SIO296: The Journal of Controversial Ideas

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 296 and it's too bad we're not doing this in October, you know, because this is a real spooktacular episode, Lindsay.

0:00:40 Lindsey: It's true.

0:00:41 Thomas: Lindsay Osterman is here, how are you doing?

0:00:43 Lindsey: Oh, fantastic. Couldn't be better.

0:00:45 Thomas: Are you fantastic or are you spooked?

0:00:45 Lindsey: Very spooked. I'm, I am terrified.

0:00:49 Thomas: Are you quaking in your boots?

0:00:50 Lindsey: There's so many, so many dangerous ideas to talk about. I've just, uh, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, I keep calling it, I Keep calling it the journal of, um, I keep Calling it the Journal of Dangerous Ideas, but no that's, that's not what it's called.

0:00:54 Thomas: Dangerous ideas, controversial ideas, trigger warning libs! That's better than my notes that every time I couldn't remember the specific wording, so I was just like, "The Journal of Dumb Shit Idea," like I just get more and more like vulgar and stupid about it. Journal of Dumass Right-Wing Stupid Race Science Ideas, basically.

0:01:17 Lindsey: Yeah. Uh, yeah I've got the Journal Of Bad and Poorly Supported and Vetted Ideas. That could be good.

0:01:21 Thomas: Yeah, like that's where I started I was like, oh, Journal of Bad Ideas, you know, and then as I kept typing it over and over and different things, I just got more and more mad at it.

0:01:25 Lindsey: Yeah That would be a fun game to play with some of the actual specific articles in this journal, I think, uh yeah, we should come back to that yeah

0:01:35 Thomas: Yeah. So What are we talking about? This is it, actually, is called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. This isn't a thing. This idea is a controversial idea. Having the journal in itself is, was started by Jeff McMahon, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer. I'm sure almost every listener knows Peter Singer, as he's been referenced on the show.

He's definitely somebody who atheists, and this is still largely, I think, an atheist skeptic circle type show, and he definitely makes the rounds in those circles, but I wasn't familiar with the other two people, and don't worry, we're going to get to their superhero or supervillain origin story, whichever you, you think it is, but this was something that, it's funny, it like dates back, they announced they were going to do it at least two years ago, maybe three, and there was a whole, there was actually a Vox article about it too in like 2018 that I was reading, and it's like, wow, I guess it, you know, fair enough, I guess it takes a while to put together an actual journal, but they did it, um and then they also said this is something they've wanted to do for like 20 years, so they finally got around to it.

0:02:12 Lindsey: I wasn't either, yep

0:02:42 Thomas: We're gonna go into it, we're going to go into the backstory, the first issue is out, uh I don't have a physical copy, I don't, if there is a physical cool copy.

0:02:36 Lindsey: They did yeah I camped out to get like the first physical copy on the day that it was released Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got it signed.

0:02:54 Thomas: Oh yeah. At the theater midnight. Yeah. Um, by

0:03:01 Lindsey: It's pretty awesome.

0:03:01 Thomas: Satan. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Uh, So we read a couple of these. This may be an ongoing show, ongoing segment, you know, like, uh because there's a lot here and there's a lot of rage. Um but also let's talk about the origin story, shall we? Okay. So why do these three folks who started this, the main editors here, why do they think we need a safe space? And that's actually not meant as like an insult. Like Francesca in an interview actually said, like, this is a safe space. They actually use that terminology. Why do they need a save space for certain ideas?

0:03:32 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. What a good question. Yeah, so I think that they have, they have two related concerns, and these are concerns that we've talked about before, that that some people hold, that, you once upon a time it was, it was fine to express, you know, a controversial idea in an academic context, context, and you wouldn't get canceled for it. But now, right, seem to think this is, again, like a sort of a two-pronged problem. So one problem that they talk about in their editorial that opens the first issue is the fact that academic writing is much more accessible now than it used to be.

0:04:05 Thomas: Hmm.

0:04:06 Lindsey: And so once upon a time, if you published an academic article, know, a handful of people would Read it that are in your area, and that's about it. And now, now, given the internet and greater accessibility of these articles, somebody outside your discipline that maybe doesn't have context for a certain claim can find your article and screenshot it and share It on Twitter And Then Never.

0:04:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:04:27 Thomas: We've never seen that happen before. No, that does have, there's literally Twitter accounts devoted to such a thing.

0:04:33 Lindsey: It's true.

0:04:34 Thomas: Goes largely the other way, but we'll Get to that

0:04:37 Lindsey: Yes, we will. And so all the founders of this journal have had some personal experiences with this happening in an online setting. Um, so Francesca Minerva, for instance, published a paper a few years ago on post-birth abortion. So, yeah, so her argument was that, uh, you know, it's not necessarily logically inconsistent or rationally inconsistent, um, to say that, like, if you can abort a fetus prior to birth, right, you could also abort a baby after birth for similar reasons, so that there's no reason to draw a bright line at birth.

0:04:53 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:13 Thomas: Well, I was actually first, uh, familiarized with this idea from Peter Singer, but I don't know if maybe he was referencing this work, or either way, um, so here's the thing, I was kind of saving this for the show, but I actually don't think in principle this is that bad of an idea, and this Is you can go ahead and say I'm, I'm like you with Nickelback in the last episode, but, however, If They Start Publishing Nickelback in this journal just because, like, it's the only place we can't, there's no, we have to Publish Nickelback's Lyrics in this, oh,

0:05:27 Lindsey: Yeah. Come on. Nobody would say you're that bad. I'm going to publish like an evolutionary analysis of Nickelback's lyrics.

0:05:45 Thomas: You Should Submit to the Journal of Controversial Ideas a defense Of Nickelback, oh My God It Actually Almost could work, it almost could Works They Might do it, but But like, honestly, at on its face I don't see this as that bad of an idea per se because, and you know, these are tough topics, obviously.

0:05:48 Lindsey: I should. Oh my God, you're so right. I'M DOING IT. It probably could. Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:04 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:06:05 Thomas: And I'm not talking about the mainly race science bullshit that got published in this thing, but like the reasons that Francesca Minerva and Peter Singer have gotten death threats are ideas that I think we should be able to at least discuss in an academic setting, you know? Or whatever.

