Controversial is by nature not a very clear category. How will the journal differentiate merely controversial papers from submissions that are various shades of unscientific, incorrect, or in bad faith?
People will submit creationist flat earther HEP theories-of-everything that explain why conservation of energy is optional and climate change is a conspiracy.
Obviously, you want to reject those, or your journal's content will taken as seriously as internet forum conspiracy theories.
But all controversial ideas are divisive by nature. On any controversial topic, there will be people who think the idea is obviously wrong, no better than the flat earth, not worth the paper it's printed on.
And on the other hand, the people who defend their ideas the most vigorously can be the least interesting. Trying to reject, say, flat earther theories by proving them wrong is an endless fight, where every second spent fighting is your loss.
So, on what grounds can you reject papers, without immediately falling back on the generally accepted scientific consensus; the same that is used to reject all controversial idea?
What's your procedure to improve on traditional peer review?
Where and how do you draw the line?
I'm not going to bother to read the article because it's pointless, but I must admit I love the title: "Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad"
I read the article. Actually, it doesn't argue that reading the article is pointless - it says lots of things we do in life can have a point, but life itself can't have a point. It's a pretty good article!
> Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism
I read (part of) this one to get an idea of the content of this journal. It has very little to do with creationism (despite the word showing up in the title twice). The idea seems to be, frame the idea of equality as an unexamined secular 'religion' of sorts, and then argue that scientists are unwilling to examine things because of it. The main example seems to be that mainstream scientists are unwilling to study whether race or ethnicity has any effect on the genetic component of intelligence.
This seems like quite a stretch, and I suspect the author just though they'd come up with a clever way of linking a dirty word (creationism) to scientists' preference to not carry water for racist groups.
Based on this sample, I don't think I'm particularly interested in exploring the rest of the journal.
The journal's home page states that "The main criterion for acceptance will be the quality of the arguments given." The principles of deductive logic are pretty cut and dry, so evaluating the quality of a rhetorical argument boils down to (1) making sure there are no logical fallacies, and (2) judging the strength of the assumptions made.
I suspect that the vast majority of papers which are "unscientific, incorrect, or in bad faith" would be filtered out at step (1), at least if the reviewers are sufficiently adept at deconstructing logical arguments. Furthermore, judging by the content of the first issue, it appears that the editors intend to focus on topics for which the assumptions (2) can be plainly stated and understood by the average academic.
Unless the journal only accept papers on logic itself, there's no way in which the criteria can be only "quality of argument". If one is making arguments about the real, one has to begin with assumptions that are plausible rather than certain and go from there. And what an editor considers plausible varies by what intellectual, political, scientific or whatever tradition they begin with.
> Unless the journal only accept papers on logic itself
A journal that was focused on "logic itself" would belong in pure mathematics.
> what an editor considers plausible varies by what intellectual, political, scientific or whatever tradition they begin with.
Not necessarily; one need not make independent claims about plausibility of an assumption in order to construct powerful logical arguments around it. This is pretty much the only game in town in philosophy, but scientific arguments must also adhere to the rules of deductive logic. And scientists are not necessarily expert logicians--they do commit logical fallacies. John Ioannidis has basically built his entire reputation on finding logical fallacies in otherwise "hard" research.
Not necessarily; one need not make independent claims about plausibility of an assumption in order to construct powerful logical arguments around it.
What's a "powerful" logical argument?
I remember when GPT-2 first came out, OpenAI published an article it generated about the history of unicorns in Peru. Facile text was quite readable and apparently well written. That it's common knowledge that unicorns do not exist left the entire construct lacking believability.
Perhaps this "journal of controversial ideas" could publish an endless stream of automatically generated texts involving logical deductions based on arbitrary, implausible assumptions.
scientific arguments must also adhere to the rules of deductive logic
This statements sounds like it was written by someone with no experience reading actual scientific papers. Most papers from most fields use plausible arguments drawn from statistics and tradition.
I think you have to bear in mind the original motivation behind the journal which was to enable a platform for researchers being suppressed and cancelled by woke academia for daring to shine a light in areas they've declared off limit.
