Ideologues citing ideologues as proof of their ideology
By 
Timothy Burke actually read the paper Pamela Paul says a top scientific journal had some kind of moral obligation to publish, and hoo boy:
The paper that follows, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, breezily declares that long-running debates that go back deep into the Western tradition are just Q.E.D., beyond argument, no need to even pause and reflect. Most of the paper, and Paul’s defense of it, is a frantic running of victory laps after a match where the victor disqualified other competitors before the game even started.
Science, we’re told, “has generally granted humanity the gifts of life, health, wealth, knowledge, and freedom”. (All by itself, science did that!) Science gets the credit for “increasing literacy and communication”, and “science has promoted empathy and rational problem-solving, contributing to a global decline in violence of all forms.” Read that last sentence and you know exactly what the footnote is going to be: yup, it’s Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. That’s a footnote meant to prove the accuracy of the claim that there has been a global decline in violence and that science is responsible, which isn’t even quite an accurate gloss on Pinker’s book, which gives as much credit to the modern state as it does science. But more importantly, that’s like me saying “The best cheesesteak in Philadelphia is John’s Roast Pork” and then giving as my evidentiary citation the URL for John’s Roast Pork. If you want to cite Pinker as evidence, you had better acknowledge that there are extremely substantial evidentiary challenges to Pinker’s claims in Better Angels, some of which have been collected in the anthology The Darker Angels of Our Nature. Historians have disagreed with how Pinker works with data: these are not “postmodernist” challenges or “identity politics” fueled rejections, they’re straightforward “No, the evidence you’re citing doesn’t prove that” and “No, the data you cite is flawed or just plain doesn’t exist”. That would go for many of the citations in the first sections of this essay: they’re colossal circle-jerks, ideologues citing ideologues as proof of their ideology.
None of the first three pages of “In Defense of Merit” are good science, nor good philosophy. It’s a declarative polemic of a kind that you can’t peer review as such. To actually demonstrate what the authors want to declare would take books. It has taken books. Books which end up treating every single one of these points about science and its accomplishments seriously and thus as arguable and complex.
What I particularly dislike about the triumphalist declarations of the first three pages is the prophylactic use of dismissive qualifiers, something that Paul also uses in the NYT piece. “Of course, science alone is not sufficient: science is but a tool that can be used for good and bad.” If science alone is not sufficient, then don’t write stuff like “science = life, health, wealth, knowledge and freedom”. Or “science = literacy”. (There’s a huge history of literacy, chock-full of evidence and facts, and the notion that it proves that science is the primary cause of literacy is not a common claim at all in that history.) Those qualifiers are intended as a pre-emptive defense against the complaints I’m making now: “oh, we agree that science is sometimes used badly”, “oh, we agree that there’s been cases of bias in science”. Really? Then why not take those points seriously enough that require actual discussion? With examples? When you hand-wave away the exception to the rule without further investigation, you’re announcing pre-emptively that no such exception will ever disprove your hypothesis about what science is and what science has done—which is a very unscientific thing to do, in terms of how the authors describe the scientific method. Normally the robust existence of exceptions is called “falsification” when it comes to a hypothesis—or at least as something that requires investigation in its own right.
Hacks citing their own hackwork as dispositive evidence –the same technique John Roberts used to manufacture “precedent” for the equal sovereign dignitude “doctrine”!
Dave Karpf has similar thoughts, while also pointing out what the actual threats to free speech are:
I am so tired of this grift.
It’s 2023. States are banning books. In Florida, they are dismantling a reputable Liberal Arts College, denying tenure cases of professors who aren’t sufficiently aligned with Ron Desantis and Chris Rufo. State legislatures are entertaining bills to end the tenure system altogether so they can fire ideological opponents. There is an active assault under way against institutions of higher education. It is not coming from the left.
And yet, here we are once again. The same hustlers are pushing the same tired schtick, insisting that their “heterodox” ideas are being CENSORED by mean colleagues and loud undergrads who have raised questions about the status quo ante. And, naturally, the New York Times is ON IT!
[…]
Paul tells the story of an eclectic set of academics, united in their *grave concern* that the pursuit of objective knowledge is under assault. The academics, hailing from a wide assortment of disciplines, submitted a 26-page diatribe to PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), one of the most prestigious journals in academia. PNAS publishes 6-12 page empirical papers, not 26-page essays. PNAS sent it out for peer review anyway. The peer reviewers were unkind, noting several of the glaring faults in the essay. PNAS rejected the paper. They then sent “informal inquiries” to several other journal editors, who informed them it didn’t seem like a good fit. The paper was eventually published in the “Journal of Controversial Ideas” a new open-access journal on whose editorial board two of the authors sit.
I’ve read the article. It’s bad. But, more importantly, this sequence of events is not the least bit newsworthy! PNAS has a 14% acceptance rate. Honestly, I’m astonished and a little livid that the editors sent it out for peer review instead of desk-rejecting it.
“Shitty paper gets rejected by a top journal and is published in a lesser one” can be considered “news” only if you’re a rube who was born to be run.