And I must say, getting a chapter of “Mein Kampf” accepted under the
title “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an
Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” is really
funny.
I can’t say whether the journals they submitted to were predatory
author-fee trash or respected journals of their fields. If these were
respected journals, then that is a very bad sign for their fields. If
these were predatory author-fee trash journals, then, well, burning
their reputations is a good service to their fields (if you submit a
hoax math paper and waste reviewer’s time, then you are an asshole; if
you submit a hoax math paper and get it accepted then you did good work,
either by burning a bad journal’s reputation or by exposing flaws in a
good journal’s processes leading to them getting corrected).
OK, at least this has actual content in it. It's hard to judge some of them without reading in terms of how "outrageous" the arguments are, specifically the Hypatia one I mentioned below and the fat bodybuilding one. (Fatness has frequently been valued as a symbol of wealth and royalty throughout history, so I don't see how it's wrong to call this "culturally constructed" or whatever.) The Nazi and dog rape ones look pretty bad -- I don't see how those could be accepted just on face value without serious lapse in judgment.
According to the authors, none of these journals had fees. Hypatia has 20 papers in the last 3 years with at least 20 citations. Don't know how that compares to other journals in the field.
Hypatia is a prominent feminist philosophy journal, which I think I may be safe in saying since it's out of my field and I know it, so it probably has decent cachet. Whereas I haven't heard of the others. On one hand, this is some big egg on their face, but on the other, the paper they submitted seems to be arguing that the conceptual penis thing was basically a pseudo-academic cry of "feminism is cancer!" which is pretty much true.
Judging journals or articles "by citations" is kinda meaningless. Impact factor or citation counting is not sybil resistant (citation-rings).
You can ask respected scholars in the field about their gut feeling whether the journal is good and whether it is known for filtering out trash. That is meaningful, as long as there is a broad consensus about who is a respected scholar and what journals are good.
>According to the authors, none of these journals had fees.
Ouch.
From what I picked up about the "mien Kampf" article (I haven't read it, it seems like no one has read it) was that only the last half was a *rewritten* portion of the original text "using intersectionality." My question is, it being *rewritten* and mien kampf not really being a popular read in 2010s, I find it hard to believe that it says anything substantive. What could it possibly be a "bad sign" of.
There have been entire academic fields that eventually collapsed, due to lack of actual knowledge. Say, phrenology or astrology. Or homeopathy.
What the hoaxers are alleging is that "Grievance Studies" et al belongs into the same class.
"Accidential Hitler" is a cheap shot. It doesn't say "this person doesn't recognize Hitler speeches", it tries to reveal either "see, this person's ideology / methods / rhetoric resembles the Nazis" or "see, this person will say anything that appears on the teleprompter".
Even though it is a cheap shot, I consider it quite funny when employed against Trump, or by Sacha Baron Cohen. Well, it is just as funny, and just as meaningful, when employed against an academic journal.
> There have been entire academic fields that eventually collapsed, due to lack of actual knowledge. Say, phrenology or astrology. Or homeopathy.
I think that is grossly ahistorical. I don't know what "actual knowledge" means here, but the stories of phrenology, astrology, and homeopathy in the history of science and education is not so whiggish. (A history article I just read last week, published in 1930s points out some conceptual developments in phrenology that held over into brain science and psychology. What killed phrenology was the popular practice of it, not any lack of "actual knowledge." Phrenology and irregular journals in the nineteenth century published a great deal of material on physiology, dietetics, and hygiene. And irregular medicine of the nineteen century was often just as "advanced," if not more so than regular medicine---with its blood-letting, mercury-compounds, etc.)
To be clear, the *Affilia* article was never published and we don't have the text available to us to judge precisely what it means. It's not even a "cheap shot," it is a completely alleged and possibly misfired shot. Do you even know what chapter 12 of volume 1 of *Mein Kompf* is even about? I don't. I've never read Hitler!
>I think that is grossly ahistorical.
Cool, I'm always interested to learn new things or unlearn bad things I picked up. Care to point me anywhere?
I admit that I'm biased against soft fields of inquiry. There is this old joke about mathematicians being very cheap to equip (you only need to pay for paper, pens and a paperbin), but philosophers being even cheaper (you don't need to provide the paperbin).
>To be clear, the Affilia article was never published and we don't have the text available to us to judge precisely what it means. It's not even a "cheap shot," it is a completely alleged and possibly misfired shot. Do you even know what chapter 12 of volume 1 of Mein Kompf is even about? I don't.
