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An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

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Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#111

Post by darawk »

tptacek wrote: post #100
darawk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hoaxers writeup is, I think, pretty misleading. Their work tended to get rejected from high-impact journals. What's your evidence for that? A number of their papers got accepted into decently high impact journals, including Hypatia. > They submitted multiple stories to some journals (notably, to Hypatia, which they brag about getting accepted in) and leave a clear impression that their most ridiculous work was…

I think you've misread me. My own comment leads off by acknowledging they got a paper accepted into Hypatia --- my gripe is that it's not the lurid farce they suggest they got accepted (a paper demanding that white male students sit on the floor in chains in class) but rather a much more boring paper about the legitimacy of hoaxes like theirs. When I said "They submit approximately the same paper to multiple journals…

> My own comment leads off by acknowledging they got a paper accepted into Hypatia --- my gripe is that it's not the lurid farce they suggest they got accepted (a paper demanding that white male students sit on the floor in chains in class) but rather a much more boring paper about the legitimacy of hoaxes like theirs.

IMO the paper they did get accepted is still quite disturbing.

> When I said "They submit approximately the same paper to multiple journals and are rejected by all but the very most marginal", I was referring to a specific paper (in fact, the Mein Kampf paper), not to all the papers. My point was: they tried that paper in several places, and the (academically) reputable venues rejected them.

Ok, but what about the others?

> Yes, I think --- I'm actually pretty confident --- that I could get a false paper accepted in a CS venue. Economists have already remarked on Twitter that you don't have to get "nonsense" papers accepted yourself, because the literature is already full of what turns out to be nonsense (do keep in mind that in large part what these hoaxers submitted was not nonsense, but rather fabricated research including field work).

False, sure. False papers get accepted all the time. That's part of the scientific process. These papers were not merely false, they were absurd. I seriously doubt you could get a truly absurd CS paper published anywhere remotely reputable.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#112

Post by darawk »

tomlock wrote: post #91
darawk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The replication crisis is an entirely different thing. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

It's entirely possible to get a nonsense paper into an economics journal, even when not intentionally trying to expose the discipline as "nonsense". I'm not sure what you're not understanding here.

Replication crisis != nonsense papers, i'm not sure what you're not understanding here.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#113

Post by tomlock »

darawk wrote: post #109
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I would be extremely surprised if you could pass of work of such low quality in journals of comparable impact factor in [math, computer science, physics and economics]. What about medicine, genetics and neuroscience? These are the fields investigated by John Ioannidis, whom you've probably heard of [1]. He's the guy that published that paper titled "Why most published research findings are false" [2]. From the abs…

I am familiar with all of the situations you've cited, and they are nothing like this one. You're really misunderstanding Ionnandis' work if you think it is relevant to this. He's making arguments about bad statistics, which is super important and valuable, but this has almost nothing to do with that. Again, the Mochizuiki situation is quite different. You're really not understanding these things if you think they're…

These disciplines aren't built on the edifice that you imagine they are. What you're doing, in examining the edification of certain disciplines, is quite postmodern. I encourage you to extend that examination to all fields.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#114

Post by darawk »

tomlock wrote: post #113
darawk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with all of the situations you've cited, and they are nothing like this one. You're really misunderstanding Ionnandis' work if you think it is relevant to this. He's making arguments about bad statistics, which is super important and valuable, but this has almost nothing to do with that. Again, the Mochizuiki situation is quite different. You're really not understanding these things if you think they're…

These disciplines aren't built on the edifice that you imagine they are. What you're doing, in examining the edification of certain disciplines, is quite postmodern. I encourage you to extend that examination to all fields.

Which disciplines aren't built on the edifice I imagine they are? If you're suggesting that math and physics aren't built on what I imagine them to be, then demonstrate your point.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#115

Post by tomlock »

darawk wrote: post #114
tomlock wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These disciplines aren't built on the edifice that you imagine they are. What you're doing, in examining the edification of certain disciplines, is quite postmodern. I encourage you to extend that examination to all fields.

