Free speech always posed the risk of persecution. This isn't news. The risk is only mitigated if a culture is developed to accept different opinions and frown upon those who feel the need to punish those who express different and opposing viewpoints, but that's a very unstable equilibrium.
In this day and age where all public statements are stored ad eternum, it only takes a change in heart in how free speech is handled for an inoquous statement made in the past to serve as an excuse to punish you in the future.
> In this day and age where all public statements are stored ad eternum, it only takes a change in heart in how free speech is handled for an inoquous statement made in the past to serve as an excuse to punish you in the future.
We don't have to refer to the future, this is already happening now if you have conservative views.
And another one, quite important from the perspective of the whole society, because it actually the shapes the general narrative in the media and the society as a whole ("Scientists discovered that..."):
You’re not wrong, but this has nothing to do with the parent’s comment. He was saying “in the future” metaphorically, not literally in the future of society.
I'm inclined to agree with you about this not being new. But, I feel that in the past, a good portion of the persecution and censorship came from the powers that be. And when mobs did gather, it was usually against a widely despised person (be he right or wrong). But now, the Internet and the anonymity it affords allows for the formation of virtual mobs against ideas or people even when society is evenly split on the matter and authorities are not in the mood to persecute.
Professors have always needed extra protection for free speech, and at least in theory, tenure was that protection.
However, over time, tenure turned into a career goal-post rather than a necessary security blanket, and it's basically lost all of it's enforcement credibility, e.g., tenured professors are fired/"resign" all the time after making comments that are viewed as racist/sexist/etc.
So now that it's clear that tenure doesn't protect professor, it's not surprising that they turn to other methods, anonymity being an obvious one.
Invoking anonymity is everyone's right, but it's still sad. Professors are supposed to embody the ideal of free and open thought, and by publishing their works anonymously, it's a sorry and self-enabling acceptance of their own irrelevance.
We have authorities willing to persecute. The difference is just that such authorities are no longer owned by the public. Social media companies are the authorities.
To elaborate a bit on why I say this: Since Social Media became uniquitous as a communication medium, I have found no more helpful way to process this in just political terms than to recognize the role of social media as a virtual urban plaza. For the last 7-8 years that I have used that metaphor, it has persisted in leading me to what I believe is the most respectable and ultimately healthy assessments of the terms it should operate under.
Interestingly, the plaza had a more complicated relationship with anonymity and pseudonymity because, outside of one’s community, one could not be recognized or traced. Nonetheless, learning about the history of this is surely helpful here.
Persecution and people disagreeing with your ideas are different. Why should we suppress the free speech of those that disagree? Protest is a legitimate means of speech.
Not really, not in an academic context at least. Counter-arguments are a legitimate response to an argument, while protest is, at best, a way of expressing political disagreement: but academic discussion should strive to be as free as possible of politics. Maybe political protests against academic personalities and theses should simply be not allowed.
Everything can be political, and ideas can always have political consequences and the people that advance them always have political persuasions. But the arena of academia is that of logic and reason, not of political convictions. So even if everything has a political connotation, the whole point of science and academia is to try to keep that out of the way, and use cold reasoning instead. A protest can show that you don't accept an idea, not that an idea is not worth being accepted.
A protest can also be an expression of the view that an academic is clouding their judgement with their own politics, or simply behaving unreasonably in a manner which has nothing to do with scientific enquiry or their subject matter.
Blanket bans on protest are just as inimical to free and open discourse as blanket bans on discussing certain subject matter.
- an expression of the view that an academic is clouding their judgement with their own politics
How is that not an ad hominem attack?
- or simply behaving unreasonably in a manner which has nothing to do with scientific enquiry or their subject matter.
This can be implied by the discussion of the ideas; stating "you are behaving unreasonably" is, again, not an argument. Protests are manifestations of personal and emotional involvement- I don't see what these things have to do with scientific inquiry.
Out of curiosity, have you actually attended a university? Because I can assure you that a lot of things professors do and say (for better and for worse) have little or nothing to do with scientific enquiry, and that lectures and seminar programmes seldom have the fluidity to incorporate extended discussions on the merits of an academic's recent behaviour, treatment of students or allegedly overtly racist media comments. Especially not if they're a hard science programme. I don't think all protests have merit or are carried out in an acceptable manner, but I also don't think professors are such special snowflakes that all criticism of their actions is off limits unless specifically solicited in their classes, and I certainly don't think you can dress blanket censorship of unauthorised criticisms of them in the clothes of free speech.
