Apart the gatekeeping aspect, I think more fundamentally, peer review is not a gold standard like it is assumed to be. A university student writes apparently, a few other people read it, with all sorts of biases and incentives, and the whole world goes with it as a truth. There’s too much faith put into it.
Peer review is a joke. It's anti-knowledge and status gatekeeping. In the context of math, I am technically a peer. Yet the stuff I find the most interesting is typically not in journals or only on arxiv, even though the journals claim or purport to be curating content of interest to the "general math community".
"You all suck! I didn't even want to publish in your journal anyway!"
Apart the gatekeeping aspect, I think more fundamentally, peer review is not a gold standard like it is assumed to be. A university student writes apparently, a few other people read it, with all sorts of biases and incentives, and the whole world goes with it as a truth. There’s too much faith put into it.
Peer review is a joke. It's anti-knowledge and status gatekeeping. In the context of math, I am technically a peer. Yet the stuff I find the most interesting is typically not in journals or only on arxiv, even though the journals claim or purport to be curating content of interest to the "general math community".