All sorts of quacks still get tenure. There’s always a university willing to accept most heterodox views.

I see regularly comments along those lines on the Internet. I’d like some examples of “unpublishable scientific theories” that are not obviously bunk, as opposed to just controversial. Otherwise it is mostly a convenient bogeyman for bunk mongers.

Also, replicability seems a strange concern for this field. We’re never going to have an Earth Mk2 to test hypotheses.

Here's an example:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

Fascinating case. Quite a lot of emotions as well. I am not going to derail the discussion, though, as this leads to a deep rabbit hole.

To stay on topic, this is not an example of career-ending article, because he’s already retired, and nevertheless still affiliated with both Georgia Tech and California Polytechnic State University. He also himself says that the un-acceptance of his article is unprecedented, so this is hardly representative of anything.

Yes this was an unprecedented case because it was rejected after being peer reviewed and accepted. If they are going that far to censor inconvenient truth imagine how often good papers are rejected in review or not even written in the first place because the would be author knows what would happen.

Why? He quite clearly states that " All modern humans are clearly, morphologically H. sapiens." Do you suspect that further research along this line will disprove this?

I think it's just a bad article title that doesn't explicitly clarify that we're not talking about existing, modern homo sapiens.

Piddling about the taxonomy of extinct species isn't problematic, but I could see a mob misinterpret this as him saying that not all living humans belong to the same species, and go on a witch hunt over the misunderstanding.

However, if some evidence started emerging that modern humans were not all the same species (whatever that actually means in practice) then I think the above comment applies. No one with a reputation to protect would touch that bit of truth with a ten foot pole.

Because the implication of his writings is that it would be consistent with taxonomic treatment of other animals to classify certain existing groups of humans as different subspecies or species. Which strays too closely to so called racism.

He's a professor emeritus, I think he'll be alright.

The website also has similar articles, for example "How Human Are We?":

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/evolution-human-identity/

I often wonder how many decades of progress political correctness (different from ethics) has cost us when it comes to science (when it's sound, provable, and replicable).

Probably not as many decades of progress as racism and sexism have cost us, eh?

Racism and sexism were political correctness.

Sometimes I feel bad for the people whose legacy was tainted by scientific racism, especially if they lived to see its end and changed their opinions accordingly. Lovecraft is an example of this.

I wasn't aware Lovecraft stopped being a xenophobe late in life. Would you be willing to provide articles or something?

Oh he never stopped being a xenophobe, but he drew a line between his personal dislike and the idea that other races were inherently inferior. This is a good read: https://motifri.com/lovecraftcontext/

I like to think that if he hadn't died so young his personal tastes might have matured.

I see what you're getting at, but this is a bit of a motte-and-bailey argument. While it is literally true that widespread acceptance of racism and sexism was (and is) motivated by a desire to avoid being wrong in the eyes of prevailing politics, that's not what the specific term "political correctness" popularized in the early '90s referred to.

The NYT opinion article that popularized the term said:

> Affirmative action is politically correct. So too are women's studies, gay and lesbian studies, and African-American studies, all of which are strongly represented in the scholarly panels at such professional meetings as those of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association. [...] Biodegradable garbage bags get the p.c. seal of approval. Exxon does not.

And Bush Sr. gave a speech shortly thereafter decrying it:

> The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones.

They and all the other media figures and conservative politicians and so forth in the early '90s would have all looked at you confused if you claimed that racism and sexism, themselves, were forms of political correctness.

If your argument is that public pressure to conform to racist and sexist cultural consensuses was bad for scientific research, it does not actually help the cause to defend opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints.

> If your argument is that public pressure to conform to racist and sexist cultural consensuses was bad for scientific research

My argument is that public pressure to conform to the political norms for its time is always bad for scientific research, regardless what the political norms are. The political norms are what is called "politically correct", things that you should believe because otherwise society will become hostile against you.

Political correct pressure on science is similar to banning all smoking health research that isn't funded by tobacco companies. Sure tobacco funded research is still research, but it will be extremely biased. The same about politically pressured research. The pressure to confirm racist ideas lead to a lot of bad science in the past. The pressure to confirm modern political ideas lead to a lot of bad science today. Those two works in exactly the same way. However since I live today and not in the past I care about the problems science face today rather than the problems it had a long time ago that are no longer relevant.

