This arose in a discussion of an obnoxious publicity hound HIV denialist who’d been invited to spew his stupid theories many years ago in a seminar at a department where I used to work.
When this sort of thing comes up, a natural reaction is: Hey, let’s be open-minded! Let him speak! It’s the marketplace of ideas! No censorship!
To which I reply: Agreed, no censorship. There have been lots of good ideas that looked bad. Indeed, the same sort of people who invited the maverick biologist to speak were heavily biased against Bayesian methods, which is the sort of thing that happens when you don’t respect outsiders.
So, sure. But . . . this leads us to the question, What junk science gets a hearing?
Which cranks get to speak? Who is privileged? Regarding HIV and public health, there are lots and lots of offbeat ideas. This particular dude was invited to speak, not because his ideas were interesting or supported by data, but because he was an obnoxious asshole who was really good at getting publicity. Inviting him to speak in the statistics department was just one more benefit (admittedly, a very small benefit) of his ability to get publicity. The point is not just that the guy’s ideas were dangerous (although they were, a little bit, to the extent they diverted resources and attention away from real research and serious scientific argument) but also that the department, by inviting him to speak, was participating in the science-as-spectacle world which I hate so much.
OK, there’s always selection bias in what gets reported. When it comes to science, I’d guess there’s a heavy bias toward stories that people want to hear, also a bias toward doomsday scenarios, also a bias toward whatever is the current orthodoxy, and, perhaps most distressingly, a bias toward bold contrarian claims. If you read that last sentence, you’ll notice some contradictions: doomsday is the opposite of what most of us want to hear, and contrarianism is the opposite of orthodoxy. So these biases aren’t additive, exactly; it’s more like there’s a bias toward messages that are at the extreme of the space. Also a bias toward attention-seekers who are good at public relations and who have low scruple in being ready to misrepresent data or to lie or to make the sorts of sloppy self-serving false statements (for example, describing a three-day study as “long term,” and, no, it was a study of humans, not fruit lies) that we would call “lies” except that so many people do it that we just call it scientific poetic license or something like that.
So, there are a lot of biases in what science gets reported and publicized, who gets the Ted talk, the Gladwell interview, and the NPR feature, and even who gets invited to speak in the departmental seminar series.
And the biases that apply to which cranks get a hearing are similar to those that apply to which legitimate scientists get a hearing.
The difference is that, for the cranks, the biases are everything; they’re the entire reason that some things get heard and some don’t. In the case of the HIV denialist, being an obnoxious publicity hog, a willingness to say things that other scientists wouldn’t say (not because such things were “taboo” but just because they were not supported by the evidence) were “features,” not “bugs,” in that they gave him the attention of the smug contrarians who would invite him to speak so as to demonstrate their generous open-mindedness.
With real science, yes, there’s bias in who gets a hearing, but the quality of the science comes into play. Not always, but often.
So that’s the difference I see. The institutions of science communication, publication, and publicity are deeply flawed, and I reflect on those flaws all the time. But the data and the reasoning matter too. With junk science, you have all the selection bias but with nothing underneath.
So, again, when you see some junk science being promoted (as here), ask yourself, What was so special about this particular unsupported speculation that got it promoted by news and social media, government officials, or whatever? Why does this deserve special consideration, more than whatever happened to appear this past week on Vixra?
P.S. My colleague who invited that HIV denialist to speak in the seminar also provided technical assistance to the O. J. Simpson defense team. He was quite the contrarian.
When my physics dept in undergrad invited a climate change denying alumnus to speak, I interpreted it as the dept chair doing their best at a Socratic symposium.
That is, a seminar is an arena for ideas, and with enough smart people in the room, the truth will prevail.
Which is a lovely sentiment! But often falls short of reality.
Student:
I do think there can be appropriate times to invite speakers whose work we think is wrong, for the purpose of stimulating discussion. We should just recognize that, by doing so, we’re making a choice. We’re choosing which sort of contrarian to give a platform to.
As I wrote about Steven Levitt, Sean Carroll, etc.: if they want to do softball interviews with scientists who promote questionable theories based on shaky evidence, that’s their choice. I’d just like them to think about all the millions of other research projects to which they’re not giving this unskeptical promotion.
There’s a whole Vixra world out there, and the only difference between Brian Wansink, Richard Tol, Ellen Langer, etc., and authors who publish on Vixra are that Wansink, Tol, Langer, etc. (a) have better connections and (b) have mastered the art of writing papers that look like empirical science without actually engaging with their data. Better connections and an ability to bullshit aren’t nothing, but in my opinion they’re not enough to warrant uncritical promotion.