Whatever else the factors in deciding what gets through, countering politically motivated censorship of research by the usual suspects who've appointed themselves Guardians of The Truth will play a significant part.
>the original motivation behind the journal which was to enable a platform for researchers being suppressed and cancelled by woke academia for daring to shine a light in areas they've declared off limit.
You need to check your history. The person who came up with the JCI had a different (though somewhat similar motivation): she received death threats from right wing Christians for an article she wrote that was published in an ethics journal.
No, that is just one example she cited of the originating motives in response to questions from (rightly) suspicious liberal interviewers.
While right-wing equivalents exist (and in former times dominated), the vast majority of recent censorship pressure has come from the left and it is inevitable the journal champions will offer placatory tales to counter the hatchet job coverage from their (woke academic) fellow-travellers in the press.
It is a famous piece and I am very familiar with it. It is totally counter to my experience. What I've seen, among friends and family, includes
* climate science faculty getting death threats after having their work called out on fox news, and having members of the trump white house interfere with their grant funding
* transgender faculty being specifically targeted by organized harassment campaigns from tpusa, though trained students who know precisely where they can write hate speech without faculty members being able to share that material
* history faculty being told administrators to focus more on the history of the colonies in a history course focused on native americans.
And in the wider news
* grad students being publicly called out for their non-standard appearance by full professors on twitter after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students being shit for being early-career on twitter by full professors after publishing work critical of heterodox views on Covid
* grad students receiving rape and other violent threats for calling out sexual assault committed by high-status faculty and the failure of universities to take action and then continuing to do so through the hatred
My experience is that undergraduates and grad students are actually either far more open to exploring ideas and engaging in difficult work that can even involve threats on their own lives than administrators or political leaders think they are, or they are already ideologically frozen and only take courses so they can attack the faculty members.
Their controversial is defined as "morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive." not "widely believed to be wrong". There's nothing morally offensive about flat-earth or perpetual motion so they are probably out of scope for this journal.
I fail to see why in a self described journal of 'controversial' ideas you would reject anything really. Speaking of which, I'm no flat earther but I find many of their ideas fascinating or at the very least entertaining.
The journal risks alienating their presumed target audience if they include too many flat earth articles and the like. This journal has a very fine line to walk and I wish them luck.
You don't need a target audience necessarily. You can just see what is submitted and ponder if that is in the general direction you want to go in.
I have a video on youtube about plant intelligence where I remove all negative comments. Its not that I'm convinced plants are intelligent and can communicate their feelings I just don't want the comment section to be a place to drop off turds and never look back.
I'm not sure if carving a unicorn out of a blob of meat makes it a unicorn but I'm convinced the unscuplted blob is not one.
That would be up to the people running the journal. They no doubt have their own ideas about what should or shouldn't be included or will know it when they see it.
First, I'm very happy this journal exists and I hope it gets popular at some point.
Second, I'm slightly disappointed by the contents of the first volume. I'd love to read more from the areas of astrophysics, philosophy of mathematics, molecular biology, quantum physics etc. written by actual experts in these fields who, for some reason or another, do have certain opinions, backed up by research, that diverges from the mainstream for various reasons, including but not limited to cultural ones.
I'd first note that the three editors are philosophers and ethicists; most of the editorial board is philosophers, social scientists and lawyers. I expect they've begun as they mean to go on.
The problem with wanting "controversy" in "hard" sciences is that if there's a "controversial" theory of physics or biology, that's really just another way of saying "there's not convincing evidence in favor of it, and it doesn't provide a productive framework for future research". If it's backed up by evidence, if it's a useful way of thinking that leads to lots of interesting new research, it's not going to be particularly controversial.
I don't know. It's the first volume. I agree this is more likely to attract submissions from fields where there's more vicious controversy, but give it time.
There's a good chance it will largely stay within the area of the first volumes' articles, perhaps with a bit more focus in bioethics or something of that sort. I could also forsee some sort of bombshell paper appearing that draws attention to the journal and raises its profile.
