
Three academics are launching a new journal for arguments to be made anonymously - camtarn
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/02/journal-of-controversial-ideas-jeff-mcmahan-peter-singer-francesca-minerva-identity-politics
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geezerjay
Free speech always posed the risk of persecution. This isn't news. The risk is
only mitigated if a culture is developed to accept different opinions and
frown upon those who feel the need to punish those who express different and
opposing viewpoints, but that's a very unstable equilibrium.

In this day and age where all public statements are stored ad eternum, it only
takes a change in heart in how free speech is handled for an inoquous
statement made in the past to serve as an excuse to punish you in the future.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> In this day and age where all public statements are stored ad eternum, it
> only takes a change in heart in how free speech is handled for an inoquous
> statement made in the past to serve as an excuse to punish you in the
> future.

We don't have to refer to the future, this is already happening now if you
have conservative views.

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
"Conservative" views that are punished somehow always end up being racist,
sexist, homophobic or some combination of those.

~~~
yourbandsucks
According to whom, though?

There are a lot of people out there absolutely chomping at the bit to label
things racist or sexist.

Outright unambiguous racism is one thing, disagreement with the activists is
another.

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scarejunba
Most anonymous forums have low information quality because I don’t trust the
raw data. While Reason requires no Speaker, Data does.

Efficient knowledge acquisition requires me to push some data gathering off
elsewhere, and then the provenance of the data and the trustworthiness of the
person become a big deal.

Hopefully, this bypasses those by being a signing authority that ensures the
data are high quality.

~~~
speedplane
Yes, learning everything in detail as an expert is impossible, we need
experts, and because by definition we take their opinion at face value, we
need some way to judge their credibility.

Of course we have those, i.e., "signing authorit[ies]" that validate that the
opinion/["data"] of the expert is of high quality: they are generally called
universities.

(I find it amusing when programming jargon is applied to the real world
outside of programming, but presented as new concept. Especially like where,
where we have had institutions that accomplish the same thing as "signing
authorities" for several thousand years).

~~~
scarejunba
Ah no, you’ve misunderstood. Yours is a different argument from mine, though
it is similar. You’re talking about the cost of being informed enough to
understand stuff. I’m talking about trusting the raw data.

The conclusions someone draws from data can be fully verified by another party
(what you appear to have called opinions or “data” with quotes). The raw data
itself cannot be, even by the most informed party. I can attempt replication
but I’ll never be able to verify your data even if you opened your dataset to
me.

For instance, I may say that on being given drug A, patients’ self-reported
pain reduced within two days, unless they’d been taking drug B for a related
condition. Now, you can read my paper and see if my hypothesis is reasonable,
if my experiment actually tests my hypothesis, if my sampling method is
reasonable, if my results actually reject the hypothesis, etc. etc. The thing
you can never check is whether I made up the numbers. Even if you were the
foremost authority in the field, you can’t tell that from the paper or my
data.

~~~
speedplane
> Ah no, you’ve misunderstood. Yours is a different argument from mine, though
> it is similar. You’re talking about the cost of being informed enough to
> understand stuff. I’m talking about trusting the raw data.

You're right, I was focusing on false analysis, not false raw data. But
perhaps I overlooked it because it's rare to see original raw data cited in
anonymous forum. Do you see this? Also, the very fact that it was cited
anonymously, and also in an internet forum rather than a serious publication
should raise enough alarm bells to distrust it, no?

I agree with you that having false data spread through discourse is
problematic. It's just not terribly common. What I see more often, is accurate
raw data being contorted and misrepresented to promote some viewpoint.

Mark Twain had a nice quote... facts are stubborn things, but statistics are
more pliable.

------
motohagiography
If the coordinated persecution of individuals is a democratic exercise of
freedom of speech and association, then a commensurate protection to ensure
these freedoms for all, whether they are the persecutors or persecuted, is a
reasonable action. The new journal in the OP would meet this criteria.

