McMahan, Singer and their third collaborator, Francesca Minerva, a moral philosopher at Ghent University in Belgium, sit on the political left. But they envision their journal as a home for all well-reasoned, if dangerous, ideas.
Elsewhere, I have read that Larry Summers, Jonathan Haidt, and Philip Tetlock will be on the editorial board. So will the journal be, like, Steve Sailer’s blog but with peer review?
“So will the journal be, like, Steve Sailer’s blog but with peer review?”
Nope, not even close. That would be impossible without every single person involved being doxx-proof but look how they are wringing their hands about even a minimal level of pseudonymity.
I’ll wager that most of the “controversy” will be of the fringe vanguard progressive variety, pushing the left half of the Overton Window outward, but not the right half. “Should child protective services permanently remove children from their parents and reassign them to more enlightened families if they have bene taught that homosexuality is sinful? Discuss.”
Definitely looks that way.
Apparently Minerva’s claim to fame is having advocated for “post-birth abortion.” As for me, I can’t say I’m upset about infanticide being a taboo topic. I suspect many on the right share that perspective. Likewise, Singer is well known and, to use the word, highly controversial for those on the right.
Can’t imagine too many of those on the non-libertarian right wanting to become regular contributors to this journal, even if Singer and Minerva were completely opening to publishing their articles.
Larry Summers’s involvement tells you all you need to know. The criticism of progressive lunacy won’t go beyond equivocal whining and hemming & hawing, accompanied by frequent signaling of loyalty to the Left and of recognition that the “Right” is the “real problem.”
Singer might start a debate on what is the best approach to recalcitrant “rightwingers”: reeducation camps or euthanasia?
Quillette has an article on the new journal. It sounds slightly disappointing:
Minerva says that the frequency with which the journal will release issues isn’t yet known—it will depend on the rate at which the editors receive quality submissions. For now, the plan is to publish at least once a year, but JCI could become a biannual publication if enough good papers are received.
As much of a monoculture as academia has become, they can’t even generate two issues worth of controversial ideas on an annual basis, even pseudonymously? Pathetic.
https://quillette.com/2021/04/28/the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-is-here/
here’s a couple test cases:
-Black IQ is one standard deviation or more lower than White IQ and it’s mostly genetic and virtually all environmental interventions in a 1st world backdrop are basically a waste of money
– Male Obligate homosexuality is likely caused by a viral infection as a toddler or child that damages the part of the brain responsible for developing sexual targeting and development. We could in theory find said virus and vaccinate it against it if we wanted to.
Something tells me both statements (that I have a reasonably strong prior to be true, particularly the first) would never be allowed in the Journal. So it’s basically just a ‘pat on the back’ exercise that doesn’t actually delve into ‘controversial ideas.’
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Strange examples.
1. Who cares? Really. Who cares besides you.
2. I’ve never heard this theory. Ever. I read stuff off and on every day. For about 50 years now. Never came across this theory.
1. Who cares? Really.
The low performance of Blacks on various metrics seems to be one of the more salient features of social discourse today. The official line is that White Supremacists sneak into their homes each night and take their stuff (source: Joe Biden’s SOTU). Maybe we should cast our net a little wider, even if it hurts people’s feelings.
2. I’ve never heard this theory. Ever.
I’ve heard it raised to then mock and dismiss it, but I guess I’ve spent too much time in Gay lit. I’m intrigued because I’ve also spent a chunk of time contemplating pestivirus and its ability to hack a developing fetus’s immune system and be recognized as self to varying degrees, which matches up with some observations that men exhibit varying degrees of gayness. Intriguing.
While they were hardly alone, I think the most prominent proponents of the germ theory of homosexuality were Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald in “infectious causation of disease, an evolutionary perspective”, which was hardly obscure at the time since it was a cover story in The Atlantic in February 1999. That was back in the last ‘interglacial’ period of more open public discourse, roughly 1993-2002 (The Bell Curve came out in 1994). In National Review in 2005 Derbyshire once made a list of 13 theories and the germ theory was one of them.
I am not an adherent to it, but to be fair, the infectious disease theory was not so much debunked as never thoroughly investigated enough within the span of time it might have still been possible to get the kind of approvals and grants necessary to follow up on it and perhaps isolate an infectious culprit or other mechanism without torpedoeing one’s career.
1. Who cares?
Well, just about everybody. Perhaps the most hated article in postwar social science is Arthur Jensen’s lengthy “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” in 1969’s Harvard Educational Review. His answer: not much because IQ is mostly genetic and school performance mostly depends on IQ. Moreover–and this was the killer–average IQ differs substantially between the three “races”. Orientals are a little smarter than Caucasians. Both are substantially smarter than Negroids.
If true, this had some obvious implications. Programs to “boost IQ and scholastic achievement” would do little to close the gap between blacks and whites. And to the extent that lifetime success depends on smarts, there would be a big and stubbornly resistant gap between blacks and whites. Asians, on the other hand, would do relatively well–and to the extent that different Asian groups differ in average IQ, they would also differ in average performance.
If those four are treated as predictions, they have all come true. The stubborn “gap” provided much of the energy to the last year’s politics, with the cause assumed to be some variant of “white privilege”. If Jensen (and Magus) is right, this is wrong, wrong, wrong and all the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts will keep bumping up against the lack of qualified candidates (though perhaps American corporations can “skim the cream” from other nations).
Americans of Han descent will continue to do well and Americans of Hmong decent will continue to do poorly.
Nobody actually knows just how big or important IQ differences are, or just how they are distributed. It’s pretty much a taboo research topic. No graduate student with any sense of self-preservation will try to investigate it.
But in 21st century America, it may be the most important thing we could know.