A reasonable comparison might be whistleblower outlets. They tend not to churn out scandalous intelligence all the time, but rather, have long boring periods punctuated by significant submissions.
I hope the journal establishes itself really. I think the main stake it's trying to make is protection of author anonymity, which I imagine could get very contentious at more mainstream outlets, even those in the physical sciences. I could even see a disgruntled editor at a typical journal leaking information about a submission in some belief that everything should be open, despite some consensus among the remaining editorial and publishing staff that anonymity should be preserved. Remember that there's a huge trend now in academic publishing toward radical transparency, in the sense of getting rid of blinded reviews. This is taking the opposite approach it seems, of increasing anonymity of everyone involved. If nothing else, it demonstrates the value of anonymity in academic publishing, and maybe provides a counterperspective to radical openness.
> The problem with wanting "controversy" in "hard" sciences is that if there's a "controversial" theory of physics or biology, that's really just another way of saying "there's not convincing evidence in favor of it, and it doesn't provide a productive framework for future research". If it's backed up by evidence, if it's a useful way of thinking that leads to lots of interesting new research, it's not going to be particularly controversial.
This is a credulous view of the hard sciences, which many scientists and almost all people who study the philosophy or sociology of science would disagree with. Certainly Kuhn would disagree fundamentally.
Many ideas which are uncontroversial within their respective scientific fields today were, in fact, very controversial in decades or centuries past: relativity, quantum physics, plate tectonics, evolution, heliocentrism, ...
>Many ideas which are uncontroversial within their respective scientific fields today were, in fact, very controversial in decades or centuries past: relativity, quantum physics, plate tectonics, evolution, heliocentrism
All of those examples provided a productive framework for future research, and after the research was done were supported by convincing evidence. They wouldn't be considered "controversial" in a modern field, people would just rightly be skeptical until the research bore fruit.
> They wouldn't be considered "controversial" in a modern field, people would just rightly be skeptical until the research bore fruit.
This is a hypothetical that is obviously impossible to disprove, but I fucking doubt it.
Science, including in the hard sciences, is rife with personal animus, envy, and rivalries. Scientists are not dispassionate logic machines who simply maintain a healthy skepticism until the research bears fruit. Many of them will viciously attack your research, you, and the institutions that support you if they feel threatened by your ideas, and they are not above lying and cheating to get their way.
As the pithy saying goes, science progresses one funeral at a time. Max Planck--a man who knew a thing or two about advocating controversial ideas--put it slightly more kindly [1]:
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
Agreed. Many people in this thread seem to overestimate scientist's ability to operate without ego and underestimate the power of institutions to suppress work it finds objectionable. That sort of environment encourages self-censorship, and many (possibly good) ideas are stuffed away for fear of rocking the boat. It's easier to go with the flow than to stand alone and cast a shadow over your reputation and ability to work in the future.
As a mid-career PhD student in a "hard" field I can attest that this description aligns with my experience. I'm a bit late to the party myself, but very much looking forward to the next generation of scientists who are exposed to the "categorical" approach to applied mathematics from a young age and have no qualms about rebuilding entire scientific fields within this new foundations.
A modern example is arguing that volcanic activity killed off the non-avian dinosaurs and not the Chicxulub impact. That's considered quite controversial today, even though volcanoes are implicated in other major extinctions and there was considerable volcanic activity leading up to the Mt. Everest-sized rock or comet hitting the Yucatan peninsula. Also there is the argument that the fossil record shows a lack of dinosaur bones at the K-T boundary, but most paleontologists think the rock or comet did the job.
An argument at the other extreme has the impact killing off all non-avian dinosaurs within one hour after the impact across the globe.
I invite you to read one of the published papers which does a fantastic job describing how little the scientific method matters when it comes to how people choose to interpret the data presented by the world around them. In short, if a evidence threatens their worldview, it is not believed.
there's a "controversial" theory of physics or biology, that's really just another way of saying "there's not convincing evidence in favor of it, and it doesn't provide a productive framework for future research"
That would be nice.
