Journal of Controversial Ideas

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.

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.

Idunno, I find utter stupidity just for utter stupidity's sake offensive in all ways, including morally.

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.

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, ...

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 mean like a lot of things in psychology or social "science"?

Or what about string theory in physics?

On the other hand side there are things like:

http://www.electricuniverseuk.eu/the-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.

Tell it to Copernicus.

Check out the book Structure of Scientific Revolutions maybe.

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)

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.

Amen. Gatekeeping is not science.

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.

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.