outlines a new approach to animal studies that calls for independent, statistically rigorous confirmation of a paper's central hypothesis before publication.
"Without efforts to reproduce the findings of others, we don't know if the facts out there actually represent what's happening in biology or not."
Without knowing whether the published scientific literature is built on solid foundations or sand, he argues, we're wasting both time and money.
"It could be that we would be much further forward in terms of developing new cures and treatments. It's a regrettable situation, but I'm afraid that's the situation we find ourselves in."