> I can assure you that a lot of things professors do and say (for better and for worse) have little or nothing to do with scientific enquiry
We have been talking so far of censorship of ideas and of "academic context", which doesn't necessarily coincide with the university building. My point, from which I might have strayed a bit in the thread, is that protests are irrelevant to the academic discourse (again, not "what professors chat about during the day") and as such they should be considered exclusively disruptive, and certainly not a way of making any sort of point. Shouldn't university, in general, also teach students to present their cases and conclusions in a cogent manner, as opposed to picketing a hall and shouting?
Then there is of course the case of bad behaviour or mistreatment of students: but what does it have to do with "controversial ideas" and public protests against them? It's a matter for disciplinary committe and investigations about actual individual facts, not about general statements and beliefs.
Political convictions are as in the area of logic and reason as academia. How else are we supposed to find the proper ways to elect representatives, and how else are those representatives to come up with and carry out their programs? The argument would work better if it were for the separation of religion and academia, faith and reason.
TBH, I find that most of the people making an argument to remove politics from things are using "politics" as a euphemism for something other than elections and governance. When HN experimented with a ban on "politics," it explicitly excluded the operations of government from the definition of the term.
> TBH, I find that most of the people making an argument to remove politics from things are using "politics" as a euphemism for something other than elections and governance. When HN experimented with a ban on "politics," it explicitly excluded the operations of government from the definition of the term.
So maybe we need a new term. Something to separate "politics as in mechanics of governance and related systems" from "politics as in partisanship, ideologies, and all the other bullshit that's entirely opposite to reason and rationality". Both HN and academia needs the former, not the latter.
>but academic discussion should strive to be as free as possible of politics.
That's a specific ideology that says that, not a law of academics.
Tons of academics, and very respected ones, would argue that everything is politics, that academics should involve themselves in the struggles of their era, and so on (including, of course, in their academic work).
Try that line in France, for example, and see how far it goes...
Most anonymous forums have low information quality because I don’t trust the raw data. While Reason requires no Speaker, Data does.
Efficient knowledge acquisition requires me to push some data gathering off elsewhere, and then the provenance of the data and the trustworthiness of the person become a big deal.
Hopefully, this bypasses those by being a signing authority that ensures the data are high quality.
Yes, learning everything in detail as an expert is impossible, we need experts, and because by definition we take their opinion at face value, we need some way to judge their credibility.
Of course we have those, i.e., "signing authorit[ies]" that validate that the opinion/["data"] of the expert is of high quality: they are generally called universities.
(I find it amusing when programming jargon is applied to the real world outside of programming, but presented as new concept. Especially like where, where we have had institutions that accomplish the same thing as "signing authorities" for several thousand years).
Ah no, you’ve misunderstood. Yours is a different argument from mine, though it is similar. You’re talking about the cost of being informed enough to understand stuff. I’m talking about trusting the raw data.
The conclusions someone draws from data can be fully verified by another party (what you appear to have called opinions or “data” with quotes). The raw data itself cannot be, even by the most informed party. I can attempt replication but I’ll never be able to verify your data even if you opened your dataset to me.
For instance, I may say that on being given drug A, patients’ self-reported pain reduced within two days, unless they’d been taking drug B for a related condition. Now, you can read my paper and see if my hypothesis is reasonable, if my experiment actually tests my hypothesis, if my sampling method is reasonable, if my results actually reject the hypothesis, etc. etc. The thing you can never check is whether I made up the numbers. Even if you were the foremost authority in the field, you can’t tell that from the paper or my data.
> Ah no, you’ve misunderstood. Yours is a different argument from mine, though it is similar. You’re talking about the cost of being informed enough to understand stuff. I’m talking about trusting the raw data.
You're right, I was focusing on false analysis, not false raw data. But perhaps I overlooked it because it's rare to see original raw data cited in anonymous forum. Do you see this? Also, the very fact that it was cited anonymously, and also in an internet forum rather than a serious publication should raise enough alarm bells to distrust it, no?
