I wonder a bit about the way some of the questions are phrased.
E.g. asking people whether asking if incest is bad, is taboo? Like the taboo part would be if someone thought incest was good, the question itself isn't taboo as long as you answer it the right way. I'm not sure they accounted for that in the phrasing of the survey.
That entire 'journal' seems to specialise in publishing things that wouldn't be publishable elsewhere, and many of the articles are by the founders of the journal.
I think the reason that the questions are taboo is that there is the problem of a small group of people who have a pre-defined narrative and try to cherry-pick facts to drive that narrative.
If you look up certain authors involved in many of these controversial studies, you'll find they have published many other studies driving at similar 'alt-right' / white supremacist controversial narratives, and almost never anything that might contradict that. Often, there are questions about why they cherry-picked a particular topic. If you look at the actual studies, they often don't even consider alternative hypotheses, and jump straight to the one that aligns to the narrative and present it as the conclusion, even when it is a long bow to draw.
For example, one of the retracted studies mentioned from 2012 relied on a 2011 study in chickens that looked at the correlation between chicken aggression and the PMEL gene (which relates to pigmentation, and is conserved across all vertebrates). However, the authors don't explain why they picked out PMEL for study, and don't consider the possibility that any correlation could be caused by other genes at a nearby locus in chickens (and hence correlated). What's more, whole genome association studies since in chickens (published by different people) didn't even find those genes as being one of a long list of genes associated with aggression.
On the topic of Whole Gene Association Studies, some of the group of usual suspects publishing this type of narrative-pushing paper did use a human WGAS and cherry picked 9 genes from it to try to tie them to geographic distribution. They didn't explain, as is typical, why those 9 genes should be singled out, or look at whether the genotypes in different regions are even the relevant ones.
Cherry picking things that support your narrative, and using flawed logic to back hateful alt-right theories is not really science (in the sense of Karl Popper), even if you found your own journal to publish it in and get your buddies to peer review everything, because you never publish anything that might falsify your existing beliefs.
The existence of this sort of thing explains why mainstream journals are reluctant to take papers that touch these subjects.
2 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] threadE.g. asking people whether asking if incest is bad, is taboo? Like the taboo part would be if someone thought incest was good, the question itself isn't taboo as long as you answer it the right way. I'm not sure they accounted for that in the phrasing of the survey.
I think the reason that the questions are taboo is that there is the problem of a small group of people who have a pre-defined narrative and try to cherry-pick facts to drive that narrative.
If you look up certain authors involved in many of these controversial studies, you'll find they have published many other studies driving at similar 'alt-right' / white supremacist controversial narratives, and almost never anything that might contradict that. Often, there are questions about why they cherry-picked a particular topic. If you look at the actual studies, they often don't even consider alternative hypotheses, and jump straight to the one that aligns to the narrative and present it as the conclusion, even when it is a long bow to draw.
For example, one of the retracted studies mentioned from 2012 relied on a 2011 study in chickens that looked at the correlation between chicken aggression and the PMEL gene (which relates to pigmentation, and is conserved across all vertebrates). However, the authors don't explain why they picked out PMEL for study, and don't consider the possibility that any correlation could be caused by other genes at a nearby locus in chickens (and hence correlated). What's more, whole genome association studies since in chickens (published by different people) didn't even find those genes as being one of a long list of genes associated with aggression.
On the topic of Whole Gene Association Studies, some of the group of usual suspects publishing this type of narrative-pushing paper did use a human WGAS and cherry picked 9 genes from it to try to tie them to geographic distribution. They didn't explain, as is typical, why those 9 genes should be singled out, or look at whether the genotypes in different regions are even the relevant ones.
Cherry picking things that support your narrative, and using flawed logic to back hateful alt-right theories is not really science (in the sense of Karl Popper), even if you found your own journal to publish it in and get your buddies to peer review everything, because you never publish anything that might falsify your existing beliefs.
The existence of this sort of thing explains why mainstream journals are reluctant to take papers that touch these subjects.