0:06:23 Lindsey: I Actually don't disagree. I mean, hearing about, so I read about this for the first time in that, in a Chronicle article that was, that was talking about the journal, and they went into this, this backstory of Francesca Minerva a little bit. And when I read that, I was like, OK, like, I can be sympathetic to this. You know, I mean, I I haven't fully I haven'T read all of the original article, but it does seem like, you know, she's she's doing something that I think, you know, a lot of philosophers do. And that's very valuable, which is to say, like, all right, where where where do our moral intuitions about this thing come from? And then, you know, where?

0:06:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:58 Thomas: Especially in philosophy, by the way. Because, and that's another thing we need to talk about, like, it's funny because I, um, read the interview with her and Vox, it was mainly her, I think, for that one, and she actually said, like, yeah, yeah, it's going to be multi-disciplinary, you know, there's going be, uh, it could be like an astrophysics paper in there, and then there was like a note after, and said, like, in subsequent emails, Francesca Minerva said this actually wasn't going to be able to be true because they don't have any expertise to, to, you Know, peer review, because the goal is that this is peer reviewed Uh, in Some fashion, um, and so it turned out like she did want that to be the deal, but then it's like, well, it's pretty much going to mainly be philosophy, and when it Comes To Specifically Specifically philosophy, I, I do get the idea that's like, yeah, there's unpleasant thought experiments, and if you're not somebody who wants to go down that road, then don't read that philosophy, like, I'm, there's, there are probably elements of philosophy that I'd be like, I just don't want to read about that, you know, if it's like too, too weird, like, the thought experiments are too gross and hard to entertain, I might just be like, yeah, but I think it'd be pretty weird to, like, you can't discuss these things. You can't even discuss the philosophy around possible infanticide, or you should get death threats. Like I, so I get that. And I think it

0:07:01 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm.

0:07:42 Lindsey: And the first issue is, yeah, I

0:08:21 Thomas: Is Acceptable in my opinion to discuss ideas like that, to explore them and to even be wrong about them, because it's philosophy. Like, you know, that specifically in terms of philosophy, you know, everybody's wrong about everything according to everybody else in philosophy, like, that's just how the field works pretty much, so I get it, yeah

0:08:21 Lindsey: Do too.

0:08:38 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, I, I need to. And, you um, know, it's, it's true that sometimes the public ire on questions like this is, is misdirected, right? Because academic articles are often meant to be read with a certain kind of context. And so if you take a claim out of context and you put it in this, in this other sort of context where it can mean something completely different, right. I'm sympathetic to the fact that there can be problems there. I mean, that said, I think that there's something to the idea that academics don't always weigh heavily enough the social implications of the work they do. Like we kind of, We, yeah, I think that we get siloed and we get used to people hearing us in a certain kind of context, and that maybe we can become sort of removed from the implications of the work that we're doing. And I think that's worth talking about too, um,

0:09:11 Thomas: Fair Enough Well I wanted to ask you This, I know we're still in the middle of the, uh, the, the origin stories here, but while we're on the topic, the main gimmick here seems to be that you get to publish under a pseudonym, so as An academic yourself, what does that mean, is that like, you know, is that the kind of thing that would have been laughed out of the room a few years ago, or is that a common thing,

0:09:25 Lindsey: Yes As Far as I know, it is not common, um,

0:09:47 Thomas: Usually the point of publishing Is that you publish something, right, isn't that the, yeah

0:09:49 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah, they did mention somewhere on their website, I think it was in the editorial, um, or maybe the welcome page, I don't know, um, but they did talk about the fact that, like, uh, if authors want to, they can publish under a pseudonym in the journal. But they can disclose that they were the true author to, like, their employers, you as evidence of like professional productivity or something.

But, yeah, I'm inclined to agree that, like, part of the point is you're establishing yourself as somebody who does this research, and, you know, people that have similar interests can reach out to you and collaborate and things like that. I guess this doesn't close the door to that, because a lot of the, or there's only a handful of people who actually took that option in the, the journal, but they set up email accounts that were consistent with their pseudonym so that people could reach Out and talk to them if they wanted to. So I don't know. I don't see this done a lot. I have never seen this done before, people publishing pseudonymously. And also, if you their claims about the problem that they're saying they're identifying here, if they're claims about that problem are true, and justified, and there really is this sort of orthodoxy that certain people are having to work against, then like, I don't know, maybe it's not a bad

0:10:35 Thomas: Yeah Yeah Yeah.

0:11:02 Lindsey: Idea to have a system like this set up so that people can share genuinely valuable ideas that might, you know, get them unjustified blowback. I mean, so the question for me is like, or is it true? Is this?

0:11:14 Thomas: Well, while we're on the topic, I, yeah, this was, this has going to be like the main thing I wanted wanted to say. What I love about this, I have several observations and we'll get back to the origin story. Sorry. It's hard to keep a structure.

0:11:25 Lindsey: Yeah, no, it's great.

0:11:26 Thomas: This is hard. I just want to talk about so many things. My first thought was, oh, you know who really needs to publish their ideas in this journal? Critical race theorists. That's who could really fucking use this journal right now because they can't do anything without being harassed out of existence and laws passed banning their work in states for real, like banning. So that's who needs a Journal of Controversial Ideas, right?

0:11:53 Thomas: You get death threats because they write about things touching on abortion, and they get those death threats from the right. But that seems to be the almost the main commonality between these three editors, is something like that. And then all the stuff they publish is like race stuff. You know, all this stuff that actually goes into the journal is

0:11:36 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. Yeah. By all appearances. Yeah.

0:12:14 Lindsey: Yeah,

0:12:14 Thomas: Not that, you know, it's more like race science, trans phobia kind of stuff, just typical IDW ideas, you And I Think what also is funny about this is, I think it's, tell me what you think about this, I think it's actually pretty meaningful that everything in here is basically philosophy, because if you have a theory, and and I get that, like, we can always say, okay, that's what they were able to peer review for the first issue, and that might entirely be true, but I think it could be, also, we'll see how, going forward, that the truth is, you can publish true, true ideas in academic journals. You're

0:12:22 Lindsey: I the same observation. Yeah? This?

