Sorry, NYT, but, yes, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” was junk science

From the New York Times:

It sounds like a headline ripped from a supermarket tabloid: In 1994, three Israeli researchers claimed to have found a secret code embedded in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.

But this wasn’t junk science.

Ahhhh . . . but it was!

The Times continues:

The paper in which they revealed their findings appeared in an esteemed, peer-reviewed journal. And the academic reputations of the three authors — Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witztum — were unimpeachable, especially that of Dr. Rips.

The reporter’s mistake was to think that, just cos something’s authored by professors at a legitimate journal and published in a reputable journal, that it can’t be junk science.

An understandable mistake to make in 1994, but hard to support nowadays. Lucky golf ball, anyone?

P.S. I remember talking with Dave Krantz a couple years after that Bible code paper came out. Some of his colleagues were really bothered by it and went to the trouble of figuring out and explaining what was going on. Dave was kind of irritated that they were wasting any time on it at all, and I just thought the whole thing was a big joke.

In retrospect I think Dave and I should’ve shown more respect to the debunkers. The Bible code paper was an early example of junk science leveraging the authority of the academic community to get publicity.

The junk-science-to-journal-to-NPR/Ted pipeline must have seemed like a great deal for everyone at the time: more publicity for researchers, more credibility for unconventional scientific claims, more fun feature stories for the news media. And for awhile it seemed to be going just fine, turning Malcolm Gladwell into a New Yorker celebrity, powering the Freakonomics franchise, and providing raw material for Jeffrey Epstein’s Edge Foundation. The Pizzagate and Shreddergate researchers became wildly successful, and even fringe players such as the beauty-and-sex-ratio guy were able to land book contracts. Formerly obscure law professors got to mingle with Henry Kissinger! It was boom time in This Week in Psychological Science.

Eventually the weight of the junk science overwhelmed the system, and ultimately I think that the whole thing was a bit of a deal with a devil: In the short term, academic social science got lots of publicity, and a few well-placed and credulous or unscrupulous professors became media stars. In the medium term, academic journals justly lost much of their authority. In the longer term, who knows.