Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

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?

> Controversial is by nature not a very clear category.

Not sure if it answers your question exactly, but here's the meat of it via their v1 to get a general idea:

- Cognitive Creationism Compared to Young-Earth Creationism

- Gender Muddle: Reply to Dembroff

- Deflating Byrne’s “Are Women Adult Human Females?”

- Black Pete, King Balthasar, and the New Orleans Zulus: Can Black Make-Up Traditions Ever Be Justified?

- A Puzzle about Self-Sacrificing Altruism

- In Defense of Direct Action

- Punishment and the Body

- Who Cares? ―The COVID-19 Pandemic, Global Heating and the Future of Humanity1

- Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

- The Epistemology of No Platforming: Defending the Defense of Stupid Ideas on University Campuses

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"

That is a wonderful title. So good, you can put other things before the colon and it's just as fun:

Money: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

Sex: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

Happiness: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

The Truth: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

Good Paper Titles in Academia: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

It’s good enough to be submitted as a new Cards Against Humanity prompt.

You missed one. Privacy: 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!

https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/132/...

> 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’m a PhD student in my fourth year. I’ve read hundreds of scientific papers.

Just because an argument draws from “statistics and tradition” does not mean it is built on something other than deductive logic.

What was the most impressive "forbidden" topic you ran into?

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.

> the vast majority of recent censorship pressure has come from the left

I don't remember left wing governors collecting data on the political leanings of university faculty.

Pick up a copy of "The Coddling of the American Mind" and you'll get a sense of what the parent is referring to.

A summary can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...

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.

> There's nothing morally offensive about flat-earth or perpetual motion

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

> Obviously, you want to reject those

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.

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