0:12:54 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:12:55 Thomas: Just able to do that. And there isn't some leftist overlords that are stopping that. So the theory of this journal could have been, man, we're going to get papers from ever. There's going to be scientists being like, I couldn't even say that the global warming was fake or something. And then what you might find is, oh, wait, there's just, there was not that. Those don't exist because that's not what the science is, like, you're just wrong about the science, it's not like you, you know, do you think that could be happening here? Yeah, yeah.

0:13:10 Lindsey: Yep. Yeah." I have a suspicion that that may be exactly what's happening, right? I mean because I think that you're absolutely right, Right. Like the the real test of their claim is, I think, this first issue. And, you know, again, we'll look at the next issue and we'll see if as this journal gains more notoriety, if if the picture changes. Right.

0:13:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:41 Lindsey: But based, based on their first issue, yeah, they're not getting ideas that like actually are sort of well-written, well-articulated, well supported and and are just, you know, being rejected by journals that by all accounts should publish them. They're getting stuff about race science.

0:13:55 Thomas: Because Here's The thing, I, contrary to what every right-winger IDW thinks, I'm good with science, I love science, like wherever the science leads, I'm, I'm cool with it. And I think that's what's funny here is the, what I think is actually happening is that same thing we see with the, Debrisos, the end of gender, and these other people who are like, the science says there's boys and girl, like the scientist says that, my, you know, my three-year-old says there's penises and vaginas and that's how everything, that's what the science says, you know, it's like, okay, that's not what the scientist says, so then they've created this alternate universe where the science does say that, but then there's a cabal of people preventing you from knowing that or something.

And so, under that expectation that, you know, you create a journal like this, like, just, just, you know, look at that, watch that inbox, there's gonna be all kinds of scientists being, I've, like, been silenced, and Uh, you know, I've got the real, the real scientific data on the, you know, peepees and vaginas that they won't, don't want you to see, you know, and there's gonna be all a bunch of that. And then, you know, you publish the first issue, and it's, it's the same boring crap, that's not, there's no bombshells in this journal, is it safe to say,

0:13:55 Lindsey: Oh. Yep.

0:14:48 Lindsey: No.

0:15:05 Lindsey: Zero.

0:15:05 Thomas: There's zero bombshelles in this journal, you

0:15:08 Lindsey: There's one about the epistemology of no platforming, and I was like, whoa, what A Bombshit

0:15:12 Thomas: Could just Write That You could write that anywhere, that's Probably is already written in other places. That's an interesting issue. I don't, you know, like nobody we talk on this very show, like we've debated. I can't remember, maybe not you and I, but like it's, it's absolutely up for debate whether or not no platforming is right in every instance or some instances or what. Absolutely. That is up for debate. Weird.

0:15:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. That's True, we Could come back To that, yeah.

0:15:38 Lindsey: No, and you, you could, you could publish that elsewhere, and actually there's another, there's another example of that in the journal, um, so there's two papers that are published about, you referenced it, about this, like, I think it's an analytical philosophy paper where they're talking about whether women are human females. Both of those papers are responses to an original paper that was published in a mainstream journal.

0:16:02 Thomas: Yep.

0:16:03 Lindsey: So it's clearly not the case that you can't publish the, yeah.

0:16:03 Thomas: Yep, I was going to say the same thing. Yeah. That's one of the um Gen is that gender muddle, specifically titled Reply to Dembroff, I'll read the, while I'm at it, why don't I read that abstract, it's

0:16:12 Lindsey: Yeah. I was just going to say like, So that one is like the author of the original paper replying to an also published reply to his paper. This is a reply to a reply.

0:16:27 Thomas: So We're in deep In The uh company emails of re re re, like that kind Of thing Okay With a lot of reply alls here, Robin Dembrofs Escaping the Natural Attitude, and by the way, you, you know, a content note for bullshit transphobia, probably. I haven't even read this, but I'm guessing. Escaping the Natural Attitude About Gender: Replies to My "Are Women Adult Human Females?" That was the name of a paper published in an academic journal, FYI.

0:16:32 Lindsey: Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, There's definitely a leftist cabal. I think

0:16:59 Thomas: Yeah. The Paper responds, this paper responds to Dembroff's many criticisms of my arguments, as well as to the the charge that "our women dot dot dot" fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons. I argue that Dembroff's criticisms fail without exception and explain why the claims about my motives are baseless. I, I feel like that abstract is a pretty decently large cell phone, like, honestly, am I reading that right? I'm not an academic, but it sounds like they said, I'm replying to a reply about my reply, that was a, probably, that um my paper was tremendous transphobic garbage, and then, like, summarized Their, their argument, well, like a very pithy, like, hey, fundamentally this paper is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons in the following paper. I'll say that's not right. You know, like, that's the, basically this abstract, am I, did I get it, oh, Man, that's the uh Journal of Controversial Ideas, everybody, the

0:18:07 Lindsey: You're spot on. Yeah. Yeah, these don't seem to actually, yeah, the things they have published don't actually seem to be like, wow, that is a really great idea. The academic journal should be publishing this stuff. No, it's the same old garbage. And actually, okay, so we need to back to the origin story because it's relevant to this, I think.

0:18:30 Lindsey: McMahon and Singer, their origin story, their experience that was, well, I don't they, yeah, bit by a spider.

0:18:28 Thomas: Right, thanks for keeping us On task, okay, Lab, Accident, Uh, Yeah, Yeah, Spider bit him, as

0:18:42 Lindsey: They were palped by a Spider. It was very unfortunate.