True. We'll need to either look at it, both in text and with context from somebody who knows the field (you?), or wait until the dust settles and trust the emerging consensus view. The hoaxers helpfully linked the chapter http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/v1c12.htm, but they did not link their rewrite. Also, Mein Kampf is just garbage; it even lacks the weird poetry of Stalinist propaganda. I refuse to spend more time reading this trash until I see the rewrite for comparison, so I can't say what this chapter is about, except for rambling "and we did this and that" and "national sacrifice" and blah blah barf.
I think even minimally historically-minded neuroscientists and neuropsychologists acknowledge that there was at least a protoscientific element to phrenology in the sense that it presaged the concept of localization, even if the particulars were bullshit. For one:
https://theness.com/index.php/phrenology-history-of-a-pseudoscience/
Jerry Fodor claimed to have been partly influenced by Gall in The Modularity of Mind, although I consider that more of a bug than a feature.
They included a Google Drive [link](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19tBy_fVlYIHTxxjuVMFxh4pqLHM_en18) with all the papers and feedback in the Areo [article](https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/).
> Cool, I'm always interested to learn new things or unlearn bad things I picked up. Care to point me anywhere?
That's a very good attitude. I don't have any great examples, but I guess taking a look at this little paper helps: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1839225 ...but the rest of the stuff on that I got from reading some of the old-timey phrenology and eclectic medicine journals. There are a few history books on the subject of medicine and the irregulars (homeopaths, naturopaths, etc): "[Ideals of Science and Their Discontents in Late Nineteenth-Century American Medicine](https://www.jstor.org/stable/233226)" and *The therapeutic perspective* by John Harley Warner, and *Knowledge in the Time of Cholera: The Struggle Over American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century* by Owen Whooley. (Whooley's book is actually really good, I liked reading it. My copy has so many sticky notes poking out.)
And you know what might be an interesting read in the context of being tough on soft field vs. mathematics: Joan Fukimura's "[Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology](https://www.jstor.org/stable/683115)." I'd draw your attention to pages 354ff, section "Canons of 'purity' and control in 19th century geometry."
> I refuse to spend more time reading this trash until I see the rewrite for comparison, so I can't say what this chapter is about, except for rambling "and we did this and that" and "national sacrifice" and blah blah barf.
Me too! So I loathe to give these people the benefit of the doubt for writing sly Nazi propaganda into a "Journal of Women and Social Work" until I've seen the damning pages.
So, in case of a nonempty peanut gallery: The Fujimura essay is good, an easy read also for hard scientists and relevant to the original topic (the three hoaxeteers). It is basically a reasonable, charitable and scathing reply to the old Sokal hoax, plus some fun history of mathematics.
Thanks again for that link, the other two articles will need to wait a couple of days until I find time to read them.
Edit: Fixed Fukimura -> Fujimura
I'm so glad you liked it! It is actually one of my favorite post-hoax articles, and I think *Fujimura* is really sharp (not your fault, I always misspell her name >.< and I did it first this time!). (I've read some of her sociology of molecular biology stuff, and I'm such a fan.)
Thanks for the links!
>So I loathe to give these people the benefit of the doubt for writing sly Nazi propaganda into a "Journal of Women and Social Work" until I've seen the damning pages.
and /u/completely-ineffable
>>but they did not link their rewrite.
>Just highlighting this red flag.
Ok, I guess you have me convinced that the headline is salacious and fun, but extending the benefit of doubt to a bunch of self-professed hoaxers is maybe not the best of ideas.
Sneer-worthy even. Well, I can be both sneerer and sneeree and am not above sneering at my one-hour-past self.
> Sneer-worthy even. Well, I can be both sneerer and sneeree and am not above sneering at my one-hour-past self.
That's what I call enlightenment now. :)
“Get ur politics out of my science!” yells three philosophers, a lit
dude, and (am I reading this correctly?) and someone who studies dog
IQs. Each begin to catalog their political disagreements.
EDIT: I am genuinely surprised that they led with the philosopher “of
biology, broadly construed.” My first guess was that maybe the editorial
process at Quit It, I’m On the Phone was to just not read
what’s published. But now my thinking is this dude, broadly construed,
is the crystallization of their conservative indignation at being called
out for being complete “tossers.” (Did I do that right, I’m American and
I only know how to speak English the natural, right, and morally correct
way.)
Cofnas is a proper weirdo, I've gotten into spats with him about phil of sci before. His most significant contribution thus far was to repudiate racist/anti-semitic evo psych by doubling down on the racist/anti-semitic talking points and then kvetching that the racist anti-semites had gone too far with them. He also defends HBD Chick to the point of essentially denying most of the core tenets of what philosophy of science has uncovered about the relationship between "evidence" and "theory" just to give her props.
