Enemies Make the Best Peer Reviewers

One way of dealing with errors is to have friends who are willing to spend the time necessary to carry out a critical examination of the experimental design beforehand and the results after the experiments have been completed. An even better way is to have an enemy. An enemy is willing to devote a vast amount of time and brain power to ferreting out errors both large and small, and this without any compensation. The trouble is that really capable enemies are scarce; most of them are only ordinary. Another trouble with enemies is that they sometimes develop into friends and lose a great deal of their zeal. It was in this way the writer lost his three best enemies. Everyone, not just scientists, needs a good few enemies.

Notes:

Quoting Georg von Békésy, who says that enemies will work hard to disprove you for free, but sometimes they are ruined by becoming friends.

Folksonomies: virtue peer review enemies

Taxonomies:
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/art and entertainment/books and literature/poetry (0.372915)
/health and fitness/disease/cancer/brain tumor (0.338352)

Keywords:
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Entities:
Georg von Békésy:Person (0.835078 (negative:-0.428859)), writer:JobTitle (0.497610 (negative:-0.738768))

Concepts:
Experiment (0.929250): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
English-language films (0.782408): dbpedia
2007 singles (0.723096): dbpedia
Design of experiments (0.720334): dbpedia | freebase
Walk This Way (0.658160): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Critical thinking (0.644609): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
2009 singles (0.642586): dbpedia
Science (0.640231): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc

 A life of magic chemistry
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Olah , George Andrew (2001), A life of magic chemistry, John Wiley and Sons, Retrieved on 2012-01-04
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: biography autobiography


    Schemas

    01 JAN 2010

     Scientific Virtues

    Memes that define the virtues of science and behaviors that we should emulate.
     41