I agree with you that having false data spread through discourse is problematic. It's just not terribly common. What I see more often, is accurate raw data being contorted and misrepresented to promote some viewpoint.
Mark Twain had a nice quote... facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
This. People hark on 4chan for being bad but to be honest the non-popular boards are remarkably echo-chamber free. People get called out instantly and it's refreshing.
Or it can provide safe cover for people who want to keep defeated ideas alive and provide legitimacy for people who want to present those ideas as silenced rather than defeated.
If you can provide some evidence that published ideas that have been soundly defeated get resurrected unjustly and that this has harmed progress, then you might have a point. This hasn't happened that I know of.
For instance, the best example I can think of are local, realistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, which most physicists consider to be soundly defeated by this point. However, some of them are completely warranted (like 't Hooft's cellular automata interpretation of QM), and the debate has actually driven some great work in quantum foundations.
There are legitimate topics that can jeopardize ones career or even personal safety if you broach them publicly. For example I think stating the equations 'woman == human female' or 'lesbian == female homosexual' has gotten a lot of people in trouble in recent years. Even on many social media platforms and content management platforms that's bound to get you banned.
> silenced rather than defeated
No-platforming exists though, many people are silenced. Some people do need safe cover, as internet mobs can do real damage, as internet mobs can turn into IRL abuse even.
In the last decade there has developed a real culture of fear surrounding woke and identity politics. Lots of people quake at the prospect of committing wrongthink, performing wrongspeak, and instead push into the other direction via virtue signaling, to ward off potential attacks and keep their rightthink membership up to date.
At this point anonymity is definitely a necessary tool for so many people who would otherwise be exposed to varying levels of danger for speaking.
> Eliminating skin in the game won't result in quality.
Actually, it does.
In fact, this is so widely known and understood in academia that specific techniques have been developed to leverage anonymity and the free flow of ideas that it enables due to the elimination of repercussion.
>Another historian, and anthropologist, Gemma Angel, who is an expert on the European tattoo, tweeted that the programme was “basically an opportunity for white male rightwing politically motivated researchers to whine on about how unpopular their abhorrent ideas are.” It was, she said, “disgusting”.
Way to prove their point about the importance of such a journal...
(Also, a university professor that's an "expert on the European tattoo" sounds like an Onion parody).
There is no reason at all that conservative views about how they no longer can say the n-word or how "those people" don't deserve rights should be defended.
Yeah, because any free speech issue can be summed up in a caricature of racism and wanting to say the n-word, and "conservative views" (where "conservative" = bad, because of course all over the world should share mainstream USA's issues and ethical considerations).
And that in a place when just a few decades ago people were losing their jobs and badmouthed because of being gay, or using marijuana, or before that because they were communist sympathizers and so on...
It seems whoever is in the mainstream in the US feels like they sniffle any other voice because theirs is the voice of history, whether they are right or left.
If the coordinated persecution of individuals is a democratic exercise of freedom of speech and association, then a commensurate protection to ensure these freedoms for all, whether they are the persecutors or persecuted, is a reasonable action. The new journal in the OP would meet this criteria.
Even assuming this is a good idea in theory, it's probably not possible. If you're going to publish a full paper defending an idea, it's going to have enough of your writing style in it to identify you.
Academics early in their careers have to publish a lot in order to advance. With more of that publishing moving to freely available online sources, it will be pretty easy to automate attribution. If this journal is freely available online, there will probably even be a browser extension to add attribution.
The only way to publish anonymously is to not also publish under your real name. Even then we'll be able to at least apply a consistent pseudonym to your writing and you'd always be one named publication away from full identification.
I disagree. Text analysis only really works when someone attempting to publish anonymously is unaware that someone will do that analysis.
At the point where there are simple tools, you can use them to put together a report on what is most identifying, and then fix it, before publication.
Or one can even publish false flags. If anyone remembers the "lodestar" speculation from earlier this year, that's a single word that someone could have put in to get the writing completely misattributed in the public sphere.
What you're describing will only work against current publicly available tools. You can't fool the tools that you don't know about as easily. Would you bet your career against the next few years or even decades of AI research just to publish an anonymous paper?