Look at how much models based on absurd assumptions dominate epidemiology, a field you'd expect to have a biological foundation. The whole thing is controversial as hell outside the field because it very obviously doesn't work, but inside the field they don't care because abusing statistical modelling lets them publish lots of papers and get lots of citations.
You could argue, OK, epidemiology isn't a hard science. Maybe it's actually a social science. But at some point it becomes tautological and the definition of "hard" science simply becomes any science in which you aren't personally familiar with the disputes.
> You could argue, OK, epidemiology isn't a hard science. Maybe it's actually a social science. But at some point it becomes tautological and the definition of "hard" science simply becomes any science in which you aren't personally familiar with the disputes.
The examples given by the OP were: "astrophysics, philosophy of mathematics, molecular biology, quantum physics etc".
> If it's backed up by evidence, if it's a useful way of thinking that leads to lots of interesting new research, it's not going to be particularly controversial.
You mean like a lot of things in psychology or social "science"?
Even there been Nobel prices for the underlying physics this stuff form the link above goes mostly in the same ballpark as flat-earth stuff. (I'm not a "believer" but I came across this stuff looking at pictures of loaded plasma and cosmological "dark mater" filaments that look bizarrely similar).
Actually even in math they have "controversies", not everybody "believes" in the same stuff, for example like constructivism or its opposite.
So I see some space for a journal which would publish science that nobody else likes to publish because it's not mainstream enough.
You mean the research area that slowly gained interest, was intensely studied for decades, and now is slowly losing interest as it fails to acquire experimental evidence and the new avenues for research based on it dry up? Are you mad that people spent so much time on it for so long or that they're now moving on to other ideas?
> Even there been Nobel prices for the underlying physics this stuff form the link above goes mostly in the same ballpark as flat-earth stuff.
I am familiar with the works of Hannes Alfven (largely because I once tried to read a library in alphabetical order); I'll grudgingly admit that his ideas could be called "controversial" while also still being "interesting".
I think it's an interesting case-study into whether there is(/was) a problem with controversial theories in astrophysics.
1. Was Alfven "hurt" by his voicing of "controversial" but "legitimate" scientific theories? Did his career suffer?
2. For the theories he put forth that were ultimately accepted by the broader scientific community, what did the trajectory of the acceptance look like? Was it just a matter of "the older generation dying off"? Was their new evidence presented that tipped the scales? Was it the applicability of the theories and methodology to other problems?
3. For the theories he put forth that were ultimately not accepted, can we now fairly discard them as "interesting but wrong?"
Alfven is in the sweet spot of "long enough ago that we should be able to 'score' a lot of his work by now, but not so long ago to be muddied by time". It could be interesting to dig into in depth.
> Actually even in math they have "controversies", not everybody "believes" in the same stuff, for example like constructivism or its opposite.
I'm not going to claim there's never been a fist-fight between a constructionist and a non-constructionist, but the "disagreements" like constructivism are much more along the lines of "I find constructivist proofs and am curious how much of mathematics can be build constructively" versus "turns out the answer is 'not enough' and there are more interesting things to do anyway", not "YOUR METHODOLOGY IS HERETICAL AND YOU MUST BE DRESTROYED".
>The problem with wanting "controversy" in "hard" sciences is that if there's a "controversial" theory of physics or biology, that's really just another way of saying "there's not convincing evidence in favor of it, and it doesn't provide a productive framework for future research".
Tell it to Copernicus.
Check out the book Structure of Scientific Revolutions maybe.
Totally agree. I was excited by this journal's existence, and then disappointed when everything in the first issue was philosophical in nature, and not scientific. The 'papers' in there right now are basically just unusually formal blog comments.
Hopefully as they get more attention they'll attract more interesting controversial scientific takes.
Robert Heinlein wrote in an essay ("Paul Dirac, Antimatter, And You") that he believes that Paul Dirac believed until his death that the gravitational constant G is decreasing slightly over time, and that he thinks Dirac was right. Is there evidence for or against this proposition?