0:18:42 Thomas: Yeah, but It was actually A radioactive asshole bit them, and now they can't, I'll

0:18:52 Lindsey: Years ago, there was a case in which a woman was convicted of sexual assault of a person who was judged to be not cognitively competent to consent to sex. Um, yeah. So McMahon and Singer published a, an opinion piece in the New York Times in, the title of their opinion piece was "Who Is the Victim in the Anna Stubfield Case," and I

0:19:07 Thomas: Gross stuff, one Sure, It's the victim is the victim, Like I Cracked it for you, solve that one,

0:19:21 Lindsey: Think So Yeah, Yeah, so their, um, their entire argument is that, actually, right, who's to say that this person was not capable of giving consent, and they're concerned about the fact that uh they, they claim that relevant evidence was suppressed during the trial that would have exonerated the defendant. And their entire argument here is contingent on that being true, evidence right? That was supposedly suppressed by the judge was facilitated communication evidence. Are you aware of this?

0:19:56 Thomas: Oh, geez. Yes, I know what this is. This is not good.

0:19:59 Lindsey: Yeah. No. So for anybody who doesn't know, facilitated communications is kind of like treating someone who is nonverbal, right, and can't communicate, of treating them like a Ouija board.

0:20:11 Thomas: I was going to make the same comparison. It is a Ouija board.

0:20:12 Lindsey: That's exactly what It is, right? So like the facilitator will take the hand of the person who can't communicate and often will use things like a keypad or something like that and will like help them, quote unquote, help them.

0:20:13 Thomas: Yeah. Oh God. This makes it worse. This does not make it better. This makes It worse. I'm more horrified now. It's not just that someone was sexually abused and they're not cognitively perhaps capable of consenting, but then also someone did a Ouijaboard trick to like make it seem like they were saying they were into it or something. Is that what we're to believe here.

0:20:30 Lindsey: No, it doesn't.

0:20:45 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know a ton about this case, but from reading this, I think I'm right in saying that the woman who was convicted of these charges was actually a caretaker for this person and was involved in doing facilitated communication with them over the years that she cared for them. And through that process, developed this belief that they were in love and that this person and wanted to have sex with them because of with them via this sort of Ouija board method. And by the way, like this is not just my opinion that facilitated communication is basically a Ouija board. Like this is – I can't overstate how empirically discredited this method is. It seemed very exciting at first and a lot of people did research on it. But like this has – they've done experiments where they show that like – no, it is.

0:20:46 Thomas: Oh, wow. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

0:21:34 Thomas: It's wishful thinking, you know, and it's heartbreaking because a lot of the cases are like they want, you know, their their relative, their family member who seems to be nonverbal, perhaps, you know, I want to say I don't know if this happened with Terry Shivo, but I think stuff like this kind of happened where it's like you want to read into it. You want to, you find ways to make it be like, oh, no, this person's actually still there. You know, they said they're they're still able to communicate. And then when you try to do actual I studies where you take out the the person who's interpreting these things and

0:22:05 Lindsey: A couple of different methods that I was reading about. Like they can sort of ask the person a factual question, like show them a picture of like a simple object, but not show it to the facilitator.

0:22:15 Thomas: Oh, right. The, yeah, yeah, gotcha. Yeah.

0:22:17 Lindsey: Yeah, it's Ouija board. And it does suck. Like, yeah, I understand like when this method was proposed, like why there was so much excitement about it and why so many places adopted it because yeah, is tough stuff, right? Um, but no, it's not, it doesn't work. And uh, in this opinion piece that that McMahon and Singer publish, like they, they just, they pretty much ignore the fact that this is not, this is evidence, they're claiming this is evident, it's it's right. Like, they say, they say, give some lip service to like, well, you You know, some scientists don't think that this is, you know, really communicative, but other scientists, it's like, no, okay, it would be equivalent if they were saying that about something like climate change denial. Some scientists think that climate change is real, but yeah. So their entire analysis of this case rested on this assumption that is empirically not true.

0:22:26 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, which is too bad because this is this is a difficult topic. And I know my first reaction when I read about stuff like this was like, oh, no way. This is an easy topic. What are you talking about? You cognitively impaired people or whatever you want to say, like they can't consent. And then there's there are disability activists who have written good good stuff about this. It's like, so wait, does that mean I am never allowed to have sex?

0:23:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

0:23:32 Thomas: Like if you are putting me in a category that is like unable to consent, et cetera, et cetera, because, because of my disability, for example, so I cannot have sex in my life. You've just decided that for me. And So that is one of those topics where I don't want to hear from Peter Singer. Like I want to hear from like disability rights activists and people who you know have experience and relevant thoughts and stuff but like it sounds like that's very much not the article they wrote like it sounds like they wrote an article that said in this clear abuse situation who was really abused

0:23:45 Lindsey: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yes. Nope. I totally agree with that analysis. I mean, the issue here that you're talking about, I really, yeah, I have thought about that and grappled with it. And it does seem like an incredibly difficult issue. Yeah, no, that's not what the opinion piece is about.

0:24:12 Thomas: And that would be the kind of issue where, you know, like I would, I would want to hear from somebody, uh, especially if they have actual experience, lived experience. Like maybe they would want to write something anonymously in a journal, like that, which is cool if they want to, I would, I would be cool with that, but that just isn't what we got in this journal. Yeah.

0:24:32 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah, and so to bring it back, the reason that I think that this is, it's interesting that this is their origin story, right, is that they got, obviously, they got a ton of pushback for this opinion piece. I'm sure that they interpreted this as being like, well, this is just because we're talking about this controversial thing, right? About the ability to give consent or whatever. And it's like, no, actually, the reason that people were outraged by this opinion piece is because you're wrong.

0:24:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:02 Thomas: And the way they framed it is awful.

0:25:04 Lindsey: And yeah, you're you're wrong. And like the claim that you're making is incredibly damaging. And And yeah, so sure.

