> One unusual feature of the journal will be giving authors the option to use a pseudonym (though the journal’s editors say they hope most will feel comfortable using their real names). The thought is that such a policy would allow an untenured academic to publish a controversial paper, and perhaps to claim it later when he or she is on firmer career footing. Or maybe just to put it out there, and never claim it at all.
That seems like an interesting, but perhaps ultimately bad idea. I'm uncertain --- it's certainly interesting.
I see that a founder is Peter Singer, who has sometimes in the past suggested that it may be better for a family (financially and happiness-wise) to kill a disabled child and have another [1]. He considers this from an ethical perspective.
I can imagine it being frustrating to want to consider hard, taboo ethical quandaries from a neutral standpoint.
Ultimately, I think the success will be determined by the fact (hypothesis?) that if you de-center the author's authority from the argument about the validity of an argument or idea, you can instead re-center to something more foundational and logical.
i.e. actually discussing the idea itself, rather than name-calling and mud-slinging as a form of discourse ("This person is a crazy Nazi / Maoist / Fascist / etc etc. - therefore how can you believe anything they say?")
I’m not worried about the fictitious and overblown “SJW” strawman youtube has lead everyone to believe are everywhere. I’m worried about corporate interests, ideologues, and charlatans publishing biased nonsense and making the world even more crowded with bad information without any recourse or ability to investigate what the motives behind the papers may have been.
But this just leads back to my original point - the motives or authority of the speaker for an idea should have little weight into whether or not it's valid or sound. If there is bad information or a biased approach, that would be easy to root out when focused on the facts and logic in a vacuum.
Editorializing or investigation into possible motives and the like puts the discussion on something that is not as important.
What's the use of pseudonyms when it is easy to deanonymize writing? If the writer is a well known academic it shouldn't be too hard to at least identify a probable author.
Countless topics that are not, in and of themselves, controversial have become incredibly politicized. And this is an issue that seems to only be getting worse over time. Let's take a not so hypothetical hypothetical based on something that recently happened. Not long ago there was a paper published that, using a novel method of measurement, suggested that oceans were heating some 60% faster than thought.
It turns out there were key errors in this paper, spotted just hours after publication, that made their conclusion (though not their novel form of measurement) unsupportable [1][2]. A couple of sources there since, as usual, the shocking headline will get a billion clicks, and the corrections maybe a dozen. But whatever, mistakes happen and that is not the point. But imagine now for a minute that this paper was instead going in the opposite direction and using a novel measurement had determined that the oceans were actually warming some 60% slower than thought, but it turns out that due to mistakes that conclusion was not supportable. Think about the backlash there and what would almost certainly end up resulting in personal attacks and suggestion of untoward motivation from the authors.
That's nasty business, but things that should just be 'science as usual' have started to become things people take deeply personal. I would feel quite uncomfortable publishing things that go against the grain on a number of topics. And this is before we get into things that ought be controversial. Increasing intellectual conservatism means such topics have gone from controversial to outright taboo.
Edit: As a perfect example of this, already in this very thread a person has stated an opposition to such journal because "I’m worried about corporate interests, ideologues, and charlatans publishing biased nonsense and making the world even more crowded with bad information without any recourse or ability to investigate what the motives behind the papers may have been." 'Seeking recourse and investigating the motives' often translates to finding the witch. Publish the 'wrong' idea and suddenly it's time to face the inquisitor. Publish the 'wrong' idea and make a mistake, and the inquisitor needn't waste his time - straight to the gallows with you.
I’d be more than a little concerned that this will turn into the “journal of not considering confounds around race/gender” and/or the “journal of old eugenics ideas that were already rejected years ago”. There are certainly parts of certain fields that suffer from too much groupthink or trend chasing, but I feel that this is putting the cart before the horse: ideas don’t gain merit because they’re controversial, they have merit despite or irrespective of that fact.
It’s also worth noting that several large and reputable publications have already set up subcommittees dedicated to handling controversial ideas. So the idea of a venue for controversial ideas isn’t really all that novel.
And while I’ve seen pubs get rejected from one venue or another for being controversial, I’ve never heard of a solid scientific pub getting blackballed from everything. Anything with even the slightest bit of rigour can almost certainly find a venue somewhere - there are a lot of second and third tier publications out there already without a lot to lose.
