That's the key here: if peer review is feedback rather than a barrier to sharing your findings and progressing in your career, then negative (though of course, in this situation review would no longer be a binary negative/positive) feedback could be considered input again. But the current setup of peer review, like this article is arguing against, assigns a high cost to "being wrong" (in the eyes of about two reviewers).
Right, but where is the threshold for wrongness which is so widely accepted as truth that it becomes harmful enough to be actively removed? If I began preaching of the correctness of 1+1=3 surely someone would deny my publication, no? Or, the critics would outweigh the proponents. How can this be accomplished without division or empathy?
You'd still have peer review, but in a very different sense. Instead of a formal process by 3 reviewers, you'd have an informal process by everyone who read the paper. People would read your dumb 1+1=3 paper, realize that it was wrong, ignore it, and pay less attention to you in the future.
> That debunked theory about vaccines causing autism comes from a peer-reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and it stayed there for twelve years before it was retracted. How many kids haven’t gotten their shots because one rotten paper made it through peer review and got stamped with the scientific seal of approval?
The point is not to prevent it from getting out there in the first place — that is already possible, you can just upload a PDF to some website. Doing that for a paper arguing 1+1=3 wouldn't be any more accepted if peer review's role would be limited.