“I’d just like them to think about all the millions of other research projects to which they’re not giving this unskeptical promotion.”
Bingo.
I have little doubt that the selection processes favor outlandish or extreme claims: this blog has exposed many examples over the years and we’ve discussed the terrible incentives provided by academic institutions that support these processes. So, too, with elected officials – the more extreme their claims, the more airtime they get. The more they shout over each other, and the more obnoxious their behavior, the more exposure they get. Moderate views hardly get a chance – so there are few such views left among elected officials. In academia and in politics, there is a similar selection process that favors the established scientists or politicians. We hear the same voices over and over again, despite the fact that they rarely say anything new or worth hearing.
Given what I see as parallel behaviors in science and politics, it makes me wonder about the similarities rather than any differences. Indeed, I don’t think they are different phenomena. When time is scarce and we are overloaded with inputs, I guess we require volume to hear anything. And that volume needs to be entertaining (widely interpreted: I view getting outraged and riled up as a form of entertainment). So, what are the countervailing forces to bring us back from the brink? I don’t see them (and certainly don’t hear them).
Quote from above: “Given what I see as parallel behaviors in science and politics, it makes me wonder about the similarities rather than any differences. ”
Interesting comment to me in light of something I have been wondering more and more. I noted something about the possibility of certain particular features of academia and psychological science being related to the possible presence and proserousness of psychopathy in academia and psychological science in the comment section of a recent blog post dated october 5th about Wansink as a proto-chatbot. I think that certain features like the role of language and reasoning, short-term thinking, difficulty in deciding who or what is right or wrong or good or bad, relative lack of accountability, relative lack of clear responsibilities, etc. may all be features of academia and psychological science which may facilitate people with psychopathic personality characteristics.
I have thought about the possible similarities between people with these psychopathic personality characteristics in academia and psychological science, and politicians, and CEOs of companies or orginazations, as I reasoned that there might be a possibility that the environments these people function (or not really function) in might have similar features and processes that facilitate these people and these psychopathic behaviors.
And, if you add to that the possibility of possible connections and cooperations between people with these personality characteristics from these diferent fields or sectors you might shine some light on possible features and processes in academia that might deserve some more attention, and thought, and writing. In light of this, I thought your comment was interesting.
> HIV denialist, being an obnoxious publicity hog
Is the denialist Peter Duesberg? If so, my rule is that it is always reasonable to invite someone who is a tenured professor at a major research university. Such people — as I know from reading this blog! — are often wrong. But surely the optimal number of such “contrarians” to invite to Columbia each year is not zero . . .
Also based on Andrew’s description I’m guessing this was back in the late 80’s and early 1990’s a time when HIV causes AIDS wasn’t on the same factual foundation that it is today. Duesberg held onto his ideas well beyond their expiration date, and if I understand it he was in fact a jerk about it, but in say 1989 or 1990 or 1991 there was some merit to wondering if we’d gotten things right.
Today we have evidence from for example the incredible success of retroviral suppression drugs in changing the AIDS death rate by like an order of magnitude in just a few years to know that in fact we got it right. That rapid kink in the death rate occurred between 1995 and 1996. In 1996 HAART therapy hit the market. Immediately after the anti-retroviral therapy hit, there was a dramatic suppression of death rate… so we know we got it right.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hiv-death-rates?tab=line&country=~USA
https://www.webmd.com/hiv-aids/hiv-treatment-history
I’d look into testing details, diagnostic criteria, any related practices (eg stopping deleterious prior intervention) that changed. Basically everything that went into generating those numbers. Not just say y happened soon after x, therefore x per se was responsible.
But I apparently have much higher standards than others for making medical claims.
This is just one of many reasons for believing HIV causes aids, including structural chemistry of the binding site, people acquiring AIDS syndrome after accidental needle sticks with HIV infected needles, people going off their medications and getting AIDS symptoms etc etc
A quick search gives:
https://exhibits.library.unt.edu/aids-quilt/aids-treatment/
If I wanted to make a medical claim, I would be sure to account for the use of black market and/or experimental drugs. How haart approval affected this, etc.
But once again, this is considered too high a standard for medical claims. People will actually be annoyed, even enraged, by suggesting such standards.
First weed out those acting in bad faith. Then weed out those acting in good faith, but advancing ideas that don’t need another debate (flat earthers).
