UPDATE:
Oystein and
Mohr
have responded. Oystein took my post as an acknowledgement that Harrit et al
wasn't actually peer-reviewed. It wasn't. I do agree that Bentham isn't exactly
what debunkers and skeptics would call an "established journal" - akin
to
Nature or
Science - but that doesn't mean it wasn't
reviewed. 9/11 truth is anti-establishment, so criticising it for not
being accepted yet by the very establishment it's challenging is stupid
and circular. My point was, you shouldn't assume from the fact that the editor-in-chief resigned that there were issues with the
review. It could be that she was pressured to resign or that she was
driven to resign by her own ideological commitments. The scientific
community is unfortunately not immune to things like groupthink,
cognitive dissonance and peer-pressure. And that was my point. I wasn't
attacking peer-review per se, I was attacking idealism and elitism
regarding the scientific review and editorial process. It annoys me when
people try to dismiss or discredit research they don't like by calling
into question its peer-review, because that's the sort of thing you'd
expect from a meticulous lawyer or a nitpicky bureaucrat, not a
scientist. I'd rather the discussions just be about the data.
Chris Mohr seems to agree with what I'm saying:
While
I am familiar with the arguments about whether the Bentham paper was
properly peer-reviewed or whether there was a proper chain of custody
for the WTC dust in that study, I have always considered these to be of
very secondary interest to me. Knowing some of the people at least
peripherally involved in that study, I have always asserted that
Harrit/Jones et al did everything in their power to preserve the
integrity of their dust samples (including rejecting some whose sources
were more questionable), and that perfectly good science gets reported
in the Bentham journals, whatever its peer-reviewed status.
As
to whether or not I accept the validity of Millette's samples, well I don't doubt
that they were collected professionally, but I'm still very much open to
the possibility that they may have been tampered with. That's why I
said,
"red/gray chips, or at least particles purporting to be them".
My argument was, assuming Millette's samples are genuine, and assuming
the chips in his samples are what Jones et al found, then that
undermines criticisms regarding the chain of custody of Jones' samples.
Those assumptions may be false, but if they are then that's more of a
problem for the debunkers than it is us.
The vast majority of debunker responses to the discovery of active
thermitic material over the past three years have been one of the
following mantras: "Paint!", "Peer-review!" and "Chain of custody!". Dr James Millette's report on the red/gray chips has apparently given the "Paint!" mantra new life, but let's look at the other two...
"Peer-review!"
Even before the Harrit et al paper was published, debunkers
were disimissing
the journal it was published in as a "vanity publication" or a
"pay-to-publish" journal. They ignore the reasons why the authors chose
that journal. The main reasons were: 1. It's free and open access.
There's no paywall preventing people from downloading the paper. And 2.
The paper is very long - 25 pages with 33 coloured pictures, many of
which fill an entire page. A paper like that would never be accepted by a
top journal like
Nature or
Science. Bentham, however, was willing to publish such a paper.
Then
of course, the journal's editor-in-chief resigned and the debunkers
have since highlighted that fact at every opportunity. As CSI's Dave
Thomas
wrote in the 9/11 10th anniversary edition of the Skeptical Inquirer:
The
article’s publication process was so politicized and bizarre that the
editor-in-chief of the Bentham journal that featured Jones’s article,
Marie-Paule Pileni, resigned in protest.
Debunkers of
course assume that this must mean the paper was crap. It doesn't seem
to occur to them that she may have been pressured to resign, or that her
emotional reaction may be due to the implications of the paper's
conclusions rather than the quality of science. Scientists and journal editors are
only human. They are affected by the same conflicts of interest and
ideological biases as anyone else. That's the major flaw of the
peer-review process. The U.S. Supreme Court agrees...
U.S. Supreme Court opinion,
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993):
Another pertinent consideration is whether the theory or technique has been
subjected to peer review and publication. Publication (which is but one element of peer review) is not a sine qua non of admissibility;
it does not necessarily correlate with reliability, and in some
instances well-grounded but innovative theories will not have been
published. Some propositions, moreover, are too particular, too new, or
of too limited interest to be published. But submission to the scrutiny
of the scientific community is a component of "good science," in part
because it increases the likelihood that substantive flaws in
methodology will be detected. The fact of publication (or lack thereof)
in a peer-reviewed journal thus will be a relevant, though not dispositive, consideration in assessing the scientific validity of a particular technique or methodology on which an opinion is premised.
In
other words, what the Supreme Court is saying here is, don't put
"peer-review" on a pedestal! The process
is not without its flaws,
especially when it comes to controversial issues such as
global warming or 9/11.
Publication
and peer-review are just the first stage of the scientific process .
The stuff that comes after - replications, rebuttals, debates, symposia
etc. - are much more important than the initial publication. Pretty much
every paper ever published has been either expanded upon or refuted
later on. And so you could look back on any paper and say, in
retrospect, based on what we know now, that that paper, if it had been
submitted now, wouldn't be acceptable. But that doesn't mean that it
shouldn't have been published back when it was. This is the nature of
science.
Consider, for example, NASA's 2010 claim of finding
arsenic-based life, or CERN/OPERA's 2011 claim of
faster-than-light neutrinos.
In both cases, the publication and announcement of these finds
attracted a great deal of controversy, and both claims were recently
refuted by replication, but that doesn't mean the initial results were
fraudulent, or that the claims were unscientific.
The
fact that skeptical scientists have attempted to independently replicate
and rebut the findings of Harrit et al means the hypothesis has
progressed to the next stage of the scientific process - meaning any
criticisms of its initial peer-review are now null and void. For years, debunkers have basically said, "we're going to dismiss this
paper because we don't believe it was properly peer-reviewed". But now, this
position has been undermined. As
I pointed out before, the JREFers' support of Dr Millette's study was an acknowledgement of the nanothermite hypothesis' scientific legitimacy. They can no longer argue on the basis of editorial controversy that the claims of Harrit et al should not be taken seriously, because they DID take them seriously!
"Chain of Custody!"
In a September 2009
debate between Dylan Avery and Pat Curley,
Pat questioned the chain of custody of Steven Jones' dust samples. When
Dylan noted that the chain of custody is documented in the Harrit et al
paper, Pat's response was:
I
don't think you're gonna find that this stuff was hermetically sealed,
that it was labeled at the time that it was taken - all the sorts of
things that police would do with something that they're using as
evidence.
Pat does sort of have a point here about the samples not being collected professionally. But as I
wrote in response at the time:
By questioning the chain of custody you are effectively accusing the
scientists and the citizens of conspiring to fake evidence by
manufacturing high-tech energetic nanocomposites that only a handful of
labs in the world can even make and adding them to samples! That sounds
like a crazy conspiracy theory to me! And yet you find the idea of the
government tampering with evidence ridiculous! Someone get Pat a tin foil hat!
Now
that red/gray chips, or at least particles purporting to be them, have
been found in professionally collected samples independent of Steven
Jones', debunkers can now be assured that these red/gray chips, whatever
they are, did not enter Jones' samples via accidental contamination,
and were not intentionally added by 9/11 truth activists. So criticisms
regarding the collection and chain of custody of Jones' samples are now
null and void.
These two debunker arguments have now been undermined by the debunkers themselves. If they were intellectually honest, they'd stop making them. But I doubt they will. Their "Peer-review!" and "Chain of custody!" mantras function as sort-of quasi-ad-hominems. Debunkers are more interested in discrediting the research than they are in having a genuine scientific discussion about it.
