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Journal of Controversial Ideas

174 points by paulsb 5y ago

wrnr 5y ago
Or just read my comments buried at the bottom of HN.
bee_rider 5y ago
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...
- bawolff 5y ago
  Its much easier if you skip the training step
- jfengel 5y ago
  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.
- hirundo 5y ago
  > write pages and pages on topics that they clearly aren't trained in at all? Also known as "journalism".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tux3 5y ago
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?
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  > 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
  - gbrown 5y ago
    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"
    - kbenson 5y ago
      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
      - gbrown 5y ago
        It’s good enough to be submitted as a new Cards Against Humanity prompt.
      - chrischapman 5y ago
        You missed one. Privacy: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad
mattpratt 5y ago
A podcast interview with the editors earlier this year -- https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/
- paulsb 5y ago
  Also one from today: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dr-debra-soh-podcast/episode/23-jeff-mcmahan-the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-the-threat-of-cancellation-86453223 https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dr-debra-soh-podcast/episo...
ReadEvalPost 5y ago
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.
jl6 5y ago
Maybe they’ll accept Mochizuki’s paper on the abc conjecture.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
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.
- darawk 5y ago
  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.
- COGlory 5y ago
  Hopefully this gets resolved in the future. If I had something particularly controversial to contribute in my field, I would happily.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  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.
  - CrazyStat 5y ago
    > 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, ...
geofft 5y ago
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/1/1 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.)
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  One of the things I’ve realized is that - 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.
natch 5y ago
Full justify is a controversial practice, if not a controversial idea.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bedobi 5y ago
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?
- COGlory 5y ago
  I could not disagree more with this take. >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. http://xray0.princeton.edu/~phil/Facility/Guides/ABCtransporter.html http://xray0.princeton.edu/~phil/Facility/Guides/ABCtranspor... 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.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    > Don't gatekeep - just falsify. Amen. Gatekeeping is not science.
ausbah 5y ago
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
- wittycardio 5y ago
  Modern day "controversial" generally means idiot who wants intellectual cover to be a bigot. Trump supporters pretending to be Galileo lol
- retsibsi 5y ago
  > 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.
specialist 5y ago
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.
da39a3ee 5y ago
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.
- curtainsforus 5y ago
  Push the button! The rainforest is evil.
hatmatrix 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
caturopath 5y ago
Heard about this on the Very Bad Wizards podcast a while back https://www.verybadwizards.com/212 https://www.verybadwizards.com/212 -- the coverage was pretty entertaining
Lloyd254 5y ago
Exactly what I needed! You just saved me several hours. Thanks! https://www.dgcustomerfirst.ltd/ https://www.dgcustomerfirst.ltd/
forgotmypw17 5y ago
My controversial idea is that something called the Journal of Controversial Ideas should allow submissions without registration.
esalman 5y ago
My peers had a look at the journal and described it as the Joe Rogan podcast of science.
aiscapehumanity 5y ago
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

174 points by paulsb 5y ago

wrnr 5y ago

Or just read my comments buried at the bottom of HN.

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...

bawolff 5y ago
Its much easier if you skip the training step
jfengel 5y ago
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.
hirundo 5y ago
> write pages and pages on topics that they clearly aren't trained in at all? Also known as "journalism".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tux3 5y ago

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?

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
> 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
- gbrown 5y ago
  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"
  - kbenson 5y ago
    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
    - gbrown 5y ago
      It’s good enough to be submitted as a new Cards Against Humanity prompt.
    - chrischapman 5y ago
      You missed one. Privacy: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad

mattpratt 5y ago

A podcast interview with the editors earlier this year -- https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/

paulsb 5y ago
Also one from today: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dr-debra-soh-podcast/episode/23-jeff-mcmahan-the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-the-threat-of-cancellation-86453223 https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dr-debra-soh-podcast/episo...

ReadEvalPost 5y ago

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.

jl6 5y ago

Maybe they’ll accept Mochizuki’s paper on the abc conjecture.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

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.

darawk 5y ago
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.
COGlory 5y ago
Hopefully this gets resolved in the future. If I had something particularly controversial to contribute in my field, I would happily.
saalweachter 5y ago
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.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
  > 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, ...

geofft 5y ago

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/1/1 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.)

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
One of the things I’ve realized is that - 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.

natch 5y ago

Full justify is a controversial practice, if not a controversial idea.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bedobi 5y ago

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?

COGlory 5y ago
I could not disagree more with this take. >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. http://xray0.princeton.edu/~phil/Facility/Guides/ABCtransporter.html http://xray0.princeton.edu/~phil/Facility/Guides/ABCtranspor... 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.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > Don't gatekeep - just falsify. Amen. Gatekeeping is not science.

ausbah 5y ago

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

wittycardio 5y ago
Modern day "controversial" generally means idiot who wants intellectual cover to be a bigot. Trump supporters pretending to be Galileo lol
retsibsi 5y ago
> 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.

specialist 5y ago

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.

da39a3ee 5y ago

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.

curtainsforus 5y ago
Push the button! The rainforest is evil.

hatmatrix 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

caturopath 5y ago

Heard about this on the Very Bad Wizards podcast a while back https://www.verybadwizards.com/212 https://www.verybadwizards.com/212 -- the coverage was pretty entertaining

Lloyd254 5y ago

Exactly what I needed! You just saved me several hours. Thanks! https://www.dgcustomerfirst.ltd/ https://www.dgcustomerfirst.ltd/

forgotmypw17 5y ago

My controversial idea is that something called the Journal of Controversial Ideas should allow submissions without registration.

esalman 5y ago

My peers had a look at the journal and described it as the Joe Rogan podcast of science.

aiscapehumanity 5y ago

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