Anyone left can be invited.
The most important cranks to avoid are the professional philosophers. Their writings should be limited to the young adult section of Barns and Noble along with all the other YA fiction.
A cool post would be on the comets-as-iceball deniers. Then the rosetta mission to orbit and land on a comet that generated all sorts of unexpected results (surface dark as coal, “ice screws” failed due to surface too hard, but then under the dark outer layer there appears to be “ice” with the consistency of froth that doesnt appear to sublimate under the sunlight, etc).
Typically rational thought goes out the window for medical topics, people treat it like a religion. But no one really cares about comets. It is similar though because dogmatic beliefs were adopted in lieu of good data, and then prove difficult to supplant.
This is good as far as it goes, but it seems to describe a flat, featureless world of free-floating psychological proclivities. That’s not where we are. The selection of speakers with dubious scientific claims is heavily influenced by whether and how they are promoted by organizations with some degree of publicity and clout. Often this is simply about money. If there’s a billionaire or twenty that, for whatever reason, want to promote a particular view, and they find someone who can pretend to be a scientific authority in favor of it, that person will get a lot of invitations in the name of “fairness”. Climate denial is an obvious example, but HIV denial was also funded, and even today is tied to people on the far right. (RFK jr’s history on this didn’t keep him out of the Trump administration.)
For the record, giving a platform to unpopular views is a good thing, but the selection should be based on research and argumentation that’s sound or insightful enough to be interesting even if wrong.
Yeah I can’t directly rebut Dr. Gelman’s ideas here, but I also thought of plotting our prior distributions of “faith of the claimer” on one axis with “credibility of the host” on another axis.
It gets tricky assailing pop sci freakonomics grifters with a dept seminar on HIV denialism. Similar phenomena but distinct in my mind.
I appreciate the post and discussion nonetheless.
Climate denial: the late Fred Singer (among others) often tried to get invites to speak at universities, sometimes via groups who could just rent rooms, but then promote events as sponsored by the university.
Fred wanted to give a lecture at a well-known British university, department refused, but was willing to give Fred a small discussion (with a few experts), in part because he’d enlisted a Fellow of the Royal Society to attend. He tried to give his usual lecture, often couldn’t answer basic questions, got shredded. Later, the FRS apologized for supporting Fred.
Another common tactic has been to try to get a seminar at department unlikely to have much relevant expertise, i.e., like doing a climate-doubt tlke for a math department (not a climate science department). Luckily, the head of department asked Dean, Dean asked me.
On the other hand, sometimes having someone in, if the context allows expert debunking, can be educational.
Andy Dessler (expert) at Texas A&M once had Fred talk to an armospheric sciences class. It did not go well for Fred, sadly, video seems gone.
When it comes to talks in the department, I can say that, at least in my department, they are also about prestige directed towards the university leadership. The leadership wants to cut funding, which is understandable given the dire financial situation of my university. While I know of no cranks who have been invited yet, a events with elevated profile* have been held.
*not quite ‘high profile’ yet
Quote from above: “The leadership wants to cut funding, which is understandable given the dire financial situation of my university. ”
I can perhaps give a talk about how to do science without (much) funding. At least if coming up with ideas and thinking about things and writing papers are viewed as doing science in this light. I think I’ve been doing that for years now…
For instance, if I remember correctly I think something that was an important part of some retracted paper mentioned on this blog a few times I have written about as well. It was about replicating each others’ studies in small groups or something like that. I thought about that general idea, and wrote about it in several places over several years without having received official funding. And maybe others did as well. So, if that idea is viewed as being similar to the format used in the retracted paper it might provide a nice example of how merely writing down ideas might be useful for something, and perhaps doesn’t need (much) funding. If people might think that replication format idea might be an interesting idea to try out it didn’t perhaps need the now retracted paper and associated resources to give it attention or provide reasons to try it out. I don’t know whether the now retracted paper was made possible by funding, and how much funding exactly, but perhaps it didn’t need it…
And, I wouldn’t even need to come to the department but could merely refer to some links also noted on this blog here to further show what I mean, and I could try and explain myself further here, or share more ideas here, or share more examples of what can be written without having received (much) funding. That would possibly save your university money because they wouldn’t have to fly me in, or pay my lunch, or such things. It also has the additional benefit of me not having to wonder whether I would be the first “crank” to have been invited at your university to give a talk in the department. Although, one definition of crank is “a grouchy person” if I understood things correctly, and I can imagine some might say that I am a “crank” in that regard…
There really is not much new under the sun when it comes to inviting/uninviting speakers. I offer you this “noTutu” tidbit from 2007:
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https://www.mprnews.org/story/2007/10/04/notutu
(AP) – Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu won’t be speaking at the University of St. Thomas in April because school officials are worried his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would offend the Jewish community, a school official said.
