It sounds like the title of an Onion article but it’s real.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive.
I think this is a brilliant idea; to create a space explicitly for the dissemination and discussion of ideas that people find uncomfortable. If we’re going to make progress in the world I honestly think that talking about ideas is one of the few ways that we can move forward. Given the diversity of human society and culture it’s inevitable that some of those ideas are going to be controversial, and so we end up not talking about them. But subjecting ideas to scrutiny is the only way that we can figure out if they’re good or bad ideas.
The co-founders are Jeff McMahan, Francesca Minerva, and Peter Singer (I’m a fan of Peter Singer), and the list of editorial board members is impressive.
I don’t see an easy way to subscribe yet (although maybe this will come when there’s some content to subscribe to) but I’ve made a note to check in regularly, as I think that this is going to be a very stimulating journal to follow. I can’t wait to see what comes from this project.
If you’re interested in this idea, have a listen to this episode of the Making Sense podcast, where Sam Harris interviewed the three co-founders.
On a side note, I was also interested to learn that the journal is using JAMS (Journal and Article Management System), which looks like a clean and simple option for running a journal. It’s always nice to see alternatives for publishing and I’d never heard of this platform so I looked it up. It’s billed as a cost-effective solution so I was surprised to see that there’s a setup fee of 250 CHF and an additional cost of 250 CHF for every paper published on the platform. OpenPhysio is free for authors and free for readers. Are we doing something wrong?