Live data from Hacker News

An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

chronicle.com

131–140 of 165 posts

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#131
post #95

I see a lot of people complaining that it is done in bad faith, and doesn't prove much. But is there really much to prove? What's the baseline? I mean, we're talking about a field where this got published - and it was not a hoax: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/030913251562336... The people behind this hoax had an unenviable task of matching and beating a paper like that (since, apparently, by itself it…

I'd be curious to actually read that Glaciers, gender, and science paper to see if it's as worthless as it sounds.

I think there's some amount of feminist theory that boils down to -- all of the people thinking/doing stuff in A field were men operating under B culture; what if we thought about things from a different perspective & revisited some of our assumptions?

Like most fields, I bet glaciology has some underlying assumptions (is the goal of glaciology to manage glaciers? navigation?) & history (which glaciers have people historically studied? are they representative?)

And I know as an outsider, it's really hard to tell what's valuable about another field. If an outsider was critiquing computer science, I bet they'd easily be able to track down studies about tabs vs. spaces and laugh at the silly stuff that gets published in that field.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#132
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirical data in individual studies are supposed to have statistical controls that mitigate incorrect conclusions, that's why p values are even a thing. To claim that on the one hand individual papers can be wrong, but the additive nature of a field somehow removes the possibility of error in the field, is misguided, to say it gently. Could it be perhaps that this individual paper, which you claim undermines the "en…

Just pay attention to what i'm saying. I'm saying that the METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK of physics and math is legitimate. The replication crisis et al does NOTHING to contradict that. This paper is ASSERTING that the METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK of gender studies is flawed. You may disagree with that assertion. However, citing the replication crisis, which is a DIFFERENT CATEGORY OF ISSUE, does nothing to make your point.

Pay attention to the article! The authors of these hoax papers don't demonstrate or address a methodological flaw in gender studies. They demonstrate that you can get papers written in bad faith into a peer reviewed journal, which is also trivially true for many disciplines, including economics, which you have previously implied people would have a problem getting a "nonsense" paper into.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#133
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are either fallible or they aren't, and since it seems you're willing to accept that all fields are fallible "to some degree" aka are fallible, we shouldn't edify any of them uncritically. Are you saying that you can claim things can be fallible without being equivalent? Because that's what I'm saying, and I'm glad we agree. The replication crisis is a perfect example of the problem faced by all fields, of pap…

> The replication crisis is a perfect example of the problem faced by all fields, of papers of questionable veracity being accepted by peer-reviewed journals. You're absolutely right. Now, feel free to explain how that is relevant to THIS issue.

Because both address getting papers that are incorrect and have made up evidence into prominent peer-reviewed journals.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#134
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just pay attention to what i'm saying. I'm saying that the METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK of physics and math is legitimate. The replication crisis et al does NOTHING to contradict that. This paper is ASSERTING that the METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK of gender studies is flawed. You may disagree with that assertion. However, citing the replication crisis, which is a DIFFERENT CATEGORY OF ISSUE, does nothing to make your point.

Pay attention to the article! The authors of these hoax papers don't demonstrate or address a methodological flaw in gender studies. They demonstrate that you can get papers written in bad faith into a peer reviewed journal, which is also trivially true for many disciplines, including economics, which you have previously implied people would have a problem getting a "nonsense" paper into.

An empirical paper with a reasonable hypothesis that happens to be wrong is not a nonsense paper. The papers they got published in these journals were not simply empirically false. They were categorically absurd and in some cases wildly unethical. They weren't simply making empirical claims that were reasonable but happened to be false.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#135
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The replication crisis is a perfect example of the problem faced by all fields, of papers of questionable veracity being accepted by peer-reviewed journals. You're absolutely right. Now, feel free to explain how that is relevant to THIS issue.

Because both address getting papers that are incorrect and have made up evidence into prominent peer-reviewed journals.

Yes, but what is at issue is the nature of the papers that got past. The papers that passed peer review in the replication crisis were reasonable, but wrong. These papers were not.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, is it fair for me to say that your criticism of "grievance studies", a criticism of its unscientific and fallible nature, is anecdotal?

...yes? Although, perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it seems to me that you've entirely mistaken what my complaint is; as best as I can tell you're trying to imply that my complaint is hypocritical by lacking large-scale statistics, when I'm not complaining about a lack of large-scale statistics at all, but rather such things as argument from consequences, lack of freedom of argument, etc.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#137
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Sure, most got rejected. But 7 got accepted. And while banality is obviously a subjective value judgment, I don't think it applies to all of them. Just to enumerate the hypotheses that were accepted:

> That dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against “the oppressed dog” through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured. This provides insight into training men out of the sexual violence and bigotry to which they are prone.

> That it is only oppressive cultural norms which make society regard the building of muscle rather than fat admirable and that bodybuilding and activism on behalf of the fat could be benefited by including fat bodies displayed in non-competitive ways.

> That it is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and that this is probably due to fear of being thought homosexual (“homohysteria”) and bigotry against trans people (transphobia). (It combines these ideas into a novel concept “transhysteria,” which was suggested by one of the paper’s peer reviewers.) Encouraging them to engage in receptive penetrative anal eroticism will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values.

> That men frequent “breasturants” like Hooters because they are nostalgic for patriarchal dominance and enjoy being able to order attractive women around. The environment that breastaurants provide for facilitating this encourages men to identify sexual objectification and sexual conquest, along with masculine toughness and male dominance, with “authentic masculinity.” The data are clearly nonsense and conclusions drawn from it are unwarranted by it. (NB. One reviewer did raise concerns about the rigor of the data)

> That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege.

> No clear thesis. A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist, much of which was produced by a teenage angst poetry generator before being edited into something slightly more “realistic” which is then interspersed with self-indulgent autoethnographical reflections on female sexuality and spirituality written entirely in slightly under six hours.

> That feminism which foregrounds individual choice and responsibility and female agency and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society.

I will grant you that 'breastaurants' and the Mein Kampf one are fairly banal. The Mein Kampf paper is really only shocking if you happen to know that it is an excerpt from Mein Kampf. But the rest seem pretty non-banal to me, at least with regard to being published in an academic journal.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#138
post #109

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…

Ioannide's work claims that false research claims routinely makes it to publication, even in high-profile journals. Mochizuki has published a proof that many in the field believe is nonsense (unintelligible nonsense, at that).

That the shoddy research investigated by Ioannidis is shoddy because it misuses statistics is besides the point. What matters is that the best efforts of peer- review in highly respected venues, in "hard" science fields fails to stop such work from being published.

Which makes the hoaxed fields (gender studies etc) not particularly special in that respect.

>> The accusation being made here is that these fields are incapable of separating absolute nonsense from genuine content.

That's also what Ioannides research concludes, except it does so for medicine, neuroscience, etc.

In Mochizuki's case, his proof was published even though experts in the field could not understand it and were not sure of its validity. It may yet prove to be nonsense, or, indeed- a hoax.

>> You're really misunderstanding Ionnandis' work if you think it is relevant to this.

Obviously, I believe it's you who doesn't understand what you're talking about. But perhaps we'll keep the discourse more civil by avoiding explicitly stated assumptions about each other's cognitive abilities?

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Yeah, OK, maybe I misread your comment.

Re: An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

#140
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because both address getting papers that are incorrect and have made up evidence into prominent peer-reviewed journals.

Yes, but what is at issue is the nature of the papers that got past. The papers that passed peer review in the replication crisis were reasonable, but wrong. These papers were not.

What makes you feel like you're an expert on what is and isn't reasonable?
Post reply on HN