Also, whatever happened to Garrett Lisi's unified theory of everything based on the E8 Lie group? was that important? how is that going?
Did Paul Dirac address the matter directly? The Robert Heinlein essay sounds interesting; I'm just confused about why he had to speculate about Dirac's belief. It's not a topic about which I know much.
None of my introductory university physics education mentioned this stuff so I' not really clear on whether it's well-known, unimportant, or something else. I just happened to be reading a big collection of this science fiction author's nonfiction work and that one claim stood out to me as kind of bizarre (G is going ... down?!) and always wondered what the deal was.
I agree. I also like that such journals can be made. I also would like to have more from the areas of astrophysics, philosophy of mathematics, molecular biology, quantum physics etc. written by actual experts in these fields who, for some reason or another, do have certain opinions, backed up by research, that diverges from the mainstream for various reasons, including but not limited to cultural ones.
I think that the articles about philosophy and ethics are also good to have; as other comments say this is what the existing writers know, and so I hope that writers who do physics, mathematics, etc will also write more.
(I also like that the articles are available as HTML and XML as well as PDF, to allow for reformatting and such things; I dislike many things about PDF. However, then about XML, it necessarily is using the XML both for the data and for the text. I think that XML is OK for text, and not as good for data (such as the data in the <front> block) (there are better formats).)
Some of my own ideas are also controversial, although I should leave it to the real scientists who have similar ideas to write about them, since their ideas will probably be better than my own. (Such a thing is not for sure, but it is likely.)
They mention formatting the document for submissing using Microsoft Word. Well, not everyone uses Microsoft Word, so they shouldn't require that. Also, since it is published as XML anyways, it might be better to use a subset of that, it can easily them be formatted as 12 point font double space or whatever (they do not specify specifically what font (e.g. serif, sans serif), but they could easily enough change the formatting to whatever font is wanted). (Also, writers who will write about mathematics might want to use TeX, anyways (or MathML; it seems they already declared the namespace for MathML, but I have not looked at all of the articles to see if they are used or not).)
That does sound interesting, though I get the impression that many such people simply don't want to bother making their ideas precise enough for publication. For, example Stephen Weinberg says a lot of things and claims to be oppressed/censored. I can't evaluate what he argues, but many who are qualified to do so have basically indicated that it sounds interesting but needs to be systematically documented for real people to actually evaluate.
Within science, many ideas are "controversial" because they're demonstrably wrong. Such ideas should not be "published" in a "journal" in some misguided attempt to give them the exposure they're justifiably denied everywhere else, that's not how science works. (example off the top of my head: chiropractics and other psuedoscientific nonsense)
Other ideas are "controversial" because there isn't enough evidence to support them, and there may never be. (example off the top of my head: neanderthals and their capacity for abstract thought, art and language) A journal for arguing about such ideas is OK I guess but kind of pointless because it's essentially just people's opinion about things that cannot be proven, and not really science.
Yet other are "controversial" despite having solid evidence because of, for lack of a better term, politics within the field, or politics in general. To me, these ideas would be the only ones worthwhile having a journal for, and such a journal would have to very very carefully select only articles that fit this category.
Instead, the first issue of this "journal" is full of garbage "articles" that are basically just people's opinions on identity politics, creationism etc? Just, what?
>Within science, many ideas are "controversial" because they're demonstrably wrong. Such ideas should not be "published" in a "journal" in some misguided attempt to give them the exposure they're justifiably denied everywhere else, that's not how science works. (example off the top of my head: chiropractics and other psuedoscientific nonsense)
They absolutely should be published. How else can I, as a scientist, be able to determine what is right and what is wrong? For example, in my field there was a small scandal regarding the publication and claims of a macromolecular structure, and to what resolution they had been solved.
I'm glad those papers were published because the truth was eventually determined, and nearly everyone in the field had a good lesson to learn from it. Not all the same lesson, either. Don't gatekeep - just falsify. Otherwise we won't know when we end up wrong.