0:25:11 Thomas: Yeah, I could have seen an equivalent article. I still, again, I don't know that they're, that the people should be writing, but if it was something like, okay, this case looks, you know, whatever, looks, looks pretty clear cut, but, you know, we found this other case that's a little more ambiguous that, you know, maybe might make you reconsider. That would be one thing. Sounds like this very much was not that. In

0:25:28 Lindsey: No, in the opinion piece itself, I think that, think, I, it's in their conclusion that they say something that essentially reiterates the title, that like our claim is that actually she's the victim here because she was a woman in love. She, you know, she had good evidence that this was, that the person that she was with here was consenting to this behavior. And now she's in prison. And then that's, that's really terrible. And so I think, I think that this is, this is illustrative of something that comes up in a lot of these articles, right? Right. They are. These people are claiming that they're being canceled on moral grounds. Right. This comes up in several different areas.

0:26:05 Lindsey: But when you actually look at the specific ideas that they are defending, it's just because they're wrong. It's just Because they are trying to relitigate.

0:26:05 Thomas: Yeah, I know it's so true. Yeah.

0:26:15 Lindsey: Right. Like when it comes to race science, that right, idea is not new. It's not cutting edge, it's, it's, it's very, very old and it has been relitigated over and over and over. And so somebody in 2021 wants to relitigation again, and then they're they get mad when people are like, oh, no, no, no, this is like a really old bad idea, we we know it's bad empirically, we know it's a wrong idea, and also it's super racist, by the way, you're welcome for me telling you that, you can stop spreading racist garbage, and then they want to cry about being cancelled, canceled, like

0:26:25 Thomas: Shit Does that transition us into the article that the only article I was able to choke down the entirety of and then I tapped out, I barely got through this one, it was so frustrating. It's incredible, just to give you an idea, in the article that I read, cognitive creationism compared to young earth creationism, which I don't know what the hell that title meant. So I was like, oh man, what will this be? Um, we get James Lindsay cited multiple times, Michael Shermer cited, uh, you know, basically all the worst people cited. And I was Like, Oh, okay. I hate this. This is boy. I sure feel, you Know, like this is a controversial idea or is it just wrong?

0:27:06 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:27:24 Lindsey: I'm gonna go with just wrong, yeah. Um, so from the from the title I wasn't clear what this was about either. I, I thought that this was going to be a more, a more general paper, maybe drawing on lots of different ideas, you know, to illustrate a central point, but it's just about race science. That's that's all it's about. Yes.

0:27:40 Thomas: Pretty much it's race science with some tricks to try, even for the journal of controversial ideas, apparently just writing pure race science was was like a little too controversial, I think, because they did a trick of trying to only talk about individual heritability of IQ, which, all right, there's a lot to unpack here. But what's weird is that I wasn't under the impression that that was particularly controversial. Like that fact in and of itself, I thought it was true that IQ was pretty heritable. It's just, there's a bunch of other problems around this.

0:28:10 Lindsey: I don't think I don't think it is Yeah. Right, no, no, there's... there's multiple, so, um, you know, I'm, I'm not an intelligence researcher and so it's it's possible that that somebody would argue with me on this, but like, I, I don't think that it's super controversial to say that, like, yeah, there's a heritable component to intelligence and there's also a huge environmental component to intelligence. That's, that's not the root of the issue here. And what this author is doing in this paper is very similar to the thing that Debra Soe did, which is to say, hey, look over here at the super uncontroversial thing, and then use that to support a conclusion that doesn't follow from it.

0:28:24 Thomas: Sure. Yep. They basically did a find and replace for like Sam Harris's group differences in IQ and then just replaced that with like individual heritability. Thank you. And they just hope nobody would notice or something. That's how it read to me anyway, Because

0:29:02 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Because I think the assumption that they're smuggling in there is that, well, if IQ has a heritable component, then part of the differences between racial groups have to be, which is, it does not follow by the way.

0:29:14 Thomas: Then obviously certain races wouldn't be as, yeah, nope,

0:29:21 Lindsey: And I think that that case has been made at length, right? So, I mean, there's, I think, that there's multiple ways in which you can dispute the evidence that's been presented on this point. But one that I think is pretty central is that the way that race is measured in these studies where they're looking at group differences and, um, in IQ, it's, it's self-report measures and What that, what that tracks, I think, most closely is something about somebody's social experience. It actually does not track genetic differences very well. Yeah.

0:29:44 Thomas: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I I, uh, yes, and my impression is, again, I'm not the expert on the show, but I've read a lot about this subject because it's come up on Sam Harris and a lot. I think there are problems at nearly every single step of this chain where it's like, what even is intelligence? And I'm not trying to get, like, super James Lindsey, you caricature of postmodernism, but it's actually a harder question than you might think if you haven't read into it. What is intelligence? And that's step one. So I'm not here to say that there's no such thing as intelligence in any meaningful way.

Clearly there is, but it's a separate question as to whether or not we're good at measuring it and whether or not we are good at it in a way that isn't racist. And people react like, oh, you're just being a, to, you know, SJW, whatever. No, like, if you look into it, the language that we use in using these tests and stuff like that matters a ton. Not only that, like environment, obviously, like how would you separate out the fact that, like, certain populations in this country haven't gotten access to the same educational resources over time. How would you set?

0:30:11 Lindsey: I I totally agree. Yeah, that's True, absolutely. Yes.

0:31:05 Thomas: There's so many problems in this causal chain that this author and people like Charles Murray and other people, they take, take all that as, like, no, that's settled science on the equivalent of, like, climate change. Like they just assert that that is vital to the argument in the stupid ass paper, is all that shit is settled science, 100 percent, even though it's absolutely not. Like, at best it's disputed. You know, like the best case for, for the race scientists here, every step in the chain is disputed, which means, like, it's inappropriate to to then do what this author does, which is to take it as a given that those race science bullshit things are settled science, and then say, why are these leftists rejecting what the settled science that's what they see with their eyes and ears? Why are they rejected? They're, well, they must be like creationists and that's the entire point of this paper, yeah.

0:31:18 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:31:52 Lindsey: I Right. They Yeah. That is the entire paper, just over and over and over. And they make a move fairly often in this paper, which is they'll move from a specific, they'll move from an example about a specific claim about race science, and then they'll draw the conclusion that the left is rejecting behavioral genetics as a field, which has not demonstrated in this paper. Also, I wanted to, I want to recommend some some listening for people. The podcast Very Bad Wizards, I think a year or so after Charles Murray went on Sam Harris's podcast, did a two-part episode on intelligence and race. And in the first one, they tackled the idea of G. And, in the second one, which I think was, yeah, yeah, that's right.

