There is in fact a method, and it got us quite far until we abandoned it for the peer review plus publish or perish death spiral in the mid 1900s. It's quite simple:

1) Anyone publishes anything they want, whenever they want, as much or as little as the want. Publishing does not say anything about your quality as a researcher, since anyone can do it.

2) Being published doesn't mean it's right, or even credible. No one is filtering the stream, so there's no cachet to being published.

We then let memetic evolution run its course. This is the system that got us Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Mendeleev, Euler, etc. It works, but it's slow, sometimes ugly to watch, and hard to game so some people would much rather use the "Approved by A Council of Peers" nonsense we're presently mired in.