Thanks for the link, it was a good example of something worth clearing up.
But I'm not sure things like chiropractics is comparable to your example - it's trash, we know it's trash and having a journal where people argue the merits of it and other similar trash would just be psuedoscience cargo culting the peer review process to lend itself an air or superficial legitimacy. Which is fine I guess, because sane people will just ignore such "journals".
But it is a shame that this particular "journal" initiative chose to focus on nonsense instead of filling a niche that might actually use filling - a legit journal for ideas that do have evidence behind them, but are still controversial for other reasons, and risk not getting published as a result.
A good example might be where ancestry meets medicine and biology, which has been justifiably kind of banned from public discourse due to its long and sad history of racist nonsense, but which if legitimately studied could save and improve lives - eg, there's the fairly widely known example of the blood thinning medicine that works for "white" people but not for "black" people. (a gross oversimplification, as our social construct "race" labels are just that, social constructs, and are terrible proxies for actual underlying genes, but still, if people don't study and publish these things, disadvantaged groups are made even more disadvantaged by being prescribed treatments that work for others but not for them, which is terrible)
> But I'm not sure things like chiropractics is comparable to your example
I'm not doing an opinion about the topic as I'm completely unfamiliar with it but it seems disqualified from the scope as there are plenty of journals that do papers about chiropractic medicine.
The thing about the situation is that you ideas accepted by the mainstream, that may or may not be true (I have more faith in physics than experimental psychology).
Then you have ideas which contradict this mainstream, "alternative approach" or whatever you want to call them. Some of these might be true. Speaking rough, an alternative approach that has a constituency becomes that constituency publicizes it anyway and the mainstream dissents.
Those constituency will naturally be the ones publishing those dissident ideas. And they should have a right to publish them and make them available. IE, it seems as if there'd be no reason to publish X just because it's controversial, if X is controversial, it has proponents and they can be the ones publishing it, not because it's controversial but because they believe it.
The thing is, there's a certain kind of position where the constituency doesn't want to be too identified with the ideas even if they hold them - usually ideas considered "hateful", a common example is racist positions and related opinions. Here, "I'm put this out because it's controversial, not because I believe it" is a common trope and I find it disingenuous.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. Are you suggesting that we should knowingly publish work we are certain will later be withdrawn due to factual errors?
So, everyone who claims to have invented a perpetual motion machine that produces free energy just gets published, because to do otherwise is "gatekeeping" and "not science"? No, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and simply submitting such claims without evidence and then whining about being censored isn't science.
I don't know if you really need extraordinarily strong evidence for perpetual motion. Just plausible evidence for every aspect of physics which must be changed because of it. If you forget to consider existing experimental evidence for, say, conservation of momentum and just quietly assume it doesn't hold or fail to notice the impact on it, that wouldn't be rigorous. But if you show that all such experiments were done with error greater than what's needed for your perpetual motion, it should be fine.
Gatekeeping is essentially the only service provided by journals. We could argue about whether it is actually a useful service, but anti-gatekeeping journal seems like a contradiction.
A certain amount of gatekeeping is necessary for good science in the modern world. This isn't the 15th century where anyone can verify the results of scientific experiments. Scientific research is often expensive and complex and isn't accessible to the average person.
> Within science, many ideas are "controversial" because they're demonstrably wrong.
I don't think incorrect facts are controversial within science, they're just wrong because they've been falsified.
Also, this isn't a science journal, it says on the main page that it's an interdisciplinary journal for controversial ideas. Maybe some science will get there too, but science isn't its focus.
You are conflating the abstract idea of "science" with the peer review process. Peer review is merely a social construct for filtering and disseminating knowledge among specialists. The fact that some novel scientific idea first showed up in a peer reviewed journal does not mean that peer review is an essential component of the scientific method.
How do these people have time to write pages and pages on topics that they clearly aren't trained in at all? I barely have time to write up the stuff I can actually make intelligent contributions to...
It's a lot faster when you aren't beholden to reality. You can save a lot of time by not having to do any of the background reading, or checking your conclusions against it.