As it always does, it will boil down to how rigorous they are about the science. Eugenics fails not because it's controversial or immoral but because it's wrong and is based upon fundamental misunderstandings of how DNA works. There are certainly types of research that will benefit from being able to be published without worrying about committing career suicide. Several years ago a relatively new sex researchers did a study that showed significant reduction in depression among women who has unprotected sex with their male partner over women using condoms. This is simple biology, but it destroyed his career. The number of people worried that the public are too stupid to be trusted to make their own decisions and scared that such 'dangerous information' might lead to less frequent condom use and wider spread of STDs was much greater than the number of people who were glad to know some more about human biology.
If you take morality from everything, nothing is wrong, nothing has ever been wrong, nothing will ever be wrong, everything simply has-been/is/will-be. That's not the kind of world people want to live in.
Oh don't get me wrong, I personally oppose eugenics from a moral standpoint. I was just quibbling with the assertion that eugenics does not work because of a "misunderstanding on how DNA works". If that's the case I'd like him to explain how we have crops and domesticated animals.
That book is about the application of eugenic policies to spread the nordic race, which the author alleges is superior to other races. I agree that it is pseudoscientific in regard to its theories of racial superiority, but it does not refute the validity of eugenics as a scientific practice.
In fact, you may not realize it, but most western countries already implement eugenic policies. For instance, in my country, most fetuses which are identified as suffering from Down syndrome are aborted, and that practice is encouraged by doctors. This has led to a significant decrease in the number of people affected with that condition. You may not think of it this way, but that is a form of eugenics.
Does it, now? How are the hips on that 'perfect' golden retriever?
To be more detailed, genes are not single-purpose. The same gene which confers a 'strength' is almost guaranteed to also confer a 'weakness'. Often this weakness is not even evident until an environmental change occurs, at which point the species with the greatest genetic diversity will survive while the one 'optimized' for the prior conditions will die off. Belief in eugenics requires some very particular things, such as, say, physical strength being completely unrelated genetically to metabolic function - which it's not. This doesn't even account for the multitude of things which, if we were to seek to genetically 'optimize' people, we would be inadvertently optimizing or eliminating. Plainly put, eugenics is bad science and a bad idea rooted in ignorance and, most dangerously, a willingness to take shortcuts with scientific rigor that substitute intuition for actual knowledge.
> journal of old eugenics ideas that were already rejected years ago
Why were such ideas rejected? Is there a scientific case for rejecting them?
Science is an ongoing process, there is no central authority to reject sinful ideas which is what your comment indicates that you would like, which underlines the need for such a journal.
Eugenics is basically applying selective breeding or even genetic engineering to humans in order to grow towards a “better” human population. This uses scientific concepts such as genetics to implement a political or ideological goal.
Eugenics is not science whichever way you carve it up.
The distinction would be interesting. The controversial journal is the single voice in this case, and the question of whether the pseudonyms are anonymous, or linkable by the editors to a real identity is the difference.
How would you describe the difference as fundamental? Is it of who a reader has recourse to?
Separately, TE isn't exactly provocative or brave.
How would you describe the difference as fundamental?
I don't think you can really compare a journal, which solicits articles from third parties (even if they're controversial) with a general interest, political, economics, arts, news and lifestyle newspaper, which is published by a number of salaried editors and an editorial board hired by a single publication.
Is it of who a reader has recourse to?
The editors of The Economist are not unknown entities. Each section has its editors known by the paper, the only thing being that their articles are not bylined.
The journalists may not be known to you, but they're absolutely not anonymous and you have every recourse towards the paper and by extension towards the responsible editor.
As a matter of fact they're quite good in printing corrections or publishing letters to the editor by an offended party.
Separately, TE isn't exactly provocative or brave.
Ahem, I introduce evidence #1 [1]
In a cover story they made a forceful argument for Gay marriage.
That was in 1996.
I, for one, wouldn't exactly call that a mainstream opinion in January 1996.
As a matter of fact this is pretty much the definition for provocative and brave.
22 years ago, TE was brave, because at that time transgression against middle class values was a big part of the elite they represented. The cultural obligation for the privileged to voice principled dissent is no longer a thing. We buried it with Christopher Hitchens.
