Having looked at "Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields", I'm not convinced. I am grappling towards my own ideas for heuristics in this essay: http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-machine.html Alternatively, I would ask the question whether the blind men are really feeling up an elephant or not. Perhaps one really is caressing a huge floppy leaf and another is hugging a tree trunk, etc. In some disciplines, I would say there really is an elephant, ergo explorations and comparing of notes will tend to converge on some solid picture. In other fields, such as literary criticism, I doubt that there is an elephant at all; people are just grabbing this and that leaf, vine, branch, tree trunk or rock and, and out of them imagining mythological animals. A lot more should be said about why academic disciplines work when they work. I'd say peer review and the other academic machinery do a better job than most any other arrangement (such as think tanks funded by people whose real interest is in promoting ideological points) -- as long as there really is an elephant. Where there is no elephant, or nobody has really found it yet, all the peer review in the world and/or attempts to mimic physics won't prevent it becoming a factory for turning out "fashionable nonsense".