I must admit I was hoping for much more controversial ideas than what Volume 1 contained. There are plenty of well-argued dissident ideas online, these articles take only a small tentative step outside the mainstream.
It's an idea that's easy to dismiss as yet another journal (do we really need so many specialized journals when online, gold access journals scale so well) - possibly full of quackery - but seeing that Peter Singer (a timeless ethics scholar) as founder and editorial board makes me want to keep an eye on this space.
it seems people in this thread like this idea because it could give a platform to not-mainstream-but-not-totally-crackpot ideas in physics, math, sociology, etc. The sorts of ideas that might disregarded by experts in a field but not things anyone would necessarily get "cancelled" for
the creators of this journal seem to have a more cynical definition of "controversial"
>controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive
the seem to want to attract articles that are not mainstream because they are ethically and morally outrageous to most people (say bigotry, cruelty, eugenics, etc.)
the small amount of papers published so far seems to be mostly the former thankfully, I personally do not think ideas pertaining to the former should be given a platform exactly because of their content
> the seem to want to attract articles that are not mainstream because they are ethically and morally outrageous to most people (say bigotry, cruelty, eugenics, etc.)
Some ideas are considered outrageous because people fail to distinguish between is and ought. I want to know what is true; I'm confident enough in my basic values that they won't crumble when faced with inconvenient empirical facts.
Of course, the question of should this be published could have a different answer from should I bother reading this. Sometimes the gatekeepers aren't failing to distinguish between is and ought, they just don't trust others to make that distinction. Or at least, they don't trust enough others to make that distinction to prevent the information from doing serious harm. And sadly they may often be right.
I want an encyclopedia of tropes. The history of ideas, memes, idioms, cliches, and so forth. The rhetorical armor version of snopes.
For instances...
I'm no longer interested in debunking creationism. I just want to know who started it, and the jargon and dog whistles they use. So whenever another zealot starts spewing nonsense, I can more quickly recognize the pathogen, and quickly extract myself from the conversation.
Just tell me the shareholder-wealth-maximization fable is just some fanfic Milton Friedman wrote to get beer money from real estate tycoons.
That some former railroad lawyer came up with the "corporate personhood" law hack so that his patrons could avoid paying taxes.
That all those QAnon stories is just a serial loser monetizing the forum posts of kids playing conspiracy Madlibs.
Lol I have not looked into the buildup of this but holly smokes is this trash. Nothing interesting honestly. Here I was thinking a new home for psychical research or something not mainstream, and it's just extensions of the culture wars
Look's like some fun stuff in the first issue! But this "dilemma" is easy isn't it?
> There is widespread agreement that coercive force may be used to prevent people from seriously and wrongfully harming others. But what about when those others are non-human animals?
Just take it to extremes:
If one person had their finger on a button to instantaneously destroy the entire remaining Amazon rainforests, and killing them were the only way of preventing it, then surely it's clear that we'd all have a moral duty to kill them? No one person's life is worth that much eternal extinction.
Well, I have to say, as someone who's not politically aligned with the sort of people who tend to be the loudest defenders of "controversial" ideas and the loudest opponents of deplatforming (because they somehow always come up with reasons that my controversial ideas don't count), that I am cautiously optimistic about what's being published here.
I was going to make some snarky comment about whether the "controversial" ideas here include the moral necessity of the proletariat revolution, the need to abolish and prosecute the police, a defense of open borders, etc. But in fact the articles in issue 1 (https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/volumes_issues/1... - click "Read more" -> "Full article" -> "View Full-text" on any of the articles to see them) include
- a defense of violent action to protect animals, as done by various animal-rights activists
- a rebuttal of a paper claiming that "women" are "adult human females" (by which I assume is meant "cis females"), which replies that the paper gives no reason to dispute that trans women are women
- a dive into the merits of blackface-ish traditions, which ends up concluding that the Dutch "Black Pete" character is not actually defensible (though others are)
- an argument in favor of "global enlightened despotism" to save the world from climate change
It isn't literally a call to guillotine every billionaire, but it's a whole lot closer than I expected it to be. Yes, there are also papers in here arguing that left-wing opponents of scientific racism are no better than young-earth creationists, that you shouldn't deplatform Steve Bannon, etc. But I came in expecting it to be only that and it isn't.