The more "sophisticated" a textual analysis tool is, the less interpretable it is, and the more difficult it will be to get people to believe the output.
And yes, I think the people involved in this will take that risk.
Yours is a valid concern, but people can also fool attribution software easily. You could even write software that alters your paper into a few different people's writing style. That will render any attribution process useless. Just like you can disassemble code, you can obfuscate it.
You can fool current attribution software easily. It gets better over time and what you're describing is essentially leads to an arms race of obfuscation software versus attribution software. I wouldn't bet that current obfuscation software would be able to permanently hide all traces of my own composition while keeping the paper coherent.
This needn't involve publishing politically sensitive material. "Student" W.C. Gossett published his paper on the T-distribution in statistics anonymously, because his employer Guinness frowned upon publication. This attitude is still prevalent today among many employers. Rather than putting measures in place to vet and approve publication of material that does not involve a conflict of interest, they simply discourage it. This is net loss to society. Conversely, many academic journals have policies prohibiting anonymous publishing. Gossett would be unable to publish in such journals today. Hence the need for this new journal.
51 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] threadIn this day and age where all public statements are stored ad eternum, it only takes a change in heart in how free speech is handled for an inoquous statement made in the past to serve as an excuse to punish you in the future.
We don't have to refer to the future, this is already happening now if you have conservative views.
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122171
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762835
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15273629
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780256
There are a lot of people out there absolutely chomping at the bit to label things racist or sexist.
Outright unambiguous racism is one thing, disagreement with the activists is another.
However, over time, tenure turned into a career goal-post rather than a necessary security blanket, and it's basically lost all of it's enforcement credibility, e.g., tenured professors are fired/"resign" all the time after making comments that are viewed as racist/sexist/etc.
So now that it's clear that tenure doesn't protect professor, it's not surprising that they turn to other methods, anonymity being an obvious one.
Invoking anonymity is everyone's right, but it's still sad. Professors are supposed to embody the ideal of free and open thought, and by publishing their works anonymously, it's a sorry and self-enabling acceptance of their own irrelevance.
To elaborate a bit on why I say this: Since Social Media became uniquitous as a communication medium, I have found no more helpful way to process this in just political terms than to recognize the role of social media as a virtual urban plaza. For the last 7-8 years that I have used that metaphor, it has persisted in leading me to what I believe is the most respectable and ultimately healthy assessments of the terms it should operate under.
Interestingly, the plaza had a more complicated relationship with anonymity and pseudonymity because, outside of one’s community, one could not be recognized or traced. Nonetheless, learning about the history of this is surely helpful here.
Not really, not in an academic context at least. Counter-arguments are a legitimate response to an argument, while protest is, at best, a way of expressing political disagreement: but academic discussion should strive to be as free as possible of politics. Maybe political protests against academic personalities and theses should simply be not allowed.
Blanket bans on protest are just as inimical to free and open discourse as blanket bans on discussing certain subject matter.
How is that not an ad hominem attack?
- or simply behaving unreasonably in a manner which has nothing to do with scientific enquiry or their subject matter.
This can be implied by the discussion of the ideas; stating "you are behaving unreasonably" is, again, not an argument. Protests are manifestations of personal and emotional involvement- I don't see what these things have to do with scientific inquiry.
We have been talking so far of censorship of ideas and of "academic context", which doesn't necessarily coincide with the university building. My point, from which I might have strayed a bit in the thread, is that protests are irrelevant to the academic discourse (again, not "what professors chat about during the day") and as such they should be considered exclusively disruptive, and certainly not a way of making any sort of point. Shouldn't university, in general, also teach students to present their cases and conclusions in a cogent manner, as opposed to picketing a hall and shouting?
Then there is of course the case of bad behaviour or mistreatment of students: but what does it have to do with "controversial ideas" and public protests against them? It's a matter for disciplinary committe and investigations about actual individual facts, not about general statements and beliefs.
TBH, I find that most of the people making an argument to remove politics from things are using "politics" as a euphemism for something other than elections and governance. When HN experimented with a ban on "politics," it explicitly excluded the operations of government from the definition of the term.
So maybe we need a new term. Something to separate "politics as in mechanics of governance and related systems" from "politics as in partisanship, ideologies, and all the other bullshit that's entirely opposite to reason and rationality". Both HN and academia needs the former, not the latter.
