Sal2: and I have this crazy idea that there’s such a thing as peer review, and scientists checking each other’s work by perusing its methodology and repeating its experiments, knowing that if they can bust someone else, they get to advance toward the head of the piranha pool.

Sure, but if all the piranahs have a similar view, then that process isn’t always so efficient. That’s it. In the long run, it seems to work. In the short run, I can show you dozens of examples where it does nit. Anf in the intermediate run, it varies from field to field. I have over 50 papers to my name: I know how it works. I’m not shouting “Conspiracy!”, I’m just saying culture can’t be a priori discarded, and that on occasion it is important. This is simple empirical FACT.

This is a great example of hallucinatory rambling:
But don’t let the notion real-world competition interfere with your idea of a great, grand and glorious anti-metaphysical conspiracy, although I will admit that if someone inserted God Did This Part into a certain section of their empirical demonstration, both their methodology and their results would most certainly be rigorously, and justifiably, checked.
That’s just wrong: it would be out of hand rejected as the ramblings of a nut. See, even when you are trying to e all clever and skeptical you get t wrg. I KNOW it woud be rejected out of habnd, because I’m one of the people who would reject it. You think we’d all waste our time rigorously checking, ‘cause you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.