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This is from the post on SEN on "Paradigm Shift"

Why I put this here is my last post in this thread Dr. Peterson has not posted yet even though it was submitted yesterday. Before the issue about Dr. Inouye came up. Maybe he was already hot and bothered because of this.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2019/10/79752.html#comment-4675035529

Dr. VelhoBurrinho • 3 days ago
What Dr. Lindsay describes still isn't rigorous peer review. Which means submitting it to academic journals within the field of study. Then the editors of the journals can then have the work reviewed by others in the field. In no way would I consider handing a paper to the fellow down the hall to have him look it over peer review. Even if he was the preeminent expert in the field. Lindsay's example while amusing at the end is pretty much a straw man.

The Interrupter at the end is an academic literary club.

If Stubbs wants respect for his theories and conclusions he needs to submit the entirety of his work for peer review, self publishing does not count.

One interesting thought at least for the LDS church is that if Stubb's is correct on his assumptions on the language connections then at least in the intermountain area the LDS church would have had a major hand in the removal, genocide and ethnic cleansing of those "nephites" from the are

DanielPeterson Mod to Dr. VelhoBurrinho • 3 days ago
VB: "The Interrupter [sic] at the end is an academic literary club."

Sorry, VB, but that's a stupid and ignorant comment, as WELL as the insult you intended it to be.

Interpreter's peer review process intentionally replicates standard academic peer review processes.

You don't know what you're talking about.

VB: "If Stubbs wants respect for his theories and conclusions he needs to submit the entirety of his work for peer review, self publishing does not count."

Brian Stubbs's theories need to be solidly based on fact and rigorous analysis. Peer review is a secondary matter.

VB: "the LDS church . . . had a major hand in the removal, genocide and ethnic cleansing of those "nephites" from the area."

You should be ashamed at cheapening and abusing terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide."

Dr. VelhoBurrinho to DanielPeterson • 2 days ago
I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of facts. Go look it up. The church is the one who should be ashamed.

DanielPeterson Mod to Dr. VelhoBurrinho • 2 days ago
The Church never engaged in "genocide."

Get a dictionary. Look the word up.

So after this I did follow his advice and looked up the definition of genocide. And posted this which now almost a full day later he has not posted.

Dr. VelhoBurrinho DanielPeterson 21 hours ago Pending

Ok Dan I looked it up https://www.merriam-webster...

genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group Brigham Young ordered an extermination campaign against the Timpanogos, with orders to kill all the Timpanogos men, but save the women and children who behaved.[4]:394[14][15] General Wells drafted the extermination order as Special Order No. 2 and sent them to Captain George D. Grant.[12]:224 In his letter, he told Grant "Take no hostile Indians as prisoners" and "let none escape but do the work up clean".[16] -

https://disq.us/url?url=https%3A%2F%2Fe ... id=2318198

I think the actions of the proceeding citation really do fit the definition of genocide. The Native American group, the Timpanogos were a separate racial and cultural group. And having official orders does look pretty deliberate and systematic. You can read more about it in Jared Farmers excellent book from 2008 called On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Or you could follow the primary sources as referenced in the Wikipedia article.

Yes in this instance the church did most clearly engage in genocide. A very similar argument could be made for the tragedy of the Bear River massacre.

Maybe you could point me to the FAIR article that tries to excuse this.

As I suggested in another thread here once I suspect Interpreter's problem is a basic one of scale. They are trying to amplify a tiny topic by publishing many more papers per year than the topic can support.

They try to publish 50 articles each year. Given the nature of their topic and the amateur status of many of their authors, I think an acceptance rate above 50% would be in vanity press territory, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt at this point, and assume they get 100 submissions per year. With two reviews per manuscript and with each reviewer reviewing two papers per year, that requires a pool of 100 expert reviewers.

I don't believe that there exist 100 academic experts on Interpreter subjects on whom the Interpreter editors can count for two timely reviews every year. I suspect the number of such reviewers is probably closer to ten. A pool of ten competent reviewers could handle ten manuscripts per year and let five of them through.

If you want to publish ten times as many articles as you can properly peer review, there aren't any good options. You'll need to expand your pool of referees to include quite a few of doubtful competence, get that still-incestuously-small group of referees to review many papers each per year, and lower your standards for acceptance all round. Fortunately peer review is supposed to be anonymous, so you won't have to reveal who your reviewers are or how many of your reviews are done by the same few people.

And anyway the term "peer review" sounds prestigious but doesn't actually imply any high standards. It's "peer" as in "peer pressure"—the other kids in your playground. It just means that the standards for research are set by the community of researchers. So if Interpreter articles are reviewed by other Interpreter authors then it may be the blind reviewing the blind but it is peer review.

