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MichaelVassar comments on Science - Idealistic Versus Signaling - Less Wrong
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Peer review is just a slightly more formal kind of debate, but debate doesn't work and isn't about finding truth.
Traditional empirical science depends on a mechanistic (as opposed to humanistic) principle for obtaining truth: the scientific method.
The traditional scientific method provides a strong principle for evaluating theories. For some fields of inquiry (physics, chemistry), this principle works very well. But modern scientists want theories about economics, nutrition, medicine, climate change, computer vision, and so on. The traditional method does not justify theories in these fields.
To go further, we must discover new mechanistic principles of truth-seeking. We should never ask: "What would it be good to know?" That road leads to alchemy. Rather we should ask: "For what types of questions can the answers be evaluated by mechanistic principles?"
Debate does work under certain circumstances. The pretense that those circumstances aren't necessary, by those who wish to seize the status of reasoned debate, dilutes what outsiders see until it looks like debate doesn't work.