The Bottom Line on Rindermann et al

Should it have been published?

I have never been Editor-In-Chief of a journal, and I’m glad. It’s a hard job, and as a general rule I think we should be charitable about decisions to publish or decline papers. I want to think a bit about publishing in general, more specifically about the Journal of Controversial Ideas, and in particular about the Rindermann et al paper.

The question of what a journal should publish is one of those problems for which the nice neat solutions are wrong. The nicest and neatest answer is, Of course you should publish it! You should publish everything! Academic freedom, free and open inquiry, free speech, etc. There is the toxic alt.right version of this: Why are you libs so intent on censoring ideas you don’t like? (See eg, Emil Kirkegaard on Twitter. If you happen to see this, Emil, have you actually read our comment? Any rebuttals?) A kinder version goes, isn’t it better to get bad ideas out in public where good people like me and Paige can criticize them? Why make martyrs out of the authors?

I have some sympathy with this point of view. I have anticipated for years that sooner or later the old journal model, based on a model of limited access to printing presses, would die off. No one is peer-reviewing this blog post, I can say whatever the hell I want. If it’s stupid, people will let me know in the comments section or social media. So why not just let everyone publish whatever they want and let god sort it out?

The problem is that on a completely wide-open model, there is no need for journals and no need for editors. Everything is just a bulletin board, Substack for everything. Calling something a “journal” has to mean something, or there is no point. Paige wrote that nice sentence on the subject:

By calling a collection of papers posted online an “academic journal,” the editorial board is implicitly making a claim about the benefits of expertise for discerning whether an idea is worthy of discussion, and moreover, whether the idea has been developed in a way that merits the attention of the scholarly community.

So what is JCI? What responsibility do the editors and the editorial board take for what they publish? Throughout the editorial process (we were only involved at the end) we were told, “Of course we don’t agree with the content of the paper, but our reviewers think it is sound.” The editors have a thoughtful defense of the decision to publish, here. But like I said yesterday, the defense is based on a set of anonymous reviewers and statistical experts who are now silent. None of these reviewers objected to assessing skin color from a fifty year old map and referring to it as “evolution”? None of the statisticians noticed a half-page of all-caps error reports in the statistical output? I have not seen a defense of the analysis from anyone this side of Emil K.

The general justification of JCI sets up a tricky paradox. Here is a schematic of some of the issues facing a journal editor with a controversial article.

All three considerations are important, and somewhat in opposition to each other. It would be easy to say that only the “Scientific Rigor” consideration should matter, but life isn’t so easy. Especially in the behavioral sciences, manuscripts don’t come over the transom stamped as, “scientifically rigorous,” as this paper demonstrates. Most human behavioral science, my own included, isn’t especially rigorous by the standards of the natural sciences, which I presume are never perfect either.

Hardcore scientific free speech types will dismiss the “Avoid Abhorrent Conclusions” vertex. Shouldn’t we follow the data wherever it leads? The problem with this is that it would mean that we are never free from some disgusting arguments. There has to be, I think, some scientific equivalent of stare decisis. Would JCI publish a defense of the economics of slavery or health benefits of female circumcision? Again, I don’t think the point is so much that these ideas are abhorrent. The point is that eventually the scientific community decides that an issue is closed. In my opinion the idea that immigrants are less evolved than white Europeans is one of those ideas.

Setting it up this way actually provides a justification for JCI. Any journal has to locate itself among (at least) those three ideals. Maybe there is very woke journal somewhere that wants to be careful to avoid morally objectionable ideas, so it includes extensive identity statements for authors and submits every paper to a big committee that screens for racism and sexism. I wouldn’t especially enjoy such a journal, frankly. JCI, on the other hand, has decided to focus on outré ideas, at some cost to rigor and abhorrence-avoidance. If you don’t like it, don’t subscribe to the journal.

This makes a certain amount of sense, but there are problems. A very practical one is that no one subscribes to journals anymore anyway. Back when you subscribed to journals as magazines that arrived in the mail, people read them cover to cover, and placed them proudly in big rows on bookshelves behind their desks. In those days, there really was a choice about what you subscribed to. But going back to my opening point, really nowadays the world is one big online journal. What journals and editors do is certify papers with their editorial judgement and peer review process. There is no avoiding that conclusion in this case, the editors thought this was a paper worth reading. The unusual editorial justification for JCI, the ability to retreat to, “Hey, we didn’t say it was good, we just said it was controversial,” makes it too easy to back away from a principled defense of what they publish. I suspect this is what happened in peer review. It was controversial, and it wasn’t 100% gibberish, so good enough. Again: someone please write a defense of the empirical part of that paper.

Finally, as in most things “heterodox,” the system has a mysterious tendency to drift rightward. There have been some good pieces on this phenomenon in the political realm by the heterodox writers Cathy Young and Thomas Chatterton Williams. This is a very complicated phenomenon and I have already gone on too long, but I’ll say this: I think part of the problem is that the scientific alt.right has hacked the algorithm. They know that there is a branch of heterodox science publishing that has pushed itself so far down in the lower left of the editorial triangle that they can be convinced to publish anything, as long as it is written in serious-sounding language. Sometimes it is OK to say no.