On Anonyminity

You'll probably have heard about the "outing" of formerly anonymous blogger Night Jack, a British policeman. Night Jack went to court in an attempt to prevent The Times newspaper from publishing his identity, but the judge ruled against him. His award-winning blog, http://nightjack.wordpress.com/, has been taken down; I don't know if this is going to be permanent.

Lawyer Jack of Kent has a typically lucid and detailed legal commentary on the case, but as a fellow anonymous blogger, I believe that this is an issue which goes beyond British law.

I write anonymously because it allows me to write things that I otherwise couldn't. I could write under my own name, as many excellent bloggers do. However, the content of Neuroskeptic would not be the same.

Broadly speaking, my "neutral" coverage of science news would remain (like this), and my criticism of journalists probably also would (like this). However, I don't feel that my more "critical" writing about science - like this - would be possible without anonymity.

I'm an academic at a junior stage of my career. Some of the targets of my (implicit and explicit) criticism are people and organizations who might well play a part in that career. Quite simply, I don't want to go on record criticizing them, for obvious reasons of self-interest.

Perhaps this just makes me a bit of a coward, but I prefer to think about it in a more philosophical light. Often when we say or write something, two things happen in parallel. We are doing something in the social world, and we are asserting a proposition.

If I were to say to someone "Your wife is having an affair", I would be doing something momentous, something that might well be very painful and damaging. This is why we don't say things like that lightly - even if they are true. We value tact. Yet at the same time, my statement is true (or false), just like any other statement of fact, and it remains true (or false) whether or not I say it.

As a society, we recognize that it's sometimes desirable to allow people to assert things without having to worry about the consequences of their words as a social act. This is why we have anonymous feedback forms, anonymous comment boxes, anonymous witnesses (in some cases). It's also why we don't regard an election as fair and open if it doesn't have a secret ballot.

And in science, we have anonymous peer review. In order for a paper to be published, it must first be subjected to the criticism of one or more experts on the topic in question, writing anonymously. The anonymonity is fundamental because it allows them to criticize the research as harshly as necessary without having to worry about the consequences. Few people want to go on record as criticizing someone else's work, especially as most scientific fields are sufficiently narrow that peer reviewers personally know the authors of most of the papers they have to critique. Yet someone has to do the dirty work of criticism.

So anonymous peer review is valued in science as a way of facilitating objectivity, something otherwise in short supply, because scientists are people with careers and reputations to uphold. At the risk of giving too much dignity to a mere blog, I see Neuroskeptic as a continuation of this review process once papers have been published. Scientific debate shouldn't be hampered by concerns about careers and reputations, although scientists being only human, it is - anonymous comment is one way of getting closer to the ideal of pure objectivity.

All of that said, anonyminity is not all roses. It's open to abuse. Someone could persue a vendetta against a rival by making apparantly objective, anonymous criticisms that were in fact motivated by nothing more than self-interest. This occasionally happens during the process of peer review - a reviewer might trash a manuscript just because they just don't like the results, or because they are planning to publish the same results and they want to do so first. And an anonymous blogger could exploit their status for similar reasons. I would like to think that I have never personally criticized anyone who is acting in good faith, which includes the vast majority of academics. I try to stick to criticising ideas, not people. But of course, I would say that.

So anonymous writing has to be seen for what it is - something that has the potential to be more objective than on-the-record statements, but with no guarantee that it in fact is. Caveat lector, as always.

[BPSDB]