41–50 of 165 posts
Given that is an experiment on human subjects, involving deception, the IRB review should be interesting. Or weren't they aren't concerned about that type of ethics?
Or weren't they concerned about that type of ethics?
Yeah... that's the point! The whole point here is that you have these "conspicuously ideological" fields or subfields, which are not doing real scholarship, not interested in truth, but which rather are pushing a specific position and attempting to label as evil and shout down anyone who disagrees; and yet they're able to get away with claiming that they're doing real work, that this is what real scholarship is, and it's seriously damaging, especially (as the hoaxers note) to anyone who does want to do real truth-seeking work in these areas.
Sure, to those of us who realize what's going on, more hardly needs to be said. But lots of people don't, and the "grievance scholars" are slowly convincing the rest of academia that real scholarship consists not of neutral methods and honest argument, but agreeing with the grievance scholars in all things, and finding ways to inject it whether it's relevant or not. The point of this hoax is to make obvious what already should be.
To put it another way -- "grievance studies" is, as Dr. Steel says, an easy epistemological target. But it's a hard social target. It's built up a layer of protection around itself consisting not of truth but of social pressure and demands to conform or be ostracized. No claim, true or false, should be so protected, and that shield needs to be shattered. It's only an "easy target" in the imaginary world where people are rational and such transparent bullshit doesn't work. But in reality, it does, which is why there's a need to puncture it.
They could, but the Bogdanov brothers did just that years earlier.
> Karl Steel, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, called the trio’s work "simply not rigorous research" and described three objections to it. It is too narrow in disciplinary scope, he said. It focuses on exposing weaknesses in gender and ethnic studies, conspicuously ideological fields, when that effort would be better spent looking at mor…
Rigor and importance are orthogonal concepts. Someone could do research of great rigor on a completely unimportant problem and people do bad research all the time on important ones.
This isn't simply a case of poor quality control. Sure, hoax articles have made it through some (largely pay-to-publish) journals in other fields from time to time. And yes those incidents should inspire reflection and correction, as well as a hit to the reputations of such journals. But this is much more. This is about a set of ideas that pass for expert scholarship despite having lost any tethering to to the real w…
If your criteria for publication is what is epistemologically true you are going to find it difficult to publish in any domain except possibly pure mathematics or physics.
This isn't simply a case of poor quality control. Sure, hoax articles have made it through some (largely pay-to-publish) journals in other fields from time to time. And yes those incidents should inspire reflection and correction, as well as a hit to the reputations of such journals. But this is much more. This is about a set of ideas that pass for expert scholarship despite having lost any tethering to to the real w…
This isn't simply a case of poor quality control. Sure, hoax articles have made it through some (largely pay-to-publish) journals in other fields from time to time. And yes those incidents should inspire reflection and correction, as well as a hit to the reputations of such journals. But this is much more. This is about a set of ideas that pass for expert scholarship despite having lost any tethering to to the real w…
"...peer-reviewed journals are the absolute gold standard of knowledge production. And these concepts leak into culture... the problem of corrupt scholarship has already leaked heavily into other fields like education, social work, media, psychology, and sociology, among others—and it openly aims to continue spreading. This makes the problem a grave concern that’s rapidly undermining the legitimacy and reputations of universities, skewing politics, drowning out needed conversations, and pushing the culture war to ever more toxic and existential polarization. Further, it is affecting activism on behalf of women and racial and sexual minorities..."
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...
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…
If we expect reviewers to reject papers they find weird or suspicious then a lot of excellent scholarship will be rejected because established researchers are stuck in their belief systems. It also leads to serious problems when an author has obtained some hard-to-get data set and this is now a downside when it comes to review.
If the results are garbage then that will come out later when people work with the ideas presented in the paper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative take: A system designed to detect bad research failed to detect blatant falsehoods, algorithmically generated noise, rabid propaganda and other seemingly easy things to detect. That PhDs worked on this doesn’t mean the system didn’t fail spectacularly.
> doesn’t mean the system didn’t fail spectacularly. You're mischaracterizing the system; it doesn't end with publication. After publication, the science goes out to a wider audience of scientists who can build on the paper or refute it if they find it's wrong. Sometimes this process can take a long time and many cycles of publicans, but that's just the nature of science. We have to stop pretending like the peer revi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud 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.
If you want to reproduce an archaeology paper, well, how? You can’t exactly go dig the same site back up.
If you go out as a cultural anthropologist to hang out with some indigenous tribe somewhere, and your experiences aren’t the same as the last guy, does that mean anything? How much is because you’re different people? How much is because the tribe has already gotten used to having a researcher around?
This is part of why shit like the Piltdown Man happens.