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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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See Scott's article on Kolmogorov complicity. Researching possible group difference in IQ is a third rail for the career in pretty much the same way as applying the scientific method to questions of religion was in 17th century Italy.

Elsevier is a relic of the print era, making tremendous profits on the back of the scientific community. They do not pay the academics who publish articles. They do not pay the academics who review articles. But they charge the institutions which wish to carry their journals (which are generally the same institutions who pay the people who work for free to make their journals work) an arm and a leg.

They basically profit from the fact that the economics of signaling and reputation are messy -- just like you will not simply build a university which is considered as prestigious as Harvard, you will also not simply build a journal as renown as Cell.

Given that the publishers are in it to extract a profit by providing a mostly redundant service, it comes at no surprise that they make publishing decisions where they try to minimize harm to their bottom line instead of pushing for academic freedom. If the eye of the twitter (now probably bluesky) mob turns to 'Intelligence' and decides it does not like their findings, the damage to Elsevier could be much larger than the money they are making from intelligence research.

So even if all the editors resign in protest and leave Intelligence the kind of empty husk that freenode has become after everyone migrated to libera chat following the takeover, it could still be in Elsevier's interests. Wokism had a surge under the first Trump administration and might make a comeback soon.

Or I could be wrong and it could all not be related to the topic of the journal at all.

See Scott's article on Kolmogorov complicity. Researching possible group difference in IQ is a third rail for the career in pretty much the same way as applying the scientific method to questions of religion was in 17th century Italy.

I had linked it as well, but axed that paragraph in an edit.

try to minimize harm to their bottom line instead of pushing for academic freedom

If they refund their prestige by, say, making all their prestigious domain editing expert volunteers leave they might also damage the bottom line. If the journal isn't financially viable they can try to turn it into a new kind of journal with a different mission. That would make sense.

However, since my post there has been a different assessment from two people that both have a history in intelligence research. Could be politics of other sorts that was sold as something else. Some clique angry one of them didn't get the job.