Apparently, the outrage of science denialists over their exposure in a recent psychological paper shows no signs of abating. It was denialists’ complaints and legal threats of libel/defamation suits that started the investigation of the paper and also in the comments to my post announcing my resignation as editor for Frontiers, the denialists complained that their public blog comments were used in a scientific paper. Blog responses by Henry Markram, editor-in-chief of Frontiers, confirmed my decision to resign: essentially, he sided with the denialists and opined that public comments were not fair sources for psychological study.
Let’s stop for a moment and ponder if there are some analogous offline scenarios to taking a public online comment and analyzing it.
Literature springs to mind: every literature department at every university takes published words and analyzes them. Apparently, Markram and the science denialists think this should all be abolished, or at least that it is a questionable practice which ought to be better regulated. Perhaps they think that literature departments should study literature without mentioning the authors? Once literature departments are up for grabs, why stop there? Why not prohibit political analysts from telling the public about their politicians? Obviously, you’d start with those analysts unfavorable of the ruling politicians. Why not fire all music critics from newspapers and magazines (those that still have such employment, that is)? Heck, isn’t “American Idol” or “America’s Next Topmodel” and all the other casting shows exactly analogous: taking a public performance and scrutinizing it publicly? It’s perhaps worth reminding everybody that online comments are public performances, like it or not.
In essence, what Lewandowski et al. have done in their ‘recursive fury’ paper is in more than a few ways akin to what the jury does in casting shows. They’ve been the jury when the science denialists went up on stage to sing and dance. If that had actually happened offline, maybe Lewandowski et al.’s jury comments might have gone like this:
“When you sing, it sounds like the quaking of a duck!”
“When you dance, you have the grace and elegance of an antelope – no, wait, what was the name of that animal with the trunk again?”
“You are seriously coyote ugly!”
After it occurred to them what fools they had made of themselves on stage, the denialists went to the TV station airing the show (Frontiers) to complain that broadcasting their embarrassing performance with the negative jury comments were defamatory. Obviously, in the real world, the TV channel people would have ROTFLTAO. In science publishing, Frontiers caved in and axed the broadcast.
Morale of the story: if you can’t take the consequences, don’t get up on stage.
Mmmm, interesting analogy. Can’t what you said above be boiled down to the far more simpler statement that you think anyone complaining about the use of their public words and identities, in any context, in any peer reviewed science paper, is by your definition announcing themselves a science denialist ? 😉
This post does not accurately reflect what a lot of people complaining about Recursive Fury have said. A lot of people take no issue with analyzing comments posted on blogs. What they take issue with is people who have clear conflicts of interest analyzing the comments of people they disagree with to conclude the people they disagree with exhibit negative traits.
Related to this, many of them take issue with the fact authors of Recursive Fury were actively engaging the people they sought to study. This issue is especially important as actively engaging people you’re studying makes them human subjects. When it comes to research ethics, human subjects have a number of rights. One of those rights is to not be identified without their consent. This is important as an identified human subjects can suffer harm.
That is a simple, ethical standard applied to all researchers. Henry Markram even cited it:
“It is well acknowledged and accepted that in order to protect a subject’s rights and avoid a potentially defamatory outcome, one must obtain the subject’s consent if they can be identified in a scientific paper.”
Put simply, the authors of Recursive Fury did not merely analyze comments. They actively provoked comments for their analysis. That difference is why it got retracted while papers analyzing things said in public usually are not.
It may be true some people make the silly argument addressed in this post, but most do not. The people who filed complaints with the journal did not. The journal did not. Henry Markram did not. As far as I can tell, nobody involved in the retraction of the paper made the argument this post addresses.
Funny, it’s your third recursively furious blog post in a row about the “Recursive Fury” affair. Now you’re shouting against Markram, guilty of “siding with the denialists” and drawing analogies with things that have almost nothing in common with peer reviewed scientific research, like literary criticisms and political analysis, and even judges of reality shows. Really, if you only could see yourself from the outside..
Well, I guess I do tend to lump all the delusionals together – many of my posts about creationists look pretty much like that, too, lol 🙂 I guess public silliness is just too tempting to make fun of. Guilty as charged.