And an associate professor who pushed for Tutu’s visit has been removed as director the university’s justice and peace studies program.
———————————————————————————-
To see the embarrassing aftermath and the finger pointing:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/minnesota-university-regrets-its-failure-to-invite-archbishop-tutu-to-campus-123258/
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A curious reader might wonder where was I 18 years ago when this contretemps took place just a few blocks from my home. A more serious reader might wonder if history is doomed to endlessly repeat itself:
Karl Marx: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.’
My assumption is that hardly anyone who reads or contributes to this blog is an administrator–chair of a department, a dean, a VP, etc.; if this is true, it then follows that there is a tilt here in this blog towards what might be called “free expression of ideas.” Administrators have a different metric. Most important to them is the avoidance of a problem. When in doubt, they lean towards safety: non inflammatory words or topics. However, in this era, offensiveness is in the eyes of the beholder. For example, while the Administration may claim it wants real data involving real entities, nothing beats the XYZ Company when it come to avoiding law suits. It also follows that an invited speaker who is uniformly dull is preferable to the invited speaker who makes an offhand comment offensive to someone in the audience whose relative works as an xxx or is enthnically yyy.
Paranoia comes easy to me and I am willing to entertain that I may be exaggerating.
Let me take a contrarian (!) view. All kinds of junk science deserves more publicity, not less. The criterion for an administrator giving time to anyone is to avoid embarrassing himself. Is the speaker willing to take hostile questions? Provide talks and/or relevant research work in advance? Can the speaker defend his views?
If not, whomever invited the speaker should be subject to embarrassment. They invited the idiot who couldn’t answer the simplest questions about his work. That’s the incentive structure to quell this stuff. Of course, it depends on people who actually know what they’re talking about to put in some work, but what higher calling could a university academician have than correcting error that requires some subject-matter expertise to correct?
Also, I’ve heard dozens of bullshit academic (or academic-ish) presentations in my life. The audience ought to come in to *every* talk with their bullshit meter set to stun. I have been to presentations that changed my mind about things, and some so outlandish and amateurishly defended that nobody was in any danger of being misled, but my modal response to most of these is: “Clever, but I’m not buying it.”
As you say above: “The quality of the science comes into play.” Let it be debated.
Jonathan,
That’s funny you say this, because another thing that would often happen in seminars in that department, back in the day, is that I would ask tough questions. Not hostile questions, just tough questions because I wanted to understand what was going on, and I naively assumed that speakers knew what they were talking about. After awhile I stopped asking tough questions, though, because I was getting the side-eye from the other faculty members. It seems that I was violating some rule of decorum.
#6 of the 10 reasons I left academia: side-eye, and what it meant.
In my nonacademic subsequent career, tough questions were my specialty. But you’re absolutely right that tough questions should never seem hostile, for exactly the reason you state: an honest desire just to figure out what’s happening in the paper. I cannot count the number of PhD job paper presentations where the candidate came to me afterwards and said (I think sincerely): “No one ever asked me questions like this before. That was really helpful in helping me explain what I’m doing.” They had a lot of skill in making sure their paper looked right, but very little in actually making clear what they had done.
Progress on your Vixra question. People who can’t write Vixra papers themselves but can use AI can submit here
https://ai.vixra.org/
or here
https://rxiverse.org/
Vixra says that
Notice: viXra.org only accepts scholarly articles written without AI assistance. Please go to ai.viXra.org to submit new scholarly article written with AI assistance or rxiVerse.org to submit new research article written with or without AI assistance.
It seems rxiverse is a spin-off to deal with the volume of AI submissions:
rxiVerse is an e-print archive of research articles including AI assisted articles launched in July, 2025 in order to accommodate rapidly increasing numbers of submissions to online archives (including viXra.org and ai.viXra.org) by researchers of a wide spectrum of educational and professional backgrounds. It is a new projection at Scientific God Inc. (“SGI”) with the goal of serving the ever widening research communities. rxiVerse has no association with arXiv.org or Cornell University.
For what it’s worth, the Vixra AI policy is genuinely stricter than arXiv’s. arXiv permits AI submissions so long as AI usage is declared (source: private correspondence).