As for Gee: I agree with those who've already pointed out the similarities to his crashing-and-burning of this Egyptology journal versus Daniel Peterson's crashing-and-burning at the Maxwell Institute. Both of them had issues that were badly overdue; both of them were using the journals to exact revenge on critics. Both of them were sent packing as a consequence.
The timeline is interesting.
Gee "departs" as editor of the JESSA 2010
Peterson "departs" as editor of the FARMS review 2012
Has Gee academically published anything related to Egyptology since 2010 that was peer reviewed?
Wow--I'm surprised that they are allowing commentary like that on the r/Mormon section of Reddit. That would *never* be permitted on FAIR Mormon, "Sic et Non," Interpreter, or the MD&D board. And yet, all of those claim to be "mainstream" LDS. As for Gee: I agree with those who've already pointed out the similarities to his crashing-and-burning of this Egyptology journal versus Daniel Peterson's crashing-and-burning at the Maxwell Institute. Both of them had issues that were badly overdue; both of them were using the journals to exact revenge on critics. Both of them were sent packing as a consequence.
But something really seems to be up with Gee lately. I can't imagine that his antics have gone completely unnoticed by the power structures in Salt Lake City. All that said, he's commented elsewhere on the fallibility of peer review. (If Tom comes along, he might know of yet another link.) It's funny how the Mopologists insist up and down that their own crap is "peer reviewed," and yet when it comes to other (legitimate) scholarship, suddenly peer review is fraught with all kinds of problems.
Some years ago, at the time when California Kid, Mortal Man and others were setting out their well-evidenced and mathematically sophisticated disproof of the 'missing papyrus' theory on this board, I met a young Egyptologist. It occurred to me that I might ask him whether he had ever run into John Gee at any international conferences, etc.
He told me that he had in fact met Gee recently, and I asked him what impression he had formed of him. His response was, if I recall correctly "He seems to be an angry kind of person". That seems both consistent with the behaviour evidenced in this thread, and also might serve to explain some of it.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
Peer review is like Churchill’s evaluation of democracy: the worst possible system except for all the others.
Peer review isn’t even supposed to be better than it is in some ways. It’s supposed to be a minimal standard, not a gold standard. It’s not supposed to ensure that everything that gets published is perfect truth or brilliant discovery. It’s only supposed to screen out stuff that nobody in the journal’s readership community is likely to want to read for any serious reason.
And peer review is only even trying to be as good as its community of peers is. A totally crackpot journal can have crackpot papers reviewed by crackpot peers; that isn’t good review but it’s peer review. Lem coined the apt term “playground peer review” for peer review by an incompetent peer group. One can absolutely question the competence of the reviewing community but it’s a mistake to argue that what a journal like Interpreter does is not peer review, because the whole point of peer review is just to accept the collective internal standards of the particular research community rather than bow to any outside authority.
Peer review is designed to let good research communities make progress quickly. It’s a tool that takes a certain collective expertise in its use. It’s not a magic circle that will keep the demons of pseudo-research at bay all by itself as long as we follow the ritual.
It’s also interesting that peer review as a practice is not very old. It only started up in natural science in the 1920’s and took a few decades to become the norm. Albert Einstein, for example, never published in a peer-reviewed journal. So science can certainly work without peer review.
Gee’s specific complaints about peer review in Egyptology are kind of foreign to me, though, because they all seem to be about problems of peer review in a small community where everyone knows everyone. Gee might well have a point about those small-community problems. Back when physics was small, before the 1920’s, it didn’t use peer review. It’s not clear to me that peer review is really the best system in small research communities.
In physics peer-reviewed journal articles have in some ways been less important for a long time than pre-print versions of submitted articles which circulate among researchers in a narrow focus before peer review or formal publication. Formerly they circulated by hard-copy mailings: when you submitted a paper to a journal you also mailed out copies of the manuscript to every physics department in the world that you hoped might read it. Since the 1990’s you post them to ArXiv.org, which takes whatever you post. People cite these e-prints by URL, even in traditionally published papers, though the convention is to “upgrade” the citation to wherever the paper was formally published, once it’s been published somewhere.
It’s still completely de rigeur to submit all your work to peer-reviewed journals but the reason to do so is less than one might think, because often the real cutting edge is on ArXiv. Once upon a time I read through all the new abstracts on ArXiv each morning, in all the topics I followed. Now there are far too many and journals have somewhat returned in importance, as filters. Other kinds of content-filtering platforms are emerging, however, outside peer-reviewed journals. And when I read an interesting abstract in an online journal (as of course all now are), it’s often too much trouble to fire up the VPN to get through the paywall with my university account, and I just download the full article text from ArXiv. It’s completely legal; the copyright forms that you sign all stipulate that e-print archives are exempt from constraints.
And even today physics journals don’t normally try to review double-blind. Reviewers see the authors’ names, just not the other way round. The reason I’ve always heard given for this is pretty much what Gee says: the reviewers can tell who was involved from the content, at least often enough that it would be unfair if not all authors were known the same way. In effect peer review always tends to focus down into small groups of peers, by sending papers for review by experts in the same topic. When an overall small research community like that of Egyptology is spread over a wide range of topics, however, the peer review model that works (at least better than all the other systems) in physics might not work well at all. It’s a point.
Gee’s remarks about newly graduated researchers being upset by criticism from mortals do sound bizarre from a retiring journal editor in print. It may well be that umbrage from young authors was a cross for the editor but I think an editor should refrain from printing bitter comments like that. That paragraph makes Gee look bad.
You'll be happy to learn that there's a quicker, easier, shorter word for "the Peterson-Hamblin-Midgley version of lds apologetics." The word is "Mopologetics."
You're welcome for all the future saved keystrokes.
LOL! Indeed.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
It looks to me like Gee tried to take the Peterson-Hamblin-Midgley version of lds apologetics outside his bubble and into the actual academic world, . . .
Dear Lem,
You'll be happy to learn that there's a quicker, easier, shorter word for "the Peterson-Hamblin-Midgley version of lds apologetics." The word is "Mopologetics."
You're welcome for all the future saved keystrokes.
It looks to me like Gee tried to take the Peterson-Hamblin-Midgley version of lds apologetics outside his bubble and into the actual academic world, where it failed spectacularly. As it should. The immaturity of the lds mopologist approach to the academic world is ridiculous.
It looks to me like Gee tried to take the Peterson-Hamblin-Midgley version of lds apologetics outside his bubble and into the actual academic world, where it failed spectacularly. As it should. The immaturity of the lds mopologist approach to the academic world is ridiculous.
That is exactly what I thought--the only place I've seen this type of tirade is in mopologetics. How could Gee be so blind as to think publishing this in a real journal would be a good idea?
Tracing it back further, where did the mopologists get the idea that being douche bags was an estimable writing style? Were they trying to imitate William F. Buckley or something?
Wow--I'm surprised that they are allowing commentary like that on the r/Mormon section of Reddit....
Well, it's not your Uncle's r/Mormon anymore! The mods have an interesting take on allowing "both" sides.
One anecdote: I recall a recent discussion on the use of the C-word here, so I was a little disconcerted to see it referred to in a thread there. Upon closer inspection, a reader was explaining that "high demanding religion" seemed to be an acceptable euphemism for the disallowed "C-word," which I finally realized meant CULT.
Also, lds believers were recently granted use of a new flair, "Spiritual," to protect their faith-based comments and conclusions, which without the flair would receive a lot of logical pushback. They could just call it "safe space for lds believers to bear their testimony," but they don't.
All in all, it's an interesting place, nice to visit, but it feels great coming back home to here!