That's a specific ideology that says that, not a law of academics.
Tons of academics, and very respected ones, would argue that everything is politics, that academics should involve themselves in the struggles of their era, and so on (including, of course, in their academic work).
Try that line in France, for example, and see how far it goes...
Efficient knowledge acquisition requires me to push some data gathering off elsewhere, and then the provenance of the data and the trustworthiness of the person become a big deal.
Hopefully, this bypasses those by being a signing authority that ensures the data are high quality.
Of course we have those, i.e., "signing authorit[ies]" that validate that the opinion/["data"] of the expert is of high quality: they are generally called universities.
(I find it amusing when programming jargon is applied to the real world outside of programming, but presented as new concept. Especially like where, where we have had institutions that accomplish the same thing as "signing authorities" for several thousand years).
The conclusions someone draws from data can be fully verified by another party (what you appear to have called opinions or “data” with quotes). The raw data itself cannot be, even by the most informed party. I can attempt replication but I’ll never be able to verify your data even if you opened your dataset to me.
For instance, I may say that on being given drug A, patients’ self-reported pain reduced within two days, unless they’d been taking drug B for a related condition. Now, you can read my paper and see if my hypothesis is reasonable, if my experiment actually tests my hypothesis, if my sampling method is reasonable, if my results actually reject the hypothesis, etc. etc. The thing you can never check is whether I made up the numbers. Even if you were the foremost authority in the field, you can’t tell that from the paper or my data.
You're right, I was focusing on false analysis, not false raw data. But perhaps I overlooked it because it's rare to see original raw data cited in anonymous forum. Do you see this? Also, the very fact that it was cited anonymously, and also in an internet forum rather than a serious publication should raise enough alarm bells to distrust it, no?
I agree with you that having false data spread through discourse is problematic. It's just not terribly common. What I see more often, is accurate raw data being contorted and misrepresented to promote some viewpoint.
Mark Twain had a nice quote... facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
For instance, the best example I can think of are local, realistic interpretations of quantum mechanics, which most physicists consider to be soundly defeated by this point. However, some of them are completely warranted (like 't Hooft's cellular automata interpretation of QM), and the debate has actually driven some great work in quantum foundations.
> silenced rather than defeated
No-platforming exists though, many people are silenced. Some people do need safe cover, as internet mobs can do real damage, as internet mobs can turn into IRL abuse even.
In the last decade there has developed a real culture of fear surrounding woke and identity politics. Lots of people quake at the prospect of committing wrongthink, performing wrongspeak, and instead push into the other direction via virtue signaling, to ward off potential attacks and keep their rightthink membership up to date.
At this point anonymity is definitely a necessary tool for so many people who would otherwise be exposed to varying levels of danger for speaking.
Actually, it does.
In fact, this is so widely known and understood in academia that specific techniques have been developed to leverage anonymity and the free flow of ideas that it enables due to the elimination of repercussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method
Way to prove their point about the importance of such a journal...
(Also, a university professor that's an "expert on the European tattoo" sounds like an Onion parody).
And that in a place when just a few decades ago people were losing their jobs and badmouthed because of being gay, or using marijuana, or before that because they were communist sympathizers and so on...
It seems whoever is in the mainstream in the US feels like they sniffle any other voice because theirs is the voice of history, whether they are right or left.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=folcWax6d7k
Academics early in their careers have to publish a lot in order to advance. With more of that publishing moving to freely available online sources, it will be pretty easy to automate attribution. If this journal is freely available online, there will probably even be a browser extension to add attribution.
The only way to publish anonymously is to not also publish under your real name. Even then we'll be able to at least apply a consistent pseudonym to your writing and you'd always be one named publication away from full identification.
At the point where there are simple tools, you can use them to put together a report on what is most identifying, and then fix it, before publication.
Or one can even publish false flags. If anyone remembers the "lodestar" speculation from earlier this year, that's a single word that someone could have put in to get the writing completely misattributed in the public sphere.
And yes, I think the people involved in this will take that risk.
Yours is a valid concern, but people can also fool attribution software easily. You could even write software that alters your paper into a few different people's writing style. That will render any attribution process useless. Just like you can disassemble code, you can obfuscate it.