04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
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 ordi...Quoting Georg von Békésy, who says that enemies will work hard to disprove you for free, but sometimes they are ruined by becoming friends.