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Matt Osborne's avatar

I think your key connection here, which I, a military historian, had not made until now, is that peer review came out of those heady days of the early Cold War when THE EXPERTS arrived at the Pentagon. The most famous of these was MacNamara. I leave the Vietnam analogy in your capable hands. From my perspective, this is the moment when scientists were being asked to think unthinkable things and question every set of assumptions until they had exhausted all cognitive powers, for the stakes were so very, very high. We may forgive the motivations and still see the shortcomings here.

I should also note that this all fits with Max Weber's theory that specialist classes make informational gatekeeping processes into safeguards for their own status. Terry Shinn wrote about it studying L'Ecole Polytechnique and I have encountered it in my own study of the French naval engineering school. If you want to add this to the social history of how entire professions can fail together, for decades, there is historiography.

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Rohit Krishnan's avatar

I don't think it failed perhaps as much as it stopped working, especially as the number of scientists exploded. A good idea becomes a bureaucratic nightmare with scale.

Also the weak link point is excellent!

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