(I do agree with another commenter's point that, essentially, most of the ideas here - especially the counter-rebuttal by the original author of the "Are women adult human females" paper - are firmly within the Overton window of discourse, and so this journal is not strongly succeeding at widening the window.)
- if you are in the habit of defending rights, you will necessarily spend a lot of time defending the worst kinds of people: Good, wholesome (non edge case) people typically do not behave in a way that conflicts with others, and if they do, they are unlikely to invoke “muh rights” as a defence.
- the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?
I felt the same sense of cautious optimism because this journal seems to be another manifestation of the two examples I just mentioned above. They are doing the grunt work of allowing people with coherent but unpopular arguments to air them, hopefully leading to a better society for the rest of us.
>> - the same with social justice: Who else is going to require social justice advocacy other than people who are considered disgusting enough by society to be treated unjustly?
Ehh, maybe there is something I'm not picking up, but there's plenty of bad things happened to people (and are happening right now) that were not justified by any 'disgusting behavior'. Ethnic cleansing for example - something that happened in my country, I do not think that people who lived somewhere for hundreds of years and killed due to some lofty ideas about the 'nation' really deserved that treatment.
I think you shouldn't read "considered disgusting" as "disgusting." If one religion in power starts exterminating a minority religion, that's at least hatred, if not disgust. And if you find yourself defending those minorities based on principle, it isn't because you think they deserved how they were treated.
Disgust was a motivation for things like sodomy laws and antimiscegation laws. Genocide's dehumanization phase frequently involves evoking disgust, calling the target vermin, parasites, or a disease.
What does it mean for something to be controversial? Basically, it means there is strong disagreement about the morally justified level of Type I versus Type II errors--how many false positives are worth one false negative, in the wages of morality?
This is of course complicated by the realization that across society, achieving "more" of one kind of justice often necessarily comes at the expense of another kind. In a stable society, the justice hierarchy is fairly well agreed-upon (at least by the "good, wholesome people" you refer to) but things can really go off the rails when profound disagreements develop.
This is how you get "good, wholesome people" to participate in xenophobic genocide or political extermination. The lesson of the 20th century is that these catastrophically tragic inversions of the justice hierarchy can come from extreme positions on either the right or the left of the ideological spectrum.
I think the space of "controversial" ideas is essentially created by the interplay between those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the right which might lead to tragedy, and those who are hypervigilant about extreme ideas on the left which might lead to tragedy. These two groups will likely be mortal enemies for obvious reasons, but a well-functioning liberal society should be able to view both sides impartially and determine when one of them is on to something.
Accordingly, a dysfunctional society is one which starts swallowing the ideas of one side or the other... and I suppose the aim of this journal is to help slow our descent into an internally fractured society of two equally dysfunctional halves.
Indeed, it appears that much of the content is in fact focused on simply constructing fully-specified rhetorical arguments (as opposed to the hand-wavy self-inconsistent arguments that dominate popular media) which derive fairly controversial conclusions from relatively widely accepted premises.
People will submit creationist flat earther HEP theories-of-everything that explain why conservation of energy is optional and climate change is a conspiracy. Obviously, you want to reject those, or your journal's content will taken as seriously as internet forum conspiracy theories.
But all controversial ideas are divisive by nature. On any controversial topic, there will be people who think the idea is obviously wrong, no better than the flat earth, not worth the paper it's printed on.
And on the other hand, the people who defend their ideas the most vigorously can be the least interesting. Trying to reject, say, flat earther theories by proving them wrong is an endless fight, where every second spent fighting is your loss.
So, on what grounds can you reject papers, without immediately falling back on the generally accepted scientific consensus; the same that is used to reject all controversial idea?
What's your procedure to improve on traditional peer review? Where and how do you draw the line?