Physics Guy wrote:As I suggested in another thread here once I suspect Interpreter's problem is a basic one of scale. They are trying to amplify a tiny topic by publishing many more papers per year than the topic can support.

They try to publish 50 articles each year. Given the nature of their topic and the amateur status of many of their authors, I think an acceptance rate above 50% would be in vanity press territory, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt at this point, and assume they get 100 submissions per year. With two reviews per manuscript and with each reviewer reviewing two papers per year, that requires a pool of 100 expert reviewers.

I don't believe that there exist 100 academic experts on Interpreter subjects on whom the Interpreter editors can count for two timely reviews every year. I suspect the number of such reviewers is probably closer to ten. A pool of ten competent reviewers could handle ten manuscripts per year and let five of them through.

If you want to publish ten times as many articles as you can properly peer review, there aren't any good options. You'll need to expand your pool of referees to include quite a few of doubtful competence, get that still-incestuously-small group of referees to review many papers each per year, and lower your standards for acceptance all round. Fortunately peer review is supposed to be anonymous, so you won't have to reveal who your reviewers are or how many of your reviews are done by the same few people.

excellent point. I always felt like Peterson’s ego contributed to his being goaded into his promise of publishing every Friday, and not until well after his promise was public and unretractable did he think it through as you have above.

And anyway the term "peer review" sounds prestigious but doesn't actually imply any high standards. It's "peer" as in "peer pressure"—the other kids in your playground. It just means that the standards for research are set by the community of researchers. So if Interpreter articles are reviewed by other Interpreter authors then it may be the blind reviewing the blind but it is peer review.

You give new meaning to the term “blind review.” lately, Peterson has taken to describing the Interpreter peer review as “academic” or as “following academic standards,” but I don’t think that helps his case.

Your playground reference reminded me of a story. When my son played basketball, there was a mother who always harassed the refs after the games for calling her son on charges of traveling; no matter how many times the refs explained the rules, she always insisted that he played that same way “on the playground,” and no one ever objected there.

After a few years of this, her name became “playground mommy,” and the term has remained a stand-in in my house for any sports reference where someone wants to be exempt from following the rules of a sport as they are written and universally accepted.

In light of your explanation and my fond memories of playground mommy, I can’t think of a better term for the Interpreter peer reviewers than to note they are, at best, “playground peers”!!

The best practice here would be to define clearly what is meant by “academic peer review” and “replicates.” In my experience there are those publications, such as conference proceedings, in which peer review is not up to the stringent standard of a top journal. One might be generous and say that Interpreter meets a standard that approximates that one. But there really is no way that it can truly replicate the standard of double-blind peer review in a top journal in a thriving discipline. Why not be frank and open about that? There are limitations imposed by the niche nature of the subject and the apologetic thrust of the content. Having made that choice, one lives with it. Nothing to be ashamed of. But it would not be honest to say there is no difference between review at the Interpreter and the best practices in the Academy.

Maybe we should try to popularize "playground peers" as a term, to express exactly this problem. I think people might get the right idea from it even if they didn't know that particular basketball mom.

I think a lot of lay people confuse the general concept of peer review in itself with the particular cases of peer review in established academic disciplines. In healthy disciplines peer review does work well to maintain high standards, but just because you have peer review doesn't mean you have good peer review. I think a lot of people don't understand that, and this opens a window for all kinds of crackpots to get more credibility with the general public than they deserve, just because they can truthfully say that they do peer review. The term "playground peer" might really help to demystify the term "peer review" for lay people.

I also feel that conference proceedings generally aren't nearly as hard to get into as regular journals. And some journals are harder to get into than others, though in some cases this isn't exactly because their standards are higher. It can often be because their standards are different in that they demand not only soundness but some level of importance. In my opinion peer review isn't nearly as good at judging importance as it is at judging soundness, so the difference in quality between the top journals and the respectable journals is much less than it seems, but the top journals certainly are more selective.

I certainly wouldn't blame any devout Mormons for maintaining a journal of devout Mormon thought. In the case of Interpreter, though, the pose of being a rigorous academic journal seems to be part of the apologetic mission.

During the last part of medical school and the first half dozen years of my medical career I would review research articles for a medical journal that one of my mentors was the lead editor for. My job in reviewing different articles was to look at the methodology of the study, look for any errors and make a brief report back. I would usually spend about four to six hours for each paper. After that my mentor and his staff would privately review it as well, then they would send the article out to the top people in that particular field to have them review. This process would take months and months. Many times the paper that was finally published looked nothing like the first one that was submitted a couple years previous.

As others have said Playground Peer review seems to be a apt description of what happens among LDS apologetic circles.

