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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>What's your procedure to improve on traditional peer review?
Where and how do you draw the line?
First, I'm very happy this journal exists and I hope it gets popular at some point.<p>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.
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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
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...
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.
A podcast interview with the editors earlier this year --<p><a href="https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/" rel="nofollow">https://samharris.org/podcasts/245-can-talk-scary-ideas/</a>
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<p>the creators of this journal seem to have a more cynical definition of "controversial"<p>>controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive<p>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.)<p>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
I want an encyclopedia of tropes. The history of ideas, memes, idioms, cliches, and so forth. The rhetorical armor version of snopes.<p>For instances...<p>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.<p>Just tell me the shareholder-wealth-maximization fable is just some fanfic Milton Friedman wrote to get beer money from real estate tycoons.<p>That some former railroad lawyer came up with the "corporate personhood" law hack so that his patrons could avoid paying taxes.<p>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?<p>> 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?<p>Just take it to extremes:<p>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.
Heard about this on the Very Bad Wizards podcast a while back <a href="https://www.verybadwizards.com/212" rel="nofollow">https://www.verybadwizards.com/212</a> -- the coverage was pretty entertaining
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 <i>my</i> controversial ideas don't count), that I am cautiously optimistic about what's being published here.<p>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 (<a href="https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/volumes_issues/1/1" rel="nofollow">https://www.journalofcontroversialideas.org/volumes_issues/1...</a> - click "Read more" -> "Full article" -> "View Full-text" on any of the articles to see them) include<p>- a defense of violent action to protect animals, as done by various animal-rights activists<p>- 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<p>- 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)<p>- an argument in favor of "global enlightened despotism" to save the world from climate change<p>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 <i>only</i> that and it isn't.<p>(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.)