Nature: Manuscripts that are ideologically impure and “harmful” will be rejected

[C C]

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/08/2...-rejected/

Steven Pinker: "Journalists & psychologists take note: Nature Human Behavior is no longer a peer-reviewed scientific journal but an enforcer of a political creed. I won't referee, publish, or cite (how do we know articles have been vetted for truth rather than political correctness)?"

Michael Shermer: "#4 means that the singular privileged perspectives of liberals in universities cannot exclude the diversity of voices of conservatives, libertarians, or classical liberals. Alrighty then. I look forward to seeing this implemented in academia!"

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): This new article in Nature Human Behavior is well-intentioned, aiming to purge bigotry from science, but goes way over the top in three ways.

First, it claims that science is complicit in structural racism at present.  That’s not true, though in the past some scientists and institutions were guilty of this.

Second, it assumes that papers submitted to the journal are going to be rife with racism, bigotry, misogyny, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias that will cause “harm”, and therefore authors must be warned in a long document about their biases and how to avoid expressing them. The piece thus gives a long set of rules that actually conform to woke practice.

Third, it explicitly states that even papers with publishable scientific results can be rejected if the facts presented are deemed liable to cause harm. And “harm” is often in the gut of the beholder. The article is thus a threat that unless articles conform to a specific ideological stance, they can be rejected even if the data themselves are worth publishing.

It is a patronizing piece full of Pecksniffery, but doesn’t differ in in substance from many similar articles appearing in scientific journals. The most dangerous thing is the implication that “harm” is grounds for rejection—and we know how many statements or results can be construed as “harmful”, including the claim that there are two sexes in humans, or any number of facts about human groups.  These days people are so eager to take offense that the guidelines have the potential to turn into pure censorship of any science that could offend anyone.

I of course have no quarrel with the title of the article. Who could? What bothers me is the implicit threat that one’s submitted manuscripts must be ideologically correct, purged of all potentially harmful stuff, or else be rejected... (MORE - details)

[Zinjanthropos]

I feel harmed by having these manuscripts rejected but I guess I don’t have the right to feel harmed.

[C C]

The Fall of ‘Nature’
https://quillette.com/2022/08/28/the-fall-of-nature/

Sir Henry Hallett Dale: And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive.

INTRO: Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution.

An editorial in Nature Human Behavior provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be skeptical of whatever follows. But in this case, the authors are taking issue with a view very few people actually hold. At minimum, most academics will readily accept that scientific curiosity should be constrained by ethical concerns about research participants.

Unfortunately, the authors then announce that they also wish to apply these “well-established ethics frameworks” to “humans who do not participate directly in the research.” They are especially concerned that “people can be harmed indirectly” by research that “inadvertently … stigmatizes individuals or human groups.” Such research “may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist, or homophobic” and “may provide justification for undermining the rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.” Because of these concerns, the Springer Nature community has worked up a new set of research guidelines intended to “address these potential harms,” explicitly applying ethics frameworks for research with human participations to “any academic publication.”

In plain language, this means that from now on, the journal will reject articles that might potentially harm (even “inadvertently”) those individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia.” Since it is already standard practice to reject false or poorly argued work, it is safe to assume that these new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported. Within a few sentences, we have moved from a banal statement of the obvious to draconian and censorious editorial discretion. Editors will now enjoy unprecedented power to reject articles on the basis of nebulous moral concerns and anticipated harms.

Imagine for a moment that this editorial were written, not by political progressives, but by conservative Catholics, who announced that any research promoting (even “inadvertently”) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified “harm” on vaguely defined groups or individuals. Many of those presently nodding along with Nature’s editors would have no difficulty identifying the subordination of science to a political agenda. One need not argue that opposing racism or promoting the nuclear family are dubious goals in order to also worry about elevating them over free inquiry and the dispassionate pursuit of understanding.

Suppose someone discovers that men are more likely than women to be represented at the tail end of the mathematical ability distribution and therefore more likely to be engineers or physics professors. Does such a finding constitute sexism, if only by implication? Does it stigmatize or help to negatively stereotype women? Are the authors of the editorial contending that journals should not publish an article that contains these data or makes such an argument? The very vagueness of these new guidelines allows—or rather requires—the political biases of editors and reviewers to intrude into the publishing process.

As the editorial proceeds, it becomes steadily more alarming and more explicitly political... (MORE - details)

[Yazata]

And people wonder why so many of us no longer trust the pronouncements of "Science" as we once did.

The problem is that when scientific conclusions become biased by extrascientific considerations like personal moral intuitions or by political ideology, those conclusions become far less persuasive to those who don't share the intuitions or the ideology.

I'm very much a global warming skeptic for precisely that reason. Does anyone believe that somebody who questions orthodoxy on this subject could be accepted into graduate school, could successfully graduate with a PhD, could get hired anywhere, ever earn tenure, or ever get published in the leading journals?

So where does that leave the whole idea of "scientific consensus", if that consensus is being manufactured and enforced by extra-scientific means, to serve extra-scientific ends?