Which disciplines aren't built on the edifice I imagine they are? If you're suggesting that math and physics aren't built on what I imagine them to be, then demonstrate your point.

All of them. Every field is fallible, phrenology was once just science. Why would you think something like that couldn't happen again?

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#116

Post by Sniffnoy »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #107
Sniffnoy wrote: post #42

> 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…

>> 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; Yeah, look- it's not that simple. In academia, we have to allow discussion and debate to be carried out freely, but obviously it doesn't make s…

Huh? I'm not claiming that these topics should be off-limits; I'm saying that the actual existing departments presently studying them are rotten. In short I'm not sure we're disagreeing here.

Edit: If you like, you can replace my use of "fields and subfields" above with "departments and segments of such". That's probably fairer in other ways, too.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#117

Post by Sniffnoy »

tomlock wrote: post #84
Sniffnoy wrote: post #42

> 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…

> 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. What degrees or disciplines would you characterise as "grievance scholars", and what evidence do you have that suggests the influence those disciplines hav…

So, first off, "grievance studies" isn't my term. But as for evidence... well, I don't have statistics; it's more of a "look around you" thing. It's not clear to me why I would care about the number of degrees awarded in women's studies; that doesn't at all seem a reliable proxy for what I do care about, i.e., to what extent the academy is becoming less free and more ideological.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#118

Post by pervycreeper »

I've noticed a lot of hair-splitting in these comments over whether this was a failure of peer review, whether to call the papers, considered as specimens of scholarship in their appropriate fields, "fraudulent" rather than "bad", or whether the number of hours they actually logged at the dog park is a relevant concern. All of this is quite besides the point. The researchers passed a version of the Turing Test among the reviewers of their papers. All that we need from that point is an acknowledgement of the absurdity and falseness of the papers themselves. This may not be easily forthcoming, though. One of the reviewers of Social Text took the position, in the wake of Sokal's hoax, that his paper constituted good scholarship, despite the stated intentions of its author. Also confer with Poe's Law. However, when we admit this as a possible response, we are in the territory of radical relativism, with no way to adjudicate between the claims of these scholars and their critics, and for that matter, those of religious fanatics, mentally ill delusional people, confidence scammers, or indeed anybody at all. This is a position which seems, at least, to be somewhat at odds with the fundamental scholarly enterprise. At its heart, one has to cross the pons arsinorum of admitting that, yes, the papers are indeed absurd nonsense. At this point, it seems impossible to convince some people to take this step.

If the critics's objections could be distilled into something with a semblance of validity and germaneness, then it would be that the researchers's methods were too unfocused. But had they taken a narrower approach, the response could just have been to rationalize and ignore. Fight fire with fire (being generality, in this case).

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#119

Post by darawk »

tomlock wrote: post #115
darawk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which disciplines aren't built on the edifice I imagine they are? If you're suggesting that math and physics aren't built on what I imagine them to be, then demonstrate your point.

All of them. Every field is fallible, phrenology was once just science. Why would you think something like that couldn't happen again?

You seem to be arguing that all epistemologies are fallible and therefore they are all equivalent. This is a pretty silly line of argument. The fact that a thing is fallible does not mean that it is the equal of things that don't even bother with the truth.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#120

Post by tptacek »

darawk wrote: post #110
fenomas wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to think that the papers that got accepted were 'banal', but that doesn't change the fact that they were accepted. The banality of the papers is the central weakness of the whole thing. The whole point of Sokal- or SCIgen-style hoaxes is that the papers were gibberish - so when a journal publishes one, the author can legitimately say "Hey look, this journal published gibberish!". The authors here can't say…

> The banality of the papers is the central weakness of the whole thing. The whole point of Sokal- or SCIgen-style hoaxes is that the papers were gibberish - so when a journal publishes one, the author can legitimately say "Hey look, this journal published gibberish!". My point is that most of them were not banal. In that line, I was responding to an isolated point of tptaceks. If all the papers were banal, i'd agree…

Most of the papers were rejected! The ones that were accepted did tend to be banal!
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