TE is a group of editors who assign to a large pool of contributors, many of whom are freelancers. Not unlike the controversy journal, which will also publish third party material without direct individual attribution.
I would argue the controversy journal allowing pseudonyms for writers is exactly the same as non-bylined articles.
Of the values of the last decade that are now held above public criticism, I doubt TE has issued a compelling challenge to any of them, discretion being the better part of valour these days.
So is it going to be actually controversial ideas, or just ideas that are commonplace in academia but controversial to the lay public because the ideas imply eugenics and genocide of the average citizen? None of the potential "controversial" ideas seem all that controversial in the current academic zeitgeist. Abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, eugenics, and general genocide of populations the academics don't like are all ideas that have vocal proponents and even conferences within academia. Such ideas were commonplace in the lead up to WW1 and WW2. So, the journal does not really seem all that controversial.
On the other hand, my opinion appears to be controversial. I wonder if the journal will publish it :D
Plenty of environmentalists recommend drastic decrease in the earth's population. Hence widespread push for abortion and contraception in third world countries with booming populations.
Since I'm rate limited for my controversial posts, responses to comments are here:
It's politically incorrect for Western nations to push for mandatory abortion and sterilization. So, instead they adopt softer means of "legalization" and "education".
While killing and preventing children can help adults not starve when the government is restricting their access to essentials so as to generate sympathy from Western countries that are causing the instability in the first place, there are perhaps other ways to address these humanitarian crises that do not hinge on ending human life and causing population implosions.
Still rate limited (censored), so this is in response to chickenfries' claim that even the Vatican does not consider abortion genocide.
“It is fashionable, or at least usual, that when in the first few months of a pregnancy doctors do studies to see if the child is healthy or has something, the first idea is: ‘Let’s send it away,’” the pope said. “We do the same as the Nazis to maintain the purity of the race, but with white gloves on.”
You just said that these “ideas” are mainstream but you admit your interpretation of them is controversial. I agree that interpreting contraception and abortion as genocide is controversial. I don’t think even the Catholic Church thinks that.
I think your comment wonderfully demonstrates the utility of publishing under a pseudonym. Rather then confront the actual merits and problems with this or that specific argument, a straw man is contructed and immediately doused with ad hominem.
If the writer is anonymous, fallacious and time wasting ad hominem reasoning is prevented.
Ad Hominem is saying that something is invalid because of who the author / speaker is. I didn’t say that these ideas are likely to be invalid because they come from people like Peter Singer. I said based on the inclusion of people like him, it’s clear (to me, at least) what kind of ideas this journal will be discussing.
yah conflating Singer's ideas with imperialism and eugenics is just silly. Arguing about the person-hood of disabled babies is not the same as killing babies of other races because of some pseudo-science white supremacy bullshit
I don't agree with most of Peter Singer's controversial positions (I'm not a utilitarian), but I think calling him a eugenicist is unfair and misrepresents his position.
Yes clearly children should have the right to be born with Tay-Sachs disease, Harlequin ichthyosis and Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. They should be forced to live a live of abject horror to conform with our primitive morals.
Yes there will be ideas discussed at the quality of eugenics.
However, there may also be ideas like the earth orbiting the sun.
Example topics that should cause too much controversy for open discussion are:
* The Palestinian apartheid
* How Carolyn Bryand Donham fits into the #metoo movement
* Supply side economics is the root cause of Facism
* How long should a peaceful protests be ignored before it can morally be violent?
* The United States was violently founded on "Taxation without representation". The same situation is happening now with gerrymandering and outdated Senate rules.
* Cloning is going to happen, and it is going to get weird
* AI is going to happen, and it may be scary
I am NOT opening these ideas up for discussion. What I am saying is that all these are worthy of open, thoughtful discussion. Sometimes to say they are not a thing, sometimes to change perceptions. Mostly they are going to make a lot of folks angry.
Correct, they are exactly random inflammatory topics.
So what examples would you suggest?
The examples from the post were:
* Euthanizing disabled babies
* The positive side of colonization
* Choosing ones race like one chooses ones own gender identity
Those also seem to have a political bent.