I think what I'm saying is that what is called "politically incorrect" is a small slice of the things that will cause society to turn hostile. Moreover, in fact, many things that are "politically incorrect" simply won't result in hostility that effectively suppresses work at all (after all, the two quotes I gave earlier were from the most influential newspaper in the world and the president of what had just become the world's only remaining superpower).

That is, I agree with you that public pressure to conform to political norms is bad for scientific research, but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.

Taking your tobacco-funding example - you are, of course, correct, that tobacco-funded research is extremely biased. Suppose someone says that this research cannot be taken at face value, and Philip Morris accuses that person of anti-tobacco bias, of succumbing to anti-cigarette political correctness, of conforming to political pressures about how terrible Big Tobacco is. Who do you side with? There are two accusations of bias here; how you do determine which one is correct?

The heuristic "Political correctness is bad" is clearly unhelpful in this scenario; it cannot guide you to the correct decision. If you want a more meaningful principle, you have to look deeper at things. Even your phrasing "conform to the political norms for its time" is a more meaningful phrasing - but then an obvious consequence is that opposition to political correctness was the political norm of the early '90s when the president and the Gray Lady were telling people how bad political correctness was.

> but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.

Right, this is a really hard topic. I didn't say I had a solution, just saying it is a problem. There will always be a lot of political influence in research topic related to controversial things and people living under that influence will have a hard time identifying it. The racists 70 years ago probably didn't think they were doing anything bad etc. But today we recognize it as bad.

> but I am arguing that a specific focus on avoiding "political correctness" means that you in fact succumb to a lot of other (present-day) political norms, which is the actual thing that is bad for scientific research.

Yeah, you have counter movements and resistances. But if the context is non-stem non-economic researchers at universities then it is pretty much only in one direction. There is no allowance for the other side to do much research in those areas, meaning research in those areas is a one sided politically correct story.

If we let tobacco companies publish research, and other people publish research, then people can look at the two and make their own decisions. But if you basically only let one side research then you will get bad research.

You can take the words and use their individual meaning to come up with any definition you like to make any argument you like. However you don't win arguments by arbitrarily definition words or phrases to be what you would like them to be. You definition factually is not the definition of political correctness. As such historical racism and sexism were not political correctness.

> Political Correctness- the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.

From wikipedia, the same source you used:

> In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[2]

The definition you read there is just what is politically correct today, it isn't what the term really means. Racism was politically correct back then, it isn't politically correct today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to...

> However you don't win arguments by arbitrarily definition words or phrases to be what you would like them to be

> the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.

Aren't you taking an arbitrary definition (un-sourced from google/Oxford Language) to win your argument?

Here is Merriam-Webster's

> conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated

Seems like both are acceptable modern-day usages... like other terms a difference between capital vs lowercase might help here like... "republican" vs "Republican", "democrat" vs "Democrat"

  "opponents of "political correctness" who advocate for the freedom to express now-unpopular racist and sexist viewpoints."

You had me until this. What I don't like about PC isn't when actual racist comments get shouted down or whatever, which is what your comment implied. It's when non-racist statements are misconstrued as being racist in order to silence political opposition. For example when opposition to affirmative action is enough for some activists to try to get someone fired.

Whining about political correctness is political correctness.

This would be clever if political correctness and racism/sexism were necessarily opposed to each other. Alas...

I strongly suspect that much of the messiness in empirical biological studies would be deconfounded if we were generally more willing to classify humans into narrower ethnic groups. For example, different groups of people are likely optimized for different diets, in which case insufficiently breaking down the ethnic makeup of your study cohort would lead to weak or contradictory evidence when applied to populations at large, as we tend to see. The same likely applies to various supplements, medications, and probably even psychological studies including behavioral and medical interventions for abnormal states.

I can understand the hesitancy to do so but I think most people, including scientists, are not aware of the likely cost. It is possibly to classify humans into races/subspecies without resorting to racial discrimination or animus - the same way we currently celebrate so called diversity.

I do believe it would likely have implications for the interventions which certain pockets of our society are attempting to install to correct for racially correlated inequities.

If it's repeatable, why does it deserve to be censored? Science is empirical, if it can be measured, measure it. If you can re-create it, do so. The very nature of it being "replicable" means it is worth publishing and discussion.

Modern social media has ruined many careers unnecessarily. The mob mentality sometimes wins and destroys people that it shouldn't. Social media can be as much a disease as a benign influence.

Because a lot of what we think we know might actually be false. For example the empirical idea that there are two biological sexes. That is false, despite seemingly being well established:

> Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic

> Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

> “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...