0:32:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:39 Thomas: Is G, general intelligence, or something, or Yeah, okay. Gotcha. Yeah.

0:32:43 Lindsey: So, they talked about G in the first one. And then, in the second one, they, I thought that they did a really excellent, clear, accessible breakdown of why this move from IQ being partly heritable to this has to be at least part of the explanation for group differences based on race. I think they did an excellent job of showing why that's an inappropriate move. And so

0:33:03 Thomas: And while you're listening to stuff like that, you have to hear Ezra Klein, Sam Harris, because that, was that, that will go down forever in history as the last possible time you could have taken Sam Harris seriously.

0:33:05 Lindsey: – oh, yeah. Yeah – no, I recommend that listening to – I actually re-listened to that not too long ago, and it was even better than I remembered it.

0:33:21 Thomas: Yeah, me too. I think it was about a year ago I listened again. It's so good.

0:33:24 Lindsey: Yeah, like, because in the intervening years, I feel like I've, you know, developed sort of much more elaborated arguments and been like, somebody needs to know somebody needs to say this to his face. And then I re-listened to it. I was like, oh, Ezra Klein said all of it to his space really well.

0:33:35 Thomas: Yeah. Ezra really is the best. Honestly, he's my personal favorite of any interviewer today. He really is. So that is, I mean, honestly, like you could have, you know, it's like that Family Guy joke where Peter Griffin taped over Citizen Cane and just says like, "It's a sled." There, I just saved you two boobless hours. It's like that, I could have saved you too boob less hours by saying this argument is, some people are too attached to their conclusions, like that's like the best case of this journal.

0:33:39 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:34:09 Lindsey: Oh, and I totally agree with that. Like the conclusion that black people are genetically inferior to white people. I think some people seem really, really attached to that conclusion.

0:34:09 Thomas: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. For example Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for example, yes, for sure. It's so, and what I resent so much about this article, and why I, I sent Lindsey so many angry messages about this article, it's just like, fuck, this guy, is he, spends, I assume it's he, uh, I guess I don't know, I shouldn't assume, um, we don't suit. Yeah, it's male sounding pseudonym, but who cares, uh, they, I'll use "they," nothing wrong with "they," um, they, the author, uh, does this trick where they try to like, I think in my opinion, let, build a bit of credibility by like going really in depth into these creationist arguments and why they're wrong.

You know, this is perfectly geared toward the skeptic audience. It's the exact same. And why I'm so resentful of it is the same ploy we've seen for 10 years in the atheist audience, which is appeal to your rationality, appeal, appeal to rationality. Make you think, you and I'm speaking as like what the author is trying to do. Make, make you think as an atheist skeptic, bro, that like these rational thoughts you have, you're, you're the one who's right, and like it's super scientific, da da da, and then race science, like squeeze that in there too, so

0:34:34 Lindsey: The pseudonym is, yeah, yeah.

0:34:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:19 Thomas: That it gives it the veneer of credibility of like, oh yeah, okay, race science, yeah, all right, because he goes in depth into like, there are reasons that the, uh, that, you know, creationists believe the world can't be more than, uh, six thousand years old. It's just for paragraphs and I'm like, my eyes are glazing over. Because I'm like, what the fuck? How is this relevant to anything?

0:35:23 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. It's not. It was, yeah, it was hard for me to get through this too. And because, again, this is another paper where it's like, I can't take anything this person is saying at face value. I have to look up every stupid source that they are citing, writing, and because, and when I do that, right, I find out that, like, nine times out of ten, they're, they're distorting something about the way that they're reporting it, right, and, uh, and yeah, it's, it's exhausting reading a paper like that, but yeah, at the end of the day, I do have like pages and pages of notes, but when I was reviewing them before we started recording, they just all say the same thing. It's just like, okay, well, this isn't true, and you're just defending race science, and And this has been relitigated over and over and over for centuries, dude. Like, it's not, it's just not the case. Like, he keeps calling this, he keep making the claim that people are rejecting race science essentially a priori. It's like, we are way past a priori! This is not,

0:36:02 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:36:40 Thomas: We're all the way in the posteriori here.

0:36:42 Lindsey: We are very posteriori. This, yeah, this has been, again, this is been, been tested, it has been examined, um, it's

0:36:51 Thomas: Well, and he might, or they, cherry picks quotes to be like, look, there are a lot of people in the world that maybe haven't even felt the need to delve deep into the race science ideas before just being like, hey, isn't that some, probably some racist bullshit. Yeah. That's probably some racism bullshit. Okay. I don't care. Like I like similar to how I have not delved deep into the moon landing is fake side of the argument.

0:36:52 Lindsey: Yeah yeah right

0:37:15 Thomas: I do not know much about it. I am sure those shadows seem a little weird to some people, you know, I draw is that guy, the cameras in the wrong, whatever. I does not care. I like, yeah. If you want to tell me that that I'm being a creationist because I'm starting from the premise that we probably landed on the fucking moon, you know, and not bothering a whole lot with the counter arguments to that particular thing.

0:37:15 Lindsey: No yeah no

0:37:37 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Guilty. I'm a creationists. You got me.

0:37:37 Lindsey: No I'm glad, I'm glad you said that, because I don't want to, I don't want to give the impression that I think that, like, well, if we've never tested this empirically, that he would be right, that both claims should be equally on the table, because we have, we actually have evidence, like, you know, the historical evidence, for instance, that, uh, I don't know, could give people some pretty plausible hypotheses about why Black people in America, right, might be, why their lives might look different than white people generally, right?

0:38:06 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I always bring this up and I'm going to bring it up again. The, the experiment based on, I can't remember what country they did it in, but the farmers, the farmers experiment, you know the one I'm talking about where it's like they, They have a cycle to their livelihood such that, you know, after the harvest, they got plenty of money because it's big harvest, big money, and that money has to last them like all year, basically, or something like that. And they gave them an IQ test at that point in their year. And then again, when they're like at the bust phase of that, like when nothing, they haven't harvested anything yet, they're at the end of their financial rope, basically. Because it's a stretch to get through it. And it was a massive difference in the same people performing at two different times. So socioeconomic stress could account for amount a of any, you difference you might find in IQ tests.