This is an utterly devastating thread in terms of what it is doing to Mormon Interpreter's credibility. It is terrifically, hilariously ironic. Dr. Peterson has been trumpeting for years now about MI's productivity: we've been posting *an article per week*! And we've been doing it for hundreds of weeks in a row! As was pointed out in a separate thread, the Mopologists utterly fetishize conventional academic respectability: having a Ph.D. is fantastic; even better if it was granted at a prestigious R1! But here's the thing: point to a single other respectable academic journal that cranks out the articles at that breakneck pace. As Physics Guy, The Hon. Rev. Kishkumen, Dr. LOD, Lemmie, et al. have pointed out: serious peer review is a painstaking process, and it normally takes months or years--something that has often been a source of frustration for academics. Are you really going to believe the claim that these jokers running Mormon Interpreter have managed to outsmart all the rest of academia, such that they are producing serious, careful work in the manner that one would expect from a serious, peer-reviewed journal, and that they are able to do this *every week*? I mean, I think that many here remember the very first "issues" of Interpreter: they were basically just recycling old Mopologetic trash from Midgley, and that sort of thing. Often, the articles were not even copyedited--they were riddled with silly and obvious errors that Tom helpfully informed them about. That is pretty much all the evidence one needs to know about the fundamental "care" and "professionalism" that are behind Mormon Interpreter. The fact is that it is a junk publication, and little more than a vanity press/project. Their practices--as publicly and repeatedly described by Daniel Peterson--are proof-positive of how hasty, careless, and sloppy their methodologies are. To pump out articles at that rate is not only irresponsible, it underscores a fundamental lack of professionalism, and a valuing of volume over quality.

I can see the Powers-that-Be attempting to formulate a response to the criticism on this thread (which, as I've said, is devastating, I believe), esp. by pointing to contributions from Teryl Givens and other respectable, well-established LDS scholars: i.e., "If Interpreter is 'crap,' then why would Givens publish with us?" The simplest and most obvious answer is: Sometimes good, God-fearing Mormons like to do favors for other Mormons. Maybe you're not sure whether or not Mormon Interpreter is a serious venture--but, hey, you're established, and publishing something faith-based and straightforward couldn't possibly damage your reputation, and there are these other LDS academics from BYU who are running this, and you believe they're well-meaning.... So, why not? To put it another way: if The National Enquirer featured an editorial by William F. Buckley, would that change the fundamental nature of what that publication is all about? If Hustler published an article by Alfred Kinsey, would that really change its basic reputation?

So, like I said, the President's decision has ultimately doomed this venture from ever being taken seriously. Lemmie is right: this is a case of ego out of control. The claim that weekly publication is somehow valuable is convincing to pretty much nobody. And for that reason, I hope that Mormon Interpreter continues its years-long streak of publishing a new "peer-reviewed article" each week. The longer they continue to do this, they more they compromise on quality, and thus we'll have continue to have material to pick apart and laugh at loudly for years to come! What's not to love about that?

For info-does Peterson have The Inquirer housed in a physical office or is it a website or a post office box somewhere?

I am thinking about sending in an article specifically asking for Woody to piss on it!

k

And on another note, I (heck all of us) was raised to believe literally that what the prophets and apostles teach is always going to be more correct than what the learned men and women of the world taught. The prophet is always closer to the truth than the world since the Gift of the Holy Ghost works within him more than in the world. Therefore, while it is ok to look at the worldly knowledge, one must always have the prophet's teachings as THE standard with which to compare to what you are reading in school.

Interpreter was ALSO raised with this exact teaching as Dr. Peterson is not much older than I am, and I KNOW what I was taught and by extension, he and his staff were also. But they put the prophets aside, and go with the Ph.D's in the world, and imagine that that is what gives them special insight and greater probability than their own church's teachings. There is something weird in that, if any of them were actually testimony totin real believers. Wouldn't they have it the other way around and be constantly stressing what the leaders say? Every now and then they might bring up a special report on something a Creationist came up with, or a scientist in a learned journal, but the prophet's words on the creation scripture parts, or any other subject, would certainly be what is being repeated along with lubricating the footnotes with what apostles and 70's have said as a meshing together in support of what the prophet has revealed. We see none of this at Interpreter. All they really ever emphasize is the learned, scholarly ideas, with perhaps periodically a token gesture towards something a church leader said sometime.

What this appears to mean to me is, the church leaders are not testimony building materials worth using, but the learned scholars are. Boyd Packer frothed and foamed at the mouth against the learned saying even their truths aren't valuable. Isn't it ironic that in order to actually attempt to bolster the faith, they have ended up relying on the scholars for the majority of their arguments, and the prophets and apostles get passed by?! Interesting track record that can't be hidden. Just look at who they are always publishing and quoting. It sure isn't the "Prophetic Words from Heaven."