Also to be clear not advocating for or against any of these ideas, some of them make me VERY uncomfortable even thinking about.
55 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThat seems like an interesting, but perhaps ultimately bad idea. I'm uncertain --- it's certainly interesting.
I see that a founder is Peter Singer, who has sometimes in the past suggested that it may be better for a family (financially and happiness-wise) to kill a disabled child and have another [1]. He considers this from an ethical perspective.
I can imagine it being frustrating to want to consider hard, taboo ethical quandaries from a neutral standpoint.
[1]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arguments-That-Harm-and/24...
Ultimately, I think the success will be determined by the fact (hypothesis?) that if you de-center the author's authority from the argument about the validity of an argument or idea, you can instead re-center to something more foundational and logical.
i.e. actually discussing the idea itself, rather than name-calling and mud-slinging as a form of discourse ("This person is a crazy Nazi / Maoist / Fascist / etc etc. - therefore how can you believe anything they say?")
Editorializing or investigation into possible motives and the like puts the discussion on something that is not as important.
This is targeted at least partly at academics that aren't that well known.
It turns out there were key errors in this paper, spotted just hours after publication, that made their conclusion (though not their novel form of measurement) unsupportable [1][2]. A couple of sources there since, as usual, the shocking headline will get a billion clicks, and the corrections maybe a dozen. But whatever, mistakes happen and that is not the point. But imagine now for a minute that this paper was instead going in the opposite direction and using a novel measurement had determined that the oceans were actually warming some 60% slower than thought, but it turns out that due to mistakes that conclusion was not supportable. Think about the backlash there and what would almost certainly end up resulting in personal attacks and suggestion of untoward motivation from the authors.
That's nasty business, but things that should just be 'science as usual' have started to become things people take deeply personal. I would feel quite uncomfortable publishing things that go against the grain on a number of topics. And this is before we get into things that ought be controversial. Increasing intellectual conservatism means such topics have gone from controversial to outright taboo.
[1] - https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-...
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/14...
----
Edit: As a perfect example of this, already in this very thread a person has stated an opposition to such journal because "I’m worried about corporate interests, ideologues, and charlatans publishing biased nonsense and making the world even more crowded with bad information without any recourse or ability to investigate what the motives behind the papers may have been." 'Seeking recourse and investigating the motives' often translates to finding the witch. Publish the 'wrong' idea and suddenly it's time to face the inquisitor. Publish the 'wrong' idea and make a mistake, and the inquisitor needn't waste his time - straight to the gallows with you.
We've solved that idea a few times on a technical level, most notably using public-key encryption.
It’s also worth noting that several large and reputable publications have already set up subcommittees dedicated to handling controversial ideas. So the idea of a venue for controversial ideas isn’t really all that novel.
And while I’ve seen pubs get rejected from one venue or another for being controversial, I’ve never heard of a solid scientific pub getting blackballed from everything. Anything with even the slightest bit of rigour can almost certainly find a venue somewhere - there are a lot of second and third tier publications out there already without a lot to lose.
In fact, you may not realize it, but most western countries already implement eugenic policies. For instance, in my country, most fetuses which are identified as suffering from Down syndrome are aborted, and that practice is encouraged by doctors. This has led to a significant decrease in the number of people affected with that condition. You may not think of it this way, but that is a form of eugenics.
To be more detailed, genes are not single-purpose. The same gene which confers a 'strength' is almost guaranteed to also confer a 'weakness'. Often this weakness is not even evident until an environmental change occurs, at which point the species with the greatest genetic diversity will survive while the one 'optimized' for the prior conditions will die off. Belief in eugenics requires some very particular things, such as, say, physical strength being completely unrelated genetically to metabolic function - which it's not. This doesn't even account for the multitude of things which, if we were to seek to genetically 'optimize' people, we would be inadvertently optimizing or eliminating. Plainly put, eugenics is bad science and a bad idea rooted in ignorance and, most dangerously, a willingness to take shortcuts with scientific rigor that substitute intuition for actual knowledge.
Why were such ideas rejected? Is there a scientific case for rejecting them?
Science is an ongoing process, there is no central authority to reject sinful ideas which is what your comment indicates that you would like, which underlines the need for such a journal.
can you give the definition of eugenics that you're using?