0:38:16 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:38:46 Lindsey: Interesting.

0:38:55 Lindsey: Yeah, that's a good, that's good point as well, there. Right, are a ton of, like, alternatives that you could, that you could put here that have, like, massively more plausibility than the idea that this person is is putting forward, right? So, like, yeah, a priori I actually do think that those two, those two hypotheses have, have different sort of credibility, right? But again, we're not a prior this, there's just, there's so many reasons that this is, this is a, this is stupid thing to be calling cancellation, there, there is a reason that you don't get this stuff published anymore, and it's because they have been relitigated over and over and found to be bad ideas and they're fucking racist. No,

0:39:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:36 Thomas: But it's as we see so many times, you assume the conclusion, like you assume this, this author assumes it's all settled science and we all know it's settled science. But why do the leftists not accept the settled science? And the comparison to creationism is so fucking infuriating and it breaks down. It's not even close to comparable, you know, like, sure, you can find some examples here and there, mostly because most people don't have time to critically examine every single belief of theirs. Like, if you, if you did the typical interview, some college students about race science, I bet you they wouldn't know anything about it or the proper counter arguments, because, like, who has the time to look into all that crap?

But anyway, point I was going to make is with the creationism, creationist examples he brings up, it's laughably absurd, terrible claim that is disproven by all of evolutionary science forever, 100 percent of the time. Right. Like on one side. And he's like, this is the same as the race science deniers. When what's actually happening is on the creationist side you have 99.9999 percent of all scientists agreeing, like, no, these are dumb bullshit ideas, like the Earth isn't 5,000 years old or whatever, 6,000, like, it's just not like

0:39:56 Lindsey: Sure, right yeah yeah

0:40:51 Thomas: There's a million reasons on the other side, it's not like you have all of the scientists saying race science, right, you know, Charles Murray is right, and then it's a plucky band of just pure leftist unqualified, you, SJW activists, they're like, no, it's not true.

What you have is like genuine scientific disagreement, and on a lot of these mini questions on IQ, like on whether or not that's a reliable thing, or if there's racism in there, and what is general intelligence, and like what accounts for any, like, measured differences, this is an environment, like, as you're saying, it's likely that we have a broad consensus that it is like more environment or uh these other factors, but even if at best it was still an unanswered question, that's nothing like the Noah's Ark bullshit, where it's a settled question with every scientist, and denying that is a way different kind of thing than looking at this muddled question of IQ and intelligence and being like, I don't think I buy that. You know, like there's scientists on both sides of these questions, and I'm pretty sure that the, like, the not racist conclusion is probably more accurate than the racist conclusion. That's not the same level of science

0:41:25 Lindsey: No it's yeah

0:42:07 Thomas: Denialism.

0:42:07 Lindsey: There's no, it is infinitely more supported, this is all, this is all based on on evidence, right?

0:42:15 Thomas: Them.

0:42:16 Lindsey: I It's, and you know, there's another thing, like, throughout the article, he keeps pulling quotes from some people to try to demonstrate that these scientists are the same as creationists. And it's like, how are you reading this as evidence? I mean, maybe 5% you could read that way. I looked up context for a lot of them and found that I thought he was misrepresenting it. But a lot the quotes that he actually includes in the article don't seem to demonstrate what he's saying they do. Like,

0:42:16 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah a lot them I think came across how I said, where it's like, no, man, that's fucking probably racist bullshit, I don't know the details, so, you know, like, I'm gonna go ahead, because if it were a scientifically hypothetically 50-50 question, I think you would be well justified and being like, well, even, and and that's a big if, like I'm not saying it is, but hypothetically, if this race science crap was a 50-50 scientific question where they're like, we're not sure, I think you'd be well justified to be like, oh, okay, well, let's just go ahead and assume the not racist thing rather than the racist thing. That sounds like a good idea. If it's a tie, or if it's anywhere close to a tie are unclear, why don't we assume that actually humans are humans? And there's probably some other explanation for this, especially given our racist ass past, you know, centuries of history, like, likely, you know, maybe we should rule on the side of like not the racist bullshit. Did

0:43:22 Lindsey: Start from there, yeah. Yeah mm-hmm One person that he talks about, uh, is is a biological anthropologist named Holly Dunsworth, um, and he, he criticized her because he claimed that she was saying that, um, in classes where where evolution is being taught, that you also need to to teach the humanities, and it, like, even in the quotes that he presents, it's like, it doesn't, it's clear that this author thinks that what she's saying is outrageous, but I don't read it as particularly outrageous, and he's also, he's, He's claiming that, like, she's essentially saying that even though she thinks evolution is true, that it shouldn't – I don't even know exactly what he's saying, right? Because, like, his whole claim is that, like, leftists are saying that, like, regardless of whether something is true, we ought to reject it, right, that is a claim.

0:43:59 Thomas: Yeah Well, I can read the quote if you want. Okay.

0:44:28 Lindsey: And yeah, yeah, that would be good.

0:44:30 Thomas: So anthropologist, so this is after, again, right after the author has outlined a creationist argument and poison the well that way by being like, here, look at this really stupid, stupid creationist thing. And I'm so smart because I'm telling you the science of why the creationist claim is wrong. Right after that, it's, anthropologist Holly Dunsworth has argued that, quote, genetic and biological determinism have a stranglehold on the popular imagination, end quote.

And that as a result, quote, evolution is all wrapped up in white supremacy and a genetically destined patriarchy, end quote, she proposes that in order to combat biological determinism and promote egalitarian ideas, classes that teach the theory of evolution must place a greater emphasis on the humanities instead of being entirely about biology. And in particular, they must actively, quote, actively dismantle evolution's racist past and present. This. Dunsworth, this very next sentence, Dunsworth's argument about the present day risks of evolutionary theory is substantially the same as an argument previously made by young Earth creationist Tas Walker at Creation Ministries International, in which Walker asserts that evolutionary theory inevitably promotes racist stereotypes and warns his readers, don't let them subconsciously turn you into a racist with their subtle evolutionary icons. It's substantially the same as a young earth creationist argument, is what they say in the next sentence.

