PZ Meyers' Hate Mail Bag

Thousands of years ago, when I was an astronomy grad student, I was in charge of the Pre-Print Library. The PPL is sort of a way of getting your idea out into circulation before it gets published, but after it has completed the peer-review cycle. Since the lag time can be a couple of months between acceptance and publication, the "pre-print" allows you to let folks know what you've done, that it's been reviewed and to start debate. In astronomy this isn't so critical because there just aren’t that many astronomers and generally everyone who would care has already seen your work in development or as a peer-reviewer. As such, the PPL was a boring, low-maintenance job (unless it was a Karen Strom paper, that's a whole other kettle of fish).

The librarian also gets a lot of "self-published" articles. Stuff that has not been through peer review or is even generally written by a trained professional scientist. It's often weird, kooky stuff and occasionally it's extraordinarily clever. Once or twice a year I'd get something so clever I'd have to think for awhile about why it wouldn't work, (usually it's a subtle variation of dividing by zero or conservation of energy, but buried so deeply in it's hard to see). In short, it was excellent work for a grad-student as it tests one's ability to reason and spot flaws.

That said, most of it was just sheer crazy fun in a paranoid tone, but all of the crazy stuff encapsulated one flawed assumption: Science works by endorsement, in the same way as religion e.g. there were quotes by Einstein that would be made to support the argument, because Einstein was an “authority” and couldn’t be questioned. Their goal was to get some professor somewhere to endorse their idea this making it “Science”. This was wrong, of course. Einstein was wrong about lots of things, most notably quantum mechanics, as is everyone else who ever gets quoted. Science is about error correction not endorsement or doctrine.

Reading PZ Meyers hate mail bag reminded me very much of the kinds of crazy stuff we’d get once every week or two. It’s nice to know some things never change.