Eugenics is not science whichever way you carve it up.
Your attitude precisely demonstrates the need for such a journal.
Economist articles, with the exception of special reports and the farewell article by the editor in chief, are not bylined.
The reason being that the newspaper wants to speak with one voice.
In addition, and being certified and proud opinion journalism, I wouldn't exactly call TE uncontroversial.
Not having a byline is very fundamentally different than writing under pseudonym.
How would you describe the difference as fundamental? Is it of who a reader has recourse to?
Separately, TE isn't exactly provocative or brave.
I don't think you can really compare a journal, which solicits articles from third parties (even if they're controversial) with a general interest, political, economics, arts, news and lifestyle newspaper, which is published by a number of salaried editors and an editorial board hired by a single publication.
Is it of who a reader has recourse to?
The editors of The Economist are not unknown entities. Each section has its editors known by the paper, the only thing being that their articles are not bylined.
The journalists may not be known to you, but they're absolutely not anonymous and you have every recourse towards the paper and by extension towards the responsible editor.
As a matter of fact they're quite good in printing corrections or publishing letters to the editor by an offended party.
Separately, TE isn't exactly provocative or brave.
Ahem, I introduce evidence #1 [1]
In a cover story they made a forceful argument for Gay marriage.
That was in 1996.
I, for one, wouldn't exactly call that a mainstream opinion in January 1996.
As a matter of fact this is pretty much the definition for provocative and brave.
[1] https://www.economist.com/node/2515389/print?story_id=251538...
TE is a group of editors who assign to a large pool of contributors, many of whom are freelancers. Not unlike the controversy journal, which will also publish third party material without direct individual attribution.
I would argue the controversy journal allowing pseudonyms for writers is exactly the same as non-bylined articles.
Of the values of the last decade that are now held above public criticism, I doubt TE has issued a compelling challenge to any of them, discretion being the better part of valour these days.
On the other hand, my opinion appears to be controversial. I wonder if the journal will publish it :D
Since I'm rate limited for my controversial posts, responses to comments are here:
It's politically incorrect for Western nations to push for mandatory abortion and sterilization. So, instead they adopt softer means of "legalization" and "education".
While killing and preventing children can help adults not starve when the government is restricting their access to essentials so as to generate sympathy from Western countries that are causing the instability in the first place, there are perhaps other ways to address these humanitarian crises that do not hinge on ending human life and causing population implosions.
Still rate limited (censored), so this is in response to chickenfries' claim that even the Vatican does not consider abortion genocide.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/06/16/pope-fr...
“It is fashionable, or at least usual, that when in the first few months of a pregnancy doctors do studies to see if the child is healthy or has something, the first idea is: ‘Let’s send it away,’” the pope said. “We do the same as the Nazis to maintain the purity of the race, but with white gloves on.”
Are the environmentalists' calling for active measures of abortion and forced contraception, or are they just pushing for them to be legal?
It's likely to be the old, regurgitated fantasies from the British Empire and early 20th century eugenicists.
If the writer is anonymous, fallacious and time wasting ad hominem reasoning is prevented.
Yes there will be ideas discussed at the quality of eugenics.
However, there may also be ideas like the earth orbiting the sun.
Example topics that should cause too much controversy for open discussion are: * The Palestinian apartheid
* How Carolyn Bryand Donham fits into the #metoo movement
* Supply side economics is the root cause of Facism
* How long should a peaceful protests be ignored before it can morally be violent?
* The United States was violently founded on "Taxation without representation". The same situation is happening now with gerrymandering and outdated Senate rules.
* Cloning is going to happen, and it is going to get weird
* AI is going to happen, and it may be scary
I am NOT opening these ideas up for discussion. What I am saying is that all these are worthy of open, thoughtful discussion. Sometimes to say they are not a thing, sometimes to change perceptions. Mostly they are going to make a lot of folks angry.
So what examples would you suggest?
The examples from the post were: * Euthanizing disabled babies * The positive side of colonization * Choosing ones race like one chooses ones own gender identity
Those also seem to have a political bent.
Also to be clear not advocating for or against any of these ideas, some of them make me VERY uncomfortable even thinking about.