No, it's not. It's reduced to "I trust people from a respectable scientific journal with 150 years of history".
reply> Sounds like politics in a nutshell.
Again, no. It sounds like the division of labor. The thing that made modern human societies possible.
Division of labor. Dividing labor between the "i'll pay you to work" and "I'm paid to work"
replyThe jokes write themselves,
Yes? What is exactly funny here? This is literally how the civilization works. I'm paid to do my work, and I pay others to do their work.
replyDo you grow your own food and sew your own clothes? Also, did you personally etch the microprocessor that runs your computer? The division of labor inherently means trusting others. So when I buy a bag of M4 screws, I'm not going to measure each screw with a micrometer, and I'm not taking X-ray spectra to verify their material composition.
The academic world also used to trust large publishers to take care to actually review papers. It appears that this trust is now misplaced. But I don't think it was somehow stupid.