11–20 of 165 posts
Every few years someone will do a Sokal-hoax-esque thing in scientific fields, but usually they're just getting a paper into very-low-quality predatory journals that have only a nominal peer review process.
I'm wondering if that's what happened here. Do humanities fields even have the same set of incentives leading to a proliferation of those sorts of journals?
For these reasons, Sokal Hoaxes (and their like) are damaging wastes of time and the perpetrators should not be praised.
Representative quote: > "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."
7⁄20 or 7⁄17, depending on how you want to count is concerning.
Or weren't they aren't concerned about that type of ethics?
Representative quote: > "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."
Shouldn't the default presupposition of any research be a lack of novelty?
You could try working without any faith in your colleagues of course, but you are probably better of switching workplace if that sounds like reasonable behaviour to you.
I've been more disturbed by the response to this than the papers themselves. Saying,well of course we were duped, you really expected the peer review system to not to utterly fail in the presence of a few bad actors? does not inspire my faith in the system.
That's what stuck out to me as well. This quote: "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it." Isn't the ability to separate out the quality work from the garbage the poin…
This is section really gets me. How in the world is science supposed to rely on “not-fraud”? Sure if you fake your data you might dupe a diligent reviewer, but this is why results are supposed to be reproduced.
Anything that relies on “not-fraud” seems inherently unscientific and straight up naive.
Representative quote: > "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."
I've been more disturbed by the response to this than the papers themselves. Saying,well of course we were duped, you really expected the peer review system to not to utterly fail in the presence of a few bad actors? does not inspire my faith in the system.
That's what stuck out to me as well. This quote: "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it." Isn't the ability to separate out the quality work from the garbage the poin…
It's not just the humanities, computer science is also susceptible to hoaxes built from jargon. SCIgen works like an academic "Mad Libs" of sorts, arbitrarily slotting in computer-science buzzwords like "distributed hash tables" and "Byzantine fault tolerance." http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scien...