you believe deeply in science and this deep belief implies that the article is necessarily, certainly, undoubtedly wrong in some fashion, and that the flaws in it should be found and exposed, rather than publishing it prematurely....... There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.
The charitable interpretation of Hofstadter's comment is that the likelihood of 13-been-unlucky is so low that we should look extra hard for flaws in the arguments of papers purporting to prove it than we would for less controversial papers. He seems to be suggesting that a more rigorous review would have meant the paper would not be published, or at least not published 'prematurely'. Sounds sensible.
the likelihood of 13-been-unlucky is so low that we should look extra hard for flaws in the arguments
A.K.A. "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". :)
A major psychology journal is planning to publish a study that claims to present strong evidence for precognition. Naturally, this immediately stirred up a firestorm. There are a lot of scientific-process and philosophy-of-science issues involved, including replicability, peer review, Bayesian statistics, and degrees of scrutiny. The Flying Spaghetti Monster makes a guest appearance.
Original New York Times article on the study here.
And the Times asked a number of academics (including Douglas Hofstadter) to comment on the controversy. The discussion is here.
I, for one, defy the data.