Real scumbag.
omg. so that's what "philosophy of biology, broadly construed" means. [::cringing emoji::]
edit: btw, I like how (according to the OED) there is an obsolete meaning to "construe" which is "in a bad sense" or as we say today "misconstrue."
Yeah, the first time I ran into him I read quickly and thought he was taking the tack of, "Okay, if we take these people's claims at face value, the result we get is still inconsistent with their views." Then I kept seeing his nonsense and it's clear he's just wack.
That guy is a huge fan of the heterodox academy. Ya know, the place where angry white professors go to complain that students are too sensitive and that dealing with tough stuff in college is how you grow and learn. And now they want to say it's not fair to make life marginally more difficult through naked, pedagogical performance? (Maybe white people need to grow and learn too.)
Yet he thought it worthy to dredge up and argue in formal journals. MacDonald's work has been debunked before, it's not legitimate and not worthy of talking about.
I would think if one spent the time necessary to write a series of full length articles seriously entertaining the arguments made that it is not unreasonable to say they take the work seriously. I don't think Cofnas agrees with MacDonald most don't but at this point MacDonald's arguments have been addressed and should be ignored and derided not given the legitimacy of formal academic debate
To clarify: it's extremely clear from looking over Cofnas's online and publication history that he attacks MacDonald from *within* the HBD nonsense circle, not from without, and this makes the force of /u/stairway-to-kevin's point absolutely right.
The fact he is a former Sesardic grad student and has been a co-aurthor with Michael Woodley is really all the indictment you need that he is firmly in the HBD reactionary camp
It's not as if he's especially coy about it: I argued with him online in the past about HBD and he endorsed comparisons between race science and Newtonian physics on grounds that belied hilariously sophomoric misunderstandings about how either of them work.
For example, the claim that both traditional racial categories and gravitation are not theory-laden. Now it's not exactly the biggest common criticism of racial categories that they're theory-laden (how many scientific and/or pseudo-scientific categories are *not* generally held to be theory-laden?) so there's no need to defend against it. But he's evidently so caught up in this stuff that he has to also claim that both gravitation and "black people" are self-evident brute facts, bizarre!
Well they also cite misleading charts about genomic differences between continents of origin, provisionally associate those with discredited research into racial differences (often in America alone?!), and then just call it "science" so fuck knows about that
lol. I wonder if that even matters. The guy is completely reactionary, he wrote something a few years ago saying that GW Bush became president and the Iraq war were a result of pomo nonsense. Sokal is a whinging centrist. Just like that weirdo film-maker who says that Thomas Kuhn paved the way for Trump.
Just wait til he takes off the Jordan Peterson mask and reveals that whole thing was a comeback attempt that went horribly right in a Producers-esque way
Hum, that might be kinda funny. But I don't know, it seems like elaborate lies ought to be considered antithetical to truth-seeking programs. What's to stop 10 years later, Peterson removing the Sokal mask and castigating us for our failure to have faith in him as our lord and savior the second coming of Christ?
Sokal was proud to work under the FSLN in Nicaragua so I don't think he's a centrist. I remember him saying something like he just wanted clear straight-forward writing that the proletariat could use. However, I could be wrong, do you have links to some bad articles he's written?
> Sokal was proud to work under the FSLN in Nicaragua so I don't think he's a centrist.
what does that even mean? He's proud he taught... what? math. What's to be proud of? And why are you taking his word here, he's lied before and he likely lies still? Wouldn't it be to his *political advantage* to frame his stuff as *not politically motivated?* I can't be the only one that recognizes the guy is a piece of shit.
EDIT: I'm sorry, I have no charity for that asshole, there's probably no conversation to be had with me about this.
Huh? He's proud he was giving people education under a socialist government. Communists need to learn math too. I think that's something to be proud of, sure. And I think his hoax *was* politically motivated, essentially saying that the social sciences aren't Marxist enough and aren't accessible to laymen workers, which is a fair criticism I think. But I'm willing to have my mind changed if you can find stuff he wrote that contradicts my impressions, I don't think that he's a hero or anything.
Like what articles are you referring to with the GWBush/Iraq stuff?
I'm not going to have this conversation. He's a pathological liar, and I don't care if he's hornswaggled you. It's not worth my time and it just makes me angry because my area of study carries an absurd burden because of that borgie NYU cream puff.
it is a three part series of essays for a dumbass philosopher's blog-magazine: https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/what-is-science-and-why-should-we-care-part-i/
>But most of the credit, I think, has to be awarded to George W. Bush and his friends, who showed just where science-bashing can lead in the real world.
Well, that's kinda true. Obviously we should be looking at a proper scientific Marxist way of analyzing the world. I don't think that he's saying PoMo lead to Bush and Iraq, just that there's some similar motivations present.
lol. I will ban you for entertaining this dumb line of thought any further.