0:45:44 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Right? So I don't – I mean, do we need to point out that that's not what she seems to be saying here?

0:45:54 Lindsey: She's not saying that, like – that, to believe in the theory of evolution is racist. She's making a claim about the historical context in which this idea arose and, like, its applications over time, all of which is totally true. I mean, this is something that especially since I teach evolutionary psychology, right, I have, like – over time as I've taught this class, I've introduced more and more and more of that historical context because I think it's super important and it does kind of it preempts I think certain um misinterpretations among students about like the implications of some of these hypotheses and I think it is super, super important to do that, right? So he, he sort of summarizes that as, "Put a greater emphasis on the humanities," right? She makes a much more specific claim than that.

0:46:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:46:40 Lindsey: Um, So I, I'm going to provide the link for that because I read her essay and I, I thought it was fantastic. And I emailed her and told her so. Yeah, we're going to be friends now, I think.

0:46:41 Thomas: Oh cool. Oh, nice. Nice. Well, uh, invite her on the show. She'd like to come on. I would love that. We'll see.

0:46:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Maybe I'll ask her about that.

0:46:54 Thomas: Yeah. That's, that's often the case with these things, you know, especially with James Lindsay and all these people, you look into the citations and you're like, that's not what the fucking thing is saying. You know, it's not what the thing is saying. But like, even if, okay, this comparison is you've got her making a very, uh justified, great point about the racist history of evolution. And then you have a creationist who is saying, uh, or the way their argument is going is, oh shit, I'm a creationists. Evolution must be false. Oh, I know.

0:47:04 Lindsey: No, no, it's not. Yeah she.

0:47:28 Lindsey: Yes.

0:47:28 Thomas: I'll latch on to like, it's a racist thing that blah, blah, that's just different. That's not the same thing.

0:47:32 Lindsey: It's totally different. Right. She's not saying that we should reject this. The entire point of her essay is that like evolution is awesome. I, you know, I study, I studied humans from an evolutionary perspective And I think it's great. And the story that has been told about this, you know, historically is very exclusionary and it doesn't have to be. And so we should be doing a better job in the classroom of communicating that. It's a great essay.

0:47:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:55 Thomas: Sounds like a great essay. I guess to wrap up, um, another general trend that I see in this, uh, that I saw in this paper and that really frustrates me to no end is the, it's the technique. I can't remember if there's a formal name for it or not, where people do this, where they say, look at these leftists, they reject science, and science is a, an enormous category, a very enormous category. And often what these people will do is say, use the evidence that some people on the left are critical of certain scientific ideas, you know, like, uh, race science, for example, and other things that are like not established facts scientifically, they will use that and then make the reader think through certain rhetorical techniques that they are rejecting all of science, as in they're rejecting the boiling point of water at the sea level and how gravity works and the coefficient of friction and all this stuff. They substitute that in to be like, look at these postmodernists. They don't think anything's real. It's like you've just done an enormous substitution there. You've done a little switcheroo.

0:48:50 Lindsey: Yes. Mm hmm.

0:48:59 Thomas: Like when someone says a particular idea that's in a like a social scientific context that's greatly debated, that's, you know, nowhere near established. And they're are like, I don't really think that's true. That's not the same as them saying the fucking coefficient of friction is not what it is on a surface. You know, it's just not the same.

0:49:17 Lindsey: It's not. Yeah. And his or whoever's the author's section on postmodern arguments was a great, great sort of instantiation of That. It was so bad, um, yeah, yep, uh,

0:49:24 Thomas: Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, geez. Well, this sucked and I hated it. I just wanted to do the Michael Scott like this was a hate crime. Well I hated it.

0:49:37 Lindsey: Yeah, oh yeah, in his conclusion, his last thought, here's a quote from his conclusion. I think it's nice just to tie a bow on all this, uh, quote, "Future examination may show whether the similarities described in this paper also exist among advocates of other worldviews that engage in morally based rejection of scientific conclusions, such as anti-vaccination and anti-GMO activists." I think that's a nice quote.

0:49:39 Thomas: Ah, okay. Yeah, sure.

0:50:01 Lindsey: So people who reject race science are basically the same as anti-vaxxers. I think that's nice. Nobody clipped that.

0:50:03 Thomas: Yeah. Oh geez. Well, I hated this, but we're going to, we've got more of this eventually. I don't think we're gonna go through every article, although I think we can certainly keep an eye on the journal because it's a good indication of where the IDW is and what, what happens when you try to do science in a safe space, or do not even science, like make arguments in a save space that you probably didn't even need a safe space to make them. Honestly, like, like you said, that one paper was a response to something that was in, it was a respond to a response, to a paper that was, to an academic journal.

Like, did you, it seems like the problem there is no one's interested in your subtweeting of the subtweet of your paper. Like that might be the reason it didn't get published somewhere. People are like, why are we doing this? I don't know. So we have what I was trying to say, though, is we have possibly a special guest on to debunk a different article in this journal that has a more philosophical bent. So we'll we'll see. I know I never want to promise anything until the recordings in the can, as they say, but look forward to that. Should be a lot of fun. Thanks so much for listening, Lindsay. Thanks so much for doing this breakdown.

0:50:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:51:04 Lindsey: I'm so excited. Yay.

0:51:20 Lindsey: My pleasure.

0:51:21 Thomas: And we are going to work on our journal of super controversial, even more double controversial ideas.

0:51:27 Lindsey: Yeah I think That's a good idea. We need to follow up on this.

0:51:30 Thomas: All right, everybody. Thanks so much. Hey, if you like this, if he found a valuable, please share it. Share it with somebody. Share Twitter on social media in response to people doing race science stuff or something. I don't know. But either way, thanks for that. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

0:51:54 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.