They are presenting verifiable evidence are they not? Why do their credentials matter outside of ad hominem attack?
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Because they clearly are not qualified in the field based on the quality of the analysis, yet claim as if they have to hide even as a "PhD". Their blog post reads like someone who works on the backend for BLAST but knows nothing about genomes or proteins.
So, "their credentials cannot be examined or questioned" yet "they clearly aren't qualified in the field based on the quality of the analysis"?
Why, according to you are they worth and not worth examining?
The evidence, and more crucially, its meaning and significance are not "verifiable" by 99.999% of the population. That's why things like credentials, resumes, publication history, and peer review exist. That's why we care if someone has promulgated 50 hoaxes in the past, for instance.
So yeah. Credentials do matter, and it matters that this person is not willing to say this out loud, in public, without using a pseudonym.
Alright. I can verify the meaning and significance. I have a PhD in chemical biology, and have done (non-pathogenic) gain of function research. This is the sort of result that I would expect someone to have found if I were given the charge to insert a furin cleavage site into a virus. Proof: https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2... ,in which I stack-overflow-copy-paste ideas for beneficial mutations from sequences in distant species.
No, you are wrong and you don't know how peer reviewing works.
Reputable journals and other publication outlets use something called "Double Blind peer review" precisely to prevent that the reputation of a researcher could skew the peer review process.
If you want to review and cast a judgement for the points presented in the article, you should do it only by refuting or confirming the content of the text itself. Not because it was written by Einstein or Donald Trump.
> Reputable journals and other publication outlets use something called "Double Blind peer review" precisely to prevent that the reputation of a researcher could skew the peer review process.
Double blind peer review is INCREDIBLY UNCOMMON among high impact biomedical journals
Some journals and conferences use double blinding. Not all do. In some, the reviewers can see the names of the authors. In others, the authors can propose reviewers, or ask the someone is excluded from review. Journals and conferences may change their rules from one year to the next.
Anyway the blinding, when it exists, is as much to protect the reviewers from retribution by asshole authors, as it is to avoid biasing the reviewers by the reputation of the authors.
First, I do know how peer review works.
Second, you're missing the key difference, here: peer review is for review and evaluation within the community of qualified scientists.
What I'm talking about is something else: the ability of the reasonably well-informed public to evaluate claims, even though they lack domain expertise.
I also think the article is wrong, but I disagree with both your points (as scientist myself). Verifiable evidence does not need to be verifiable by some threshold percentage of the population. If that was the case, most math PhD thesis would not be verifiable. Also, writing under a pseudonym is quite understandable given the polemic nature of the topic. If anything, I think we should have more people writing under pseudonyms than less. We could end up with a lot more interesting ideas circulating. The peer review itself must of course be done by trustworthy third parties, but the source of the text need not be.
The credentials don't matter to experts in the field, but this forum is filled with laypeople. No layperson should accept such an article without expert vetting.
No. People can evaluate the evidence for themselves. We do not need authority figures to tell us what to think. This is particularly true when it comes to assessing probabilities, an activity at which most experts have proven hilariously incompetent.
(Musing: What is the probability that a genetics expert's opinion on the probabilities at play would make the discussion less well-informed rather than more well-informed?)
People are so good at evaluating evidence for themselves that we can't end the pandemic due to antivaxers, and there are millions of people who believe the words of Q.
> So yeah. Credentials do matter, and it matters that this person is not willing to say this out loud, in public, without using a pseudonym.
The problem is that we've come so far that him not saying this out loud is not necessarily hinting to him being a charlatan. Plausibly, the cost/benefit analysis by that individum might not make it worth speaking the truth given how heated up the matter is rn. If this sentiment propagates to other topics I fear that larger (and important) parts of the world might drift towards soviet era incompetence