Is this an "arguments as soldiers" thing? Compare an isomorphic argument: "how did medicine get done for the centuries before antibiotics."

That's not isomorphic. To put it bluntly, medicine didn't. It only started becoming net beneficial extremely recently (and even now tons of medicine is harmful or a pure waste), based on copying a tremendous amount of basic science like biology and bacteriology and benefitting from others' discoveries, and importing methodology like randomized trials (which it still chafes at) and not by importing peer review. Up until the very late 1800s or so, you would have been better off often ignoring doctors if you were, say, an expecting mother wondering whether to give birth in a hospital pre-Semmelweiss. You can't expect too much too much help from a field which published its first RCT in 1948 (on, incidentally, an antibiotic).

Leaving aside that this an argument from authority,

I include it as a piquant anecdote since you seem to have no interest in looking up any of the statistical evidence on the unreliability and biases (in the statistical senses) of peer review, or the absence of any especial evidence that it works.

But: "they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

That is not what I am saying. I am saying, 'if you think MIRI is Bozo the Clown, get a photograph of its leader and see if he has a red nose! See if his face is suspiciously white and the entire MIRI staff saves a remarkable amount on gas purchases because they can all fit into one small car to run their errands! Don't deliberately look away and simply listen for the sound of laughter! That's a terrible way of deciding!'

Good papers are very likely to get a fair shake and get published.

No, they're not, or at the very least, you need to modify this to, 'after being forced to repeatedly try solely thanks to the peer review process, a good paper may still finally be published'. For example, in the NIPS experiment, most accepted papers would not have been accepted given a different committee. Unsurprisingly! given low inter-rater reliabilities for tons of things in psychology far less complicated, and enormous variability when n=1 or 3.

Absolute numbers are kind of useless here. Do you have some work in mind on false positive and false negative rates for peer review?

Yes, any of it. They all say that peer review is not a little but highly stochastic. This isn't a new field by any means.

I asked you this before, gwern, how much experience with actual peer review (let's say in applied stats journals, as that is closest to what you do) do you have?

I have little first-hand experience; my vitriol comes mostly from having read over the literature showing peer-review to be highly unreliable, and biased, from the unthinking respect and overestimation of it that most people give it, being shocked at how awful many published studies are despite being 'peer reviewed', and from talking to researchers and learning how pervasive bias is in the process and how reviewers enforce particular cliques & theories (some politically-motivated) and try to snuff opposition in the cradle.

The first represents a huge waste of time; the second hinders scientific progress directly and contributes to one of the banes of my existence as a meta-analyst, publication bias (why do we have a 'grey literature' in the first place?); the third is seriously annoying in trying to get most people to wake up and think a little about the research they read about ('but it's peer-reviwed!'); and the fourth is simply enraging as the issue moves from an abstract, general science-wide problem to something I can directly perceive specifically harming me and my attempts to get accurate beliefs.

(Well, actually I think my analysis of Silk Road 2 listings is supposed to be peer-reviewed, but the lead author is handling the bureaucracy so I can't say anything directly about how good or bad the reviewers for that journal are, aside from noting that this was a case of problem #4: the paper we were responding too is so egregiously, obviously wrong that the journal's reviewers must have either been morons or totally ignorant of the paper topic they were supposed to be reviewing. I'm still shocked & baffled about this: how does an apparently respectable journal wind up publishing a paper claiming, essentially, that Silk Road 2 did not sell drugs? This would have been caught in a heartbeat by any kind of remotely public process - even one person who had actually used Silk Road 1 or 2 peeking in on the paper could have laughed it out of the room - but because the journal is 'peer reviewed'... Pace the Gell-Man Effect, it makes me wonder about all the papers published about topics I am not so knowledgeable about as I am on Silk Road 2 and wonder if I am still not cynical enough.)

I don't think we disagree here, I think this is a form of peer review. I routinely do this with my papers, and am asked to look over preprints by others. I think this is fine for certain types of papers (generally very specialized or very large/weighty ones).

Yes, I have no objection to 'peer review' if by what you mean is all the things I singled out as opposed to, and prior to, and afterwards, the institution of peer review: having colleagues critique your work, having many other people with different perspectives & knowledge check it over and replicate it and build on it and post essays rebutting it - all this is great stuff, we both agree. I would say replication is the most important of those elements, but all have their place.

What I am attacking is the very specific formal institutional practice of journals outsourcing editorial judgment to a few selected researchers and effectively giving them veto power, a process which hardly seems calculated to yield very good results and which does not seem to have been institutionalized because it has been rigorously demonstrated to work far better than the pre-existing alternatives (which of course it wasn't, any more than medical proposals at that time were routinely put through RCTs first, even though we know how many good-sounding proposals in psychology & sociology & economics & medicine go down in flames when they are rigorously tested), but - to go off on a more speculative tangent here - whose chief purpose was to simply make the bureaucracy of science scale to the post-WWII expansion of science as part of the Cold War/Vannevar Bush academic-military-government complex.

The worry is MIRI's conception of what a "peer" is basically ignores the wider academic community (which has a lot of intellectual firepower), so they end up in a bubble.

If this is the problem with MIRI, I think there are far more informative ways to criticize them. For example, I don't think you need to rely on any proxies or filters: you should be able to evaluate their work directly and form your own critique of whether it's any good or if it seems like a good research avenue for their stated goals.

Honestly, you sound a bit angry about peer review.

Science is srs bsns. (I find it hard to see why other people can't get worked up over things like publication bias or aging or p-hacking. They're a lot more important than the latest outrage du jour. This stuff matters!)