Actually, please, continue: how does Latour's *Science in action* and Sandra Harding's *The Science Question in Feminism* (1987 and 1986) share "some similar motivations." And then I will ban you.
Please remember, you have an opportunity to speak truth to power here :)
I'm not familiar with those books but PoMo and conservatism share similar motivations in that they are both non-Marxist and represent bourgeois ideology.
I don't think pointing out that right-wing ideologues can use obfuscatory language just as easily as Pomo thinkers is really a particularly controversial one. If we look at how power is wielded in universities and other places of discussion/learning I don't think it's any surprise that Pomo stuff has taken off while Marxist thought is marginalized.
Well, that makes me feel better. Very soon the central party planning committee will be passing a resolution declaring my PoMo nonsense as party policy and therefor Marxist.
To clarify I do read a bit of Pomo nonsense and generally enjoy it. I consider it useful in the same way I like to read good honest bourgeois historians and so on. But yes, not Marxist, therefore not correct. You just have to sift through the bad and re-orient the good.
I've spent the last five minutes trying to come up with a good sneer about the difference between women, people of color, and "normal" folks, but I'm honestly struggling to find one that's absurd enough to clearly read as satire. This shit's pervasive.
HAHAHAHAHA I KNEW IT! I knew the most vocal proponents of these ideas would be the kind who would likely either go silent or get nothing right when asked about some genomics material one of my friends in an MD/PhD program has to understand to get through her day.
Academic publishing is completely fucked, but I read the entire thing
and I’m totally not sure what it has to do with p0wn!g SJWs. Across all
fields traditional peer review is a good filter in some specific ways
and terrible in others.
This “experiment” or hoax is the equivalent of noticing that there
are some potholes in the road outside the fire station, stealing a fire
truck and driving it back and forth until a new pothole forms and then
declaring that all potholes are due to out of control fire trucks.
I wrote some thoughts I had about it here.
Short version is that the authors do something different from what most
people seem to think they do, if you take them at their word at least -
in that they explicitly deny that the journals in question were
willing to publish hoaxes, but instead argue that their acceptance of
the alternative papers they wrote proves that these fields are all
infected with the dangerous ideology of “Radical Constructivism”. But in
that regard the experiment is poorly designed, because all they’re
really able to show is that if you use a certain jargon, you can get bad
papers published; it doesn’t really prove what they want to prove, which
is that this Radical Constructivism A) exists, B) is dangerous, C)
corrupting, and D) undermines truth, science, and the American way. In
fact nothing in the whole review process shows anything of the kind. I
think if they had tried to use this as proof that the jargon of certain
branches of cultural studies could cover up meaningless or shallow
stuff, they’d have a good argument, but as proof of a Radical
Constructivist conspiracy it really doesn’t work very well. (Also they
accuse their opponents of being grifters who don’t care about truth,
which is kind of hilarious from Quillette writers who cite precisely
zero examples of anyone believing the things they ascribe to
Radical Constructivism, but sure.)
Of course, in reality this is just an attempt to wage ‘Culture War’
by (among others) a guy who is on record stating he wants to defund
gender studies entirely, but even so it raises some interesting
questions.
> if you take them at their word at least
Probably a bad idea. I read the Hypatia paper and the Mein Kampf one. The former is basically an extremely wordy and overly jargon-ized way of saying "punch up, not down." I'm not sure how this is at all a prima facie absurd argument for an ethics paper in a philosophy journal. The Mein Kampf one is barely recognizable even if you already know the catch. It's pretty much a boilerplate lit review. Pretty vague and platitudinous, but again not prima facie absurd. It is almost completely reworked from the Mein Kampf passages it's allegedly lifted from, where they make it sound like they swapped out Jews for white guys or something. There is some parallel in paragraph and sentence structure in spots, but I can't see how it's a direct "rewrite" at all. So add those to the shitty poem and 3/7 are not that convincing to me.
That said, the ones ostensibly containing data should have been rejected on ethical grounds for lacking IRB approval, before the content even becomes relevant. Unless the numbers were fabricated, the referees should have questioned this immediately.
I finally found the "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an
Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," and I have no idea what these hoaxers thought they were doing. I found chapter 12 online and looking at them side by side, I don't get the connection.
>
>
>
>
> That said, the ones ostensibly containing data should have been rejected on ethical grounds for lacking IRB approval, before the content even becomes relevant. Unless the numbers were fabricated, the referees should have questioned this immediately.
I'm curious: does IRB approval get passed onto publishers? I thought it was something that took place exclusively within the host institution. But I've never navigated the whole process by myself.
