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Three academics are launching a new journal for arguments to be made anonymously
- geezerjay 8y agoFree 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.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago> 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.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoTo all downvoters: you actually support my point. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16122171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11762835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15273629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15273629
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoAnd 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..."): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780256
- keiferski 8y agoYou’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.
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y ago"Conservative" views that are punished somehow always end up being racist, sexist, homophobic or some combination of those.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoAccording to whom, though? 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.
- hliyan 8y agoI'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.
- speedplane 8y agoProfessors 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.
- yellowbuilding 8y agoWe 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoPersecution 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.
- Udik 8y ago- 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoWhat are ideas if not political? The concept of an academia free of politics is absurd.
- Udik 8y agoEverything 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.
- notahacker 8y agoA 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.
- scarejunba 8y agoMost 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.
- speedplane 8y agoYes, 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).
- scarejunba 8y agoAh 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.
- 8y ago
- superpermutat0r 8y agoEliminating skin in the game won't result in quality. Just like trying to impress peers won't.
- naasking 8y agoFearless contrarianism adds its own value. It can keep a field honest rather than encourage an echo chamber.
- spacesuitman2 8y agoThis. 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.
- UncleMeat 8y agoOr 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.
- naasking 8y agoIf 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.
- culot 8y agoThere 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoI'm so excited for Eugenics: a misunderstood idea? and Making the case for phrenology in an intolerant world
- detaro 8y agoprevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469230
- coldtea 8y ago>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).
- FranzFerdiNaN 8y agoThere 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.
- coldtea 8y agoYeah, 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.
- coldtea 8y ago"feels like they should stifle"
- dorfsmay 8y agoInteresting discussion about why this journal is needed: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=folcWax6d7k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=folcWax6d7k
- motohagiography 8y agoIf 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.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoEven 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.
- Eridrus 8y agoI 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.
- daveFNbuck 8y agoWhat 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?
- Eridrus 8y agoThe 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.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
- randaouser 8y agoRing Signature constructs are ideal for this.
- rmbeard 8y agoThis 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.