Just to clarify: this article is against gold standards, not against peer review. It concludes by observing that peer review is a necessity. The argument it raises is that peer review doesn't mean what lay audiences think it means.
I think they're clearly correct, and that even on HN, in a community that (roughly) prides itself on being scientifically literate, there are broad misunderstandings of what peer review means (during the bogus "Sokal Squared" hoax, for instance, many commenters implied that peer review prior to publication was meant to encompass replication). Also, while I'm not a "scientist", I've gotten to do some peer review work for ACM and Usenix, and even in the little bit of review I did, I seen some shit. There is much less formality and oversight to review than you might expect.
I think they're clearly correct, and that even on HN, in a community that (roughly) prides itself on being scientifically literate, there are broad misunderstandings of what peer review means (during the bogus "Sokal Squared" hoax, for instance, many commenters implied that peer review prior to publication was meant to encompass replication). Also, while I'm not a "scientist", I've gotten to do some peer review work for ACM and Usenix, and even in the little bit of review I did, I seen some shit. There is much less formality and oversight to review than you might expect.