Dear Philip,
what I like in your essay is the smooth flow of the reasoning and the narrative, and the several pieces of concrete information (data, references, examples) that you provide in support to your claims.
One aspect that I personally see as a potential weakness in your analysis is the great optimism that you put into the `solutions` that should be found in papers from the ongoing current scientific literature - be it open access/reviewed or not.
You write:
`We have the intellectual capacity to figure these things out and steer the right course, yet we fail.` This claim reminds me of another essay I`ve read here (Sabine Hossenfelder), who also says that the problem is NOT that we lack ideas for what to do.
More than one essay here suggests that a mismatch has been reached between the skills reached by humans via evolution, and the complexity of the mixed natural/artificial global environment where we live. So I am a bit more skeptical about a totally rationalistic approach, and on the possibility to govern a complex system whose emergent phenomena seem to happen high above our heads, out of the reach of our hands or individual brains (to put it roughly). This of course will never stop us from doing science (and art), in order to understand better our universe and ourselves.
Another, more concrete point.
One of the remarks I appreciated most in your essay is the one at the bottom, where you acknowledge that the problem of biased evaluation is likely to affect equally badly the expert peer-reviews in the current official system, and the reviews from the general public. I fully agree. The reviews from supposed experts may suffer from the biases you describe, and other problems (referee reports for conference submissions, for example, has undergone a sad shrinking in length and depth, in my experience as PC member for Soft. Eng. conferences in the 80`s and 90`s), but I also notice that in some alternative, Web-based open contexts the risk is to end up with a proliferation of `reviews` that suffer themselves not only from biases, but also from other, even more severe limitations. I am not sure whether shifting to the system you describe will always turn into an advantage for the authors, and the quality of their work.
In fact, let`s consider this FQXi Contest. In my experience, I cannot say that the feedback I have received is clearly superior, to the effect of helping me improve the text, than what I could have expected from three anonymous `expert` referee reports.
Your experience?
Best regards
Tommaso