This is definitely not a precondition for a successful social institution.
I want to differentiate two kinds of success for a social institution:
“reproductive” success, by analogy with evolution: how well the institution establishes and maintains itself as dominant,
success at stated goals: for peer review, success at finding the truth, producing high quality research, etc.
Your argument seems to be (at least in part) that because peer review has achieved success 1, that is strong evidence that it’s better than its alternatives at success 2. My argument (in part) is that this is only true if the two kinds of success have some mechanism tying them together. Some example mechanisms could be:
the institution achieved reproductive success by means of being pushed really hard by people motivated by the desire to build and maintain a really high quality system,
the institution is easy to replace with better systems, and better systems are easy to try, so the fact that it hasn’t been replaced must mean better systems are hard to find.
I don’t think either of these things are true of peer review. (The second is true of AWS, for example.) So what’s the mechanism that established peer review as the consensus system that relates to it being a high quality system?
(I’m not saying I have alternatives, just that “consensus means a thing is good” is only sometimes a good argument.)
I want to differentiate two kinds of success for a social institution:
“reproductive” success, by analogy with evolution: how well the institution establishes and maintains itself as dominant,
success at stated goals: for peer review, success at finding the truth, producing high quality research, etc.
Your argument seems to be (at least in part) that because peer review has achieved success 1, that is strong evidence that it’s better than its alternatives at success 2. My argument (in part) is that this is only true if the two kinds of success have some mechanism tying them together. Some example mechanisms could be:
the institution achieved reproductive success by means of being pushed really hard by people motivated by the desire to build and maintain a really high quality system,
the institution is easy to replace with better systems, and better systems are easy to try, so the fact that it hasn’t been replaced must mean better systems are hard to find.
I don’t think either of these things are true of peer review. (The second is true of AWS, for example.) So what’s the mechanism that established peer review as the consensus system that relates to it being a high quality system?
(I’m not saying I have alternatives, just that “consensus means a thing is good” is only sometimes a good argument.)