Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences

= The Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS)

URL = https://www.soibs.com/

Description

"We are scholars and practitioners in the behavioral sciences committed to free inquiry and truth seeking. In healthy scientific fields, ideas are debunked rather than censored, and their proponents are debated rather than punished. Increasingly, orthodoxies, sociopolitical dogmas, and ideological norms have captured the behavioral sciences, skewing research, practice, and policy work. We are dedicated to maintaining open inquiry, civil debate, and rigorous standards in the behavioral sciences."

(https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/introducing-the-society-for-open)

Discussion

Why SOIBS Now?

Lee Jussim:

" Justice as the Foundation for Truth-seeking: I used to think that truth precedes justice, because how can you seek justice if you do not know what the truth is? But Alice Dreger, of Galileo’s Middle Finger fame, convinced me that justice precedes truth. Efforts to ferret out truth for anything controversial (and noncontroversial truths need no ferreting out) have to be built on a foundation of justice.

Not Social Justice (the dogmatic cult that has produced White Fragility, Parasitic Whiteness, Himpathy, Bropen Science, Inclusion by Exclusion, Diversity as the Progressive Stack, the bizarre notions that you are either a racist or anti-racist, that a White single mom with three kids and three jobs living in a trailer park is “privileged” and that there are infinity human sexes). When capitalized in this manner, I use “Social Justice” to refer to the dogmatic, authoritarian, quasi-religious cult that raised cancel culture to new heights after the murder of George Floyd.

Not Social Justice, but justice. Justice, to me, means protection of individual rights and liberties and due process for alleged transgressions. It means these things legally, with respect to protections from government overreach, but not only legally. Individual rights and due process should be valued, protected and nourished throughout our institutions and the wider culture.

Truth requires justice so defined, because when freedom of expression, academic freedom, open inquiry and debate are compromised, truth-seeking efforts are harmed or blocked entirely.

Science-by-Outrage-Mob: Although the reasons are still not well-understood, the wider society has undergone a dramatic rise in reported self-censorship. The rise of cancel culture – punishing people for wrongspeech – is, however, a strong contender. When people risk public shaming or, worse, losing their livelihoods for expressing their views, they will quickly learn to shut up.

This is bad. It is bad in general, but it is particularly bad for institutions tasked with discovering or reporting things that are actually true (such as scientific disciplines and the mass media). To be sure, the truth may well be obvious 99.99% of the time. You know where your home can be found; that you can eat a tomato but not a baseball; that your dog needs to be walked but your cat doesn’t; that Alaska is usually colder than Florida, and literally zillions of other things. No one is going to be denounced, ostracized or fired for proclaiming that the Sun sets in the west.

But when the truth is uncertain, things get different fast. What about the effectiveness and net risks/benefits of the covid vaccines for someone young and in good health? Affirmative action? Why cops shoot people? The health of polar bear populations in the face of global warming? And the pace and extent of global warming itself? There is a huge swath of uncertainty around all of these issues and many many more. I return to Alice Dreger, who once argued that the anthem of academic scientists should be “We are uncertain!”

Indeed. If we are uncertain, as we are, or at least should be, about nearly all controversial issues, then we are in no position to be closing off debate, research, and inquiry. If we do, then even strong evidence based on rigorous research may never see the light of day if it reaches the “wrong” socially “unacceptable” conclusions. When that happens, we get a Reign of Error."

(https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/introducing-the-society-for-open)

More information

Some instances of censorship in academia, by Lee Jussim:

(links via [1])

" “No Debate” is the clarion call of many transgender activists, including academics. I could do a whole essay on No Debate, but for now, I’ll just say I want to see an academic culture that responds with “Yes Debate.”

2014, Harvard Crimson editorial calls for abandoning academic freedom to advance “social justice.”

2017, Ryerson University, Canada, canceled a panel on … free speech. It was so controversial they claimed to fear violence.

2020, Princeton faculty, graduate students and alumni call for big brother style thought-policing to censor anything a committee deems racist coming out of Princeton.

2015-2020. A slew of duly published papers that passed peer review have been retracted, not because of fraud or misconduct, but because they offended the sensibilities of woke academic mobs. I described a slew of these incidents, and other attempts to punish scholars for wrongthink in this essay titled The Threat to Academic Freedom…from Academics.

2022. Charles Negy was fired from the University of Central Florida after Tweets that offended the mob. A set of kangaroo court-like proceedings trumped up other charges so that UCF could pretend they were not violating his academic freedom and (as a state school bound by the First Amendment, his rights to free speech). This is not just my opinion; he brought his case to arbitration and the arbitrator ruled in his favor, requiring his university to give him his job back with full back pay. I hope he sues for defamation and wins millions in punitive damages – that is the type of thing it will take to get universities to think twice before embracing McCarthyism-like tactics.

There are so many cases like this, it is impossible to keep up. But you don’t need to because The Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (formerly, in Education) maintains a Scholars Under Fire database and has so far tracked over 700 cases (the number grows by leaps and bounds every time I check the link).

2022. Paging George Orwell: University of Wisconsin suppressed a study of … Free Speech on Campus. As of this writing, it was unclear whether that suppression was temporary or permanent, but professors organized by the University Senate called for making the ban permanent. In one of the most twisted inversions I have ever seen, they referred to the survey on beliefs and attitudes towards free speech as a form of McCarthyism!

(https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/introducing-the-society-for-open)