It might depend on the journal, actually. Possibly more humanities-oriented journals that don't usually deal with experimental or ethnographic results wouldn't require it?
Oh, I just don't know what that looks like specifically : the transfer of "authorization" between irb and the journal. And I don't recall ever seeing irb approval noted in any ethnography or social science ive read. I could be wrong, but I thought irb was pretty exclusively an institutional safeguard for universities and research organizations, not a part of the scholarly publishing apparatus.
Oh and the other thing I found notable, and in a way more interesting for us because it's true across the Rationalosphere, is the strange attitude towards journal articles. The premise of the whole Areo article is the claim that journal articles are the gold standard in knowledge production, and that therefore anything that undermines the scientific purity and Truth of the journal article is a direct attack on all we hold dear. It's very reminiscent of r/SSC's endless wars-via-article-citations. I have a hard time understanding why journal articles are given this elevated status by the Defenders of Reason, when in my view they are really just a particular way that arguments or results get formatted as part of larger scientific practice, not some kind of guarantee of quality.
Peer Review^TM is treated as making articles unassailable in pop science rather than just as a mechanism (ostensibly) of minimum quality control. And obviously, it frequently fails at even the latter.
> because all they're really able to show is that if you use a certain jargon, you can get bad papers published
-
> A) exists, B) is dangerous, C) corrupting, and D) undermines truth, science,
Where exactly do you see the disconnect? If they prooved that you can basically get any content published if it is just coded right (and hits in the right ideological direction), then isn't it pretty reasonable to conclude A, B, C and D?
No, because I don't have as exaggerated expectations from journal article publications as the authors do. I don't think they are meant to detect fraud or deception, nor are they intended to be guarantees of value or ideology free science or some foolproof mechanism to separate the True from the False. Once you reject those premises about what journal articles are for, the supposed impact of the 'hoax' basically disappears.
Aside from that, the Areo article goes on for ages about the supposed views and implications of "Radical Constructivism", but they nowhere actually cite *anyone* as saying the things they attribute to it, nor do they anywhere make the actual connection between the peer review comments they received (which, skimming them, I found pretty reasonable if perhaps a bit too accommodating) and the supposed ideology. If they had done that, the argument would have actually connected. But nobody in the peer review seems to say "if you, , commit to saying that science is fake and that anything goes as long as it is favorable to social justice, we will publish you!!". Which I feel their claims would require them to do.
Haha, you know I didn't actually read what they purported to want to show cuz: once a fraud in print, always a fraud in print. I went straight to the data (like a real scientist!), and found it wanting.
It is interesting that their purported goal---exposing the dangerous ideology of "Radical Constructivism"---doesn't seem like the kind of thing hoaxing can expose. Moreover, aren't these people part of the anti-PC police, and don't they argue that ideas can't be "dangerous" and that they must be sorted out in the free marketplace of civil conversation? (I mean, I get the punchline here: it's a lot of bad faith.)
It's good to track them on the things they make explicit, someone's got to do it.
Well that's one thing I noticed: a better design would have been to use *real* data and draw conservative or otherwise non-"Radical Constructivist" conclusions from it and see if it gets rejected on ideological grounds in these journals. But they didn't do that.
That's a really good point. It's almost like they could have actually argued their case for non-"radical constructivism" instead of creating this theater of deception.
I did read some people making the point that in calling their "hoax" an ethnography, the three people (and definitely the guy with the University job) are putting themselves under the preview of an IRB. Which means they could have violated some serious norms of research, which can get them fired and barred from the academy.
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
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Someone sets out to show that the peer review process doesn't protect against the publication of junk, they successfully get multiple junk articles through the peer reveiw process, and you think the appropriate response is to punish them? What exactly does that accomplish other than protecting institutions?
I mean many peer-reviewed publications are barely even cited and largely ignored. This is not relatively new and has been ongoing for at least a decade. When you move outside of the general journals like Science or Nature, there are literally dozens to hundreds of papers that get published that are utter trash, even in the "big" journals of a particular field. Most of them get no attention or citations and it amounts to nothing. I have skimmed some papers of this kind myself but there is no point in doing anything about them since no textbook cites them, no major paper cites them, and no one has ever heard of them. Only the ones that get some attention get refuted.
You have to remember that reviewing papers is voluntary in the end of the day.
This trash style trolling from those people belongs in an internet forum not in fucking peer review academia. It's a cheap way to score a political point. If anything this move shuts down conversation because it gets both sides on a defensive-attacking game.
> there are literally dozens to hundreds of papers that get published that are utter trash, even in the "big" journals of a particular field.
While I get the sentiment and concern here, I'd like to push back a little against this. Because though there are certainly lots of predatory and vanity journals out there, I think that there is another explanation for why we might find articles of bad poetry, buttsex for cishets, and 4 dudes watching *a lot* of porn that doesn't require us to think there's garbage about: sometimes these things are printed not for their profundity but because journals are *records* of scholarly work. I think in the contemporary era, we've mistaken the intro-method-results-discussion scientific form as *the* scholarly product. But not only is this not the case everywhere, it's not even the case for the history of science. Medical journals sometimes carry (or carried) government reports, material reviews, misc, etc. Life science journals can contain collection catalogs, protocols, lit summaries, etc. And, of course, humanities (construed broadly) contains notes, queries, material discoveries (look at this rare lost book I found!), etc.
And yes, sometimes journals contain "trash." And it's certainly true that the conditions of academic publishing lately have increased the amount of unambiguously trash. But I caution against reading too strongly here that the problem is all about trash. It could be many of these articles are limited in material usefulness but are interesting in their own right. (Consider the "weird" porn studies one---that being the word a reviewer used. I've never even heard of such an experiment, and it might be worthwhile as a subject of discussion itself.)
Ironically, Sokal himself undoes this mystery: when he described writing his Social Text article, he makes an interesting admission: *it was difficult to create pomo trash.* And if you'll grant me a bit of pomo flexibility: the "pomo" these people imitate is not this free wheeling nonsense, *it makes sense* and they in bad faith engage in that sense making. But I don't think bad faith here necessarily means bad scholarship. To just give a contrast: I presume we believe that a scientist acting in bad faith (say, they're a creationist) can, if adhering strictly to some norms of research, produce true biology scholarship.
Basically, i think there's a lot to this story that us flattened and obfuscated by our hoaxers in the very *ideologically driven narrative* of what this hoax is all about. (Sorry for typos, I'm stuck on a train in manhatten, on my phone.)
I get what you are saying. I'm not even talking about bad faith here. I think bad faith is rare outside predatory journals, which can be recognized by experts in a field. I'm talking about papers that start on a premise that has been debunked decades ago, and build their own academic niche on this whole debunked paradigm, because they missed the memo or something. I'm talking about the papers you write off as "this should be avoided" in a review of the literature. Research that is sloppy as heck and screams "I just rushed this to get published". Hell, I have had profs suggest to me that I publish half-assed papers before, to bump my publication counter.
Oh yeah, I see that. There is certainly something quite extensive about that going on (economics, *am i right?*).
I just took your comment as a jumping off point for a thought I was having that I wanted to jot down, the idea that maybe these people weren't writing as much bunk as they thought. That maybe even shaping up an argument that you personally don't believe in can *create* an argument that might actually be "good." (Isn't this like a large amount of philosophy?... or so I've heard.)
But yes, you're right: there is predatory journals, vanity journals, /r/badjournals, etc. But in the context of this thread and this larger episode, I think that we (or "me") are being pelted with bird-shot about *every* problem in scholarly publishing when this is *really* about a very narrow problem in scholarly work---that of bad faith actors and their political games.
I agree with this to a certain extent, but this observation
>When you move outside of the general journals like Science or Nature, there are literally dozens to hundreds of papers that get published that are utter trash, even in the "big" journals of a particular field. Most of them get no attention or citations and it amounts to nothing.
ought to raise our eyebrows more than it does. And the argument that the bad ones that "get some attention get refuted" would be more convincing if 1) the replication crisis hadn't struck some of the most highly cited research in psychology, and only after decades, and 2) there weren't people in this very thread arguing that these disciplines don't have falsifiability standards in the first place, and so we can't judge them that way.
> the replication crisis hadn't struck some of the most highly cited research in psychology
And the only reason psychology got the first turn in the barrel is that its experiments are so cheap and easy to replicate.
well yeah I forgot to say "except when they aren't". obviously a lot of shit had gotten popular in the past.
apart from that, I don't see what's problematic with admitting that you cannot really falsify on the spot an ethnography, unless you try to replicate it.
it's the same when we take the data authors give us at face value. I don't go around thinking that the authors have fabricated their data; I judge the methodology employed and the paper overall, but I can't start questioning the the data, unless it's something really weird and even then you don't have much to do
> I don't see what's problematic with admitting that you cannot really falsify on the spot an ethnography
This isn't problematic per se, but it stands in very clear contrast to "the [bad] ones that get some attention get refuted." Ethnographic work isn't even really subject to replicability. And my point here is not that it should be, or that it is "invalid" in some sense because of this. My point is that there is some standard or another for evaluating what should be published and what shouldn't be, and if that standard can't even keep out utter fabrication from laypeople, then what *does* it keep out?
