You think that's better than the work that preceded peer review, by people like Einstein, Bunsen, Kelvin, Planck, Darwin, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Michelson, Steinmetz, Faraday, Davy, Haber, Tesla, etc.? Because I have to say I find the pre-peer-review papers to generally be of much higher quality.
How did you come to the conclusion that those have not been peer-reviewed? Every uni course that presents the work of these people implicitly reviews it for consistency, and the advanced practices courses repeat their experiments.
"The system of peer review" in this context is the system where a scholarly journal editor sends your submitted paper out to other experts in the field to decide whether or not to publish it. This system came into use in the middle of the 20th century, and Einstein was famously outraged by it. It does not refer generically to every time someone reads or discusses a paper or replicates an experiment.
I don't think survivorship bias is particularly relevant for three reasons. First, both papers from 50 years ago and papers from 150 years ago are already heavily filtered. Second, if you look at journal issues from 150 years ago, you will find forgotten papers in the same issue with the foundational ones, and the quality is still much better than today's forgotten papers. Third, what I'm really concerned about is not that bad papers about bad research are being published, but that good papers about good research that would have been done are not, echoing Higgs's remark about how he couldn't have done his work on the Higgs boson today because he wouldn't get tenure. Or, read Freeman Dyson's autobiography, and contrast the years when he was working on nuclear energy to the rather uninspired following 50 years, because, as he put it, it stopped being fun.
You're still too vague. Do you mean the <100 old peer review system? And that it's better than all the scientific discoveries of the past thousands of years?