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superpermutat0r
Eliminating skin in the game won't result in quality. Just like trying to
impress peers won't.

~~~
naasking
Fearless contrarianism adds its own value. It can keep a field honest rather
than encourage an echo chamber.

~~~
UncleMeat
Or it can provide safe cover for people who want to keep defeated ideas alive
and provide legitimacy for people who want to present those ideas as silenced
rather than defeated.

~~~
naasking
If you can provide some evidence that published ideas that have been soundly
defeated get resurrected unjustly and that this has harmed progress, then you
might have a point. This hasn't happened that I know of.

For instance, the best example I can think of are local, realistic
interpretations of quantum mechanics, which most physicists consider to be
soundly defeated by this point. However, some of them are completely warranted
(like 't Hooft's cellular automata interpretation of QM), and the debate has
actually driven some great work in quantum foundations.

------
detaro
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469230)

------
rmbeard
This needn't involve publishing politically sensitive material. "Student" W.C.
Gossett published his paper on the T-distribution in statistics anonymously,
because his employer Guinness frowned upon publication. This attitude is still
prevalent today among many employers. Rather than putting measures in place to
vet and approve publication of material that does not involve a conflict of
interest, they simply discourage it. This is net loss to society. Conversely,
many academic journals have policies prohibiting anonymous publishing. Gossett
would be unable to publish in such journals today. Hence the need for this new
journal.

------
daveFNbuck
Even assuming this is a good idea in theory, it's probably not possible. If
you're going to publish a full paper defending an idea, it's going to have
enough of your writing style in it to identify you.

Academics early in their careers have to publish a lot in order to advance.
With more of that publishing moving to freely available online sources, it
will be pretty easy to automate attribution. If this journal is freely
available online, there will probably even be a browser extension to add
attribution.

The only way to publish anonymously is to not also publish under your real
name. Even then we'll be able to at least apply a consistent pseudonym to your
writing and you'd always be one named publication away from full
identification.

~~~
Eridrus
I disagree. Text analysis only really works when someone attempting to publish
anonymously is unaware that someone will do that analysis.

At the point where there are simple tools, you can use them to put together a
report on what is most identifying, and then fix it, before publication.

Or one can even publish false flags. If anyone remembers the "lodestar"
speculation from earlier this year, that's a single word that someone could
have put in to get the writing completely misattributed in the public sphere.

~~~
daveFNbuck
What you're describing will only work against current publicly available
tools. You can't fool the tools that you don't know about as easily. Would you
bet your career against the next few years or even decades of AI research just
to publish an anonymous paper?

~~~
Eridrus
The more "sophisticated" a textual analysis tool is, the less interpretable it
is, and the more difficult it will be to get people to believe the output.

And yes, I think the people involved in this will take that risk.

------
coldtea
> _Another historian, and anthropologist, Gemma Angel, who is an expert on the
> European tattoo, tweeted that the programme was “basically an opportunity
> for white male rightwing politically motivated researchers to whine on about
> how unpopular their abhorrent ideas are.” It was, she said, “disgusting”._

Way to prove their point about the importance of such a journal...

(Also, a university professor that's an "expert on the European tattoo" sounds
like an Onion parody).

~~~
FranzFerdiNaN
There is no reason at all that conservative views about how they no longer can
say the n-word or how "those people" don't deserve rights should be defended.

~~~
coldtea
Yeah, because any free speech issue can be summed up in a caricature of racism
and wanting to say the n-word, and "conservative views" (where "conservative"
= bad, because of course all over the world should share mainstream USA's
issues and ethical considerations).

And that in a place when just a few decades ago people were losing their jobs
and badmouthed because of being gay, or using marijuana, or before that
because they were communist sympathizers and so on...

It seems whoever is in the mainstream in the US feels like they sniffle any
other voice because theirs is the voice of history, whether they are right or
left.

~~~
coldtea
"feels like they should stifle"

------
dorfsmay
Interesting discussion about why this journal is needed:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=folcWax6d7k](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=folcWax6d7k)

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randaouser
Ring Signature constructs are ideal for this.