This problem appears in slightly different forms across disciplines, but that's not an excuse to pretend it isn't a problem.
sure I never meant to imply that every bad paper that gets popular is refuted. from my experience in my work, most of the papers that get cited in textbooks and are popular are pretty decent. I don't even know about other fields.
As far as the other point is concerned, I mean that't the baseline on how we start. There's not a lot you can do to avoid falling for utter fabrication and fraud.
Social priming was cited for decades. Doesn't exist. Power posing? Lucrative but nonsense. Shelby Steele work appears holed below the waterline.
Not at my fingertips but 40% of major economics papers recently did not replicate. Tons of medical studies.
The incentives to publish findings have created a ton of nonsense in many fields.
> They showed that the academic publishing system relies on an assumption of trust, and that bad actors can abuse that trust.
Bullshit. The entire purpose of peer review--its only purpose--is to distinguish legitimate research from flawed research. The writers of these articles don't have any training whatsoever in the fields they were publishing in, as far as I am aware. You think "assumption of trust" explains why reviewers couldn't distinguish between legitimate work and "work" that was not only fabricated, but fabricated by people with no expertise in the field at all? If the assumption of trust is so strong that one cannot distinguish utter garbage from expert research, then how in the world can the reviewer make finer distinctions?
This isn't how it works though. I get that that is the idea of "peer-review" but if you've ever engaged with the process at all you quickly begin to understand that things are published based on anything but an actual peer-review of the article and claims. Professional communities DO operate largely on trust
You're wrong. I work in a STEM field that's become very fashionable recently, and the volume of bad research has grown very quickly and shows no signs of slowing. Papers with trivial mistakes and grossly gerrymandered "evaluation metrics". I would love it if someone sent the field a wakeup call of exactly this kind.
If you have a moment, please address what the purpose of scientific publication is if peer reviewers cannot distinguish garbage from expert research. Why not just publish everything on a blog?
I'm inclined to agree about the need for such wake up calls, but I think there's also a factor of what the hoaxes aim to achieve and how it plays in the media. If people shared your attitude, that would be great.
Most people reacting to this don't seem to, though, and from the little that I looked at it the people doing the hoax and writing about it don't seem to, either - in my impression they're less interested in making a point about low quality journals no matter the field and more interested in taking down the *postmodern neomarxist sjw corrupted academia* or whatever they'd call it, specifically.
This has to be taken into account in how we react to this, wouldn't you agree? Of course, I don't mean downplaying what it shows about peer review, but rather taking care in not feeding an opportunistic anti-intellectual rightwing narrative about particular fields. Because they do not at all seem interested in the issues your field is having, just so happens to be.
I agree completely about the motivations of the hoaxers and how they would like to represent this story in their broader political narrative. And the hot takes from quillette (intellectual bastion that it is) are about as alarmist and self-serving as one would expect. You will not hear them talk about problems in academic STEM because they think papers with equations in them are Real Science™.
*However*, I am totally unimpressed by arguments that this all means nothing because the bad guys did it.
Or, perhaps I should say, if they *do* talk about problems in STEM, they will never provide it a political frame. They might discuss them the way they discuss bugs in code: incidental problems that can be repaired with some quick diagnostics and a little tweaking.
That's sad then. Too bad that fashionable STEM fields are sending researchers out into the world without properly training them on how to do their jobs.
>please address what the purpose of scientific publication
Cynical answer: To determine who gets jobs, promotions, and tenure.
Non-cynical answer: Isis recently published [a paper](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700070) about the recent history of peer rewiew in the sciences.
> Too bad that fashionable STEM fields are sending researchers out into the world without properly training them on how to do their jobs.
You're telling me. I think you'd agree that it would be a shame if the same were true of social theorists.
I heard them say what they had set out to show was that if you appeal to the political heartstrings of these areas of discipline by using language of privilege, oppression, etc., you can get junk papers to filter through the peer reviews. This is a much more interesting claim, I wish they had actually provided any proof of that.
On people here wanting them punished, all I can say is this subreddit is a strange place. Half the time I don’t know what people are talking about. Too many movements, too many terms to learn, too many people who like to post like they’re writing fortune cookies. Funniest thing about it is I refuse to unsubscribe because somehow I think I’ll be missing out.
Why should we give hoaxers a pass? Should we do so for people who publish fraudulent data? Because that's what we call it when its done in science journals, and I don't think anyone is clamoring to tare down the laboratories or super-colliders.
The question is not whether they're "heroes." The question is whether they actually demonstrated that there's a serious problem with particular academic journals. I agree with a poster above who basically said that this hoax doesn't "pwn the SJWs," and that academic publishing more generally has really serious problems. That's a pretty reasonable take.
What's not a reasonable take is the ridiculous defensive posture that some of the sneerers have, contending that getting garbage through peer review repeatedly isn't evidence of anything, and we should just ignore it and punish the people responsible. That's intellectually dishonest.
One the then real open questions I have is to what extent is it that these things were actual "garbage." As odd as it sounds and tho these authors certainly didn't believe what they were writing, some of what they write *kinda* made sense. A little while ago, I saw someone make a point that one of the article doesn't seem so absurd (the one about straight cis men and anal sex, "dildos" lol). I kinda think the "Fat Bodybuilding" one has an interesting premise.
Alternatively, peer review is not a solution for all the problems of scholarship (indeed, this is partially why trust is so essential.) "Hooters" is an ethnographic work, part of it is purely the observational account of the writer---if they lied about what they saw, no one can rebut that content without reference to primary material like field notes, etc. Moreover, they say their purposes was to test to see if the journal "will accept very shoddy qualitative methodology and ideologically-motivated interpretations which support this." And this signals these people's complete naiveté: [observation is theory laden](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/#HowObsEviMigTheLad), you don't get non-"ideologically-motivated interpretations." Similarly with the “Dog Park” article, reviewers can't determine if ethnographic work is "false"---ethnographic work is never "falsifiable." These dumb, dumb hoaxers.
“Hoax on Hoaxes 2” actually has grounds in history and previous scholarship. I'd point you too Joan Fukimura's "[Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology](https://www.jstor.org/stable/683115)," and specifically pages 354ff, section "Canons of 'purity' and control in 19th century geometry."
I don't understand what the standards of the art therapy "Journal of Poetry Therapy," but the "test" was whether they'll feature "bad" poems. I don't think poem standards are a scholarly concern for anyone in 2018. It's not even obvious what they thought they were doing with “Porn," but *Porn Studies* is a good journal, and as a very young field who wouldn't anticipate some very *avant garde* stuff. I actually think the *Hypatia* one is pretty interesting, even if in bad faith. [You ever heard of Jane Elliot?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) Anyways, wouldn't it reflect badly on philosophers if they shied away from controversial material?
Except for the *Porn Studies* one (which has not been accepted but I wanted to defend as a journal) and the "Mein Kampf" one (which I dissect elsewhere in this thread), these are the only articles that *could* demonstrate anything about what a journal might publish. Now you tell me, in the face of these dumb-dumbs, how is someone like me (a feminist, a queer, a SJW) who knows better supposed to act but incredulous at their half-baked claims. I'm not the one who's failed to understand the nature of things. But **you** tell me what they demonstrated in a detailed fashion.
(And anyways, calling our posture "defensive" implies that we've got something to defend. As others have pointed out, and even you yourself have half-admitted, scholarly publishing *industry* is very sick. it says nothing about the state of these disciplines that there is this universal problem.)
>And anyways, calling our posture "defensive" implies that we've got something to defend. As others have pointed out, and even you yourself have half-admitted, scholarly publishing industry is very sick.
I wouldn't call my admission "half" at all--you can see me trash the publication and peer-review standards in STEM, where I work, a few comments above. The general problem of getting work published because it merely "looks" the way such work ought to look, absent semi-rigorous standards for content, is not at all unique to the so-called "grievance studies" that the hoaxers are going after for political reasons. That political motivation provokes the defensive response on the part of people who work in these fields or are otherwise connected to them, because they correctly perceive that the fields are under threat of being delegitimized in the public sphere. This incentivizes minimizing or dismissing evidence of an actual problem because the existence of that problem can be used for bad faith rhetorical point scoring.
>But you tell me what they demonstrated in a detailed fashion.
Certainly we can conclude that people with no training at all in these fields are able to repeatedly publish papers that they wrote quickly, by imitating what they see others saying. At a minimum, this should lead us to ask how experts can discern who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't. You yourself admonish the hoaxers for failing to realize that ethnographic research is unfalsifiable, with the implication (I believe) that reviewers couldn't have been expected to detect the hoax on those grounds. But surely this creates a dilemma--because presumably the journal does reject articles, and preferred to publish the hoax to the exclusion of something else. So what was the standard on which it was evaluated? The hoaxers contend that it was evaluated based on how well it conforms to a particular ideological frame. They don't have any evidence of this. But we agree that it wasn't evaluated based on falsifiable claims.
In short, the broader problem exposed here is that if these very explicit bad faith actors with no real knowledge are able to blend in so well, then how in the world can we trust that articles not explicitly written in bad faith are based on any real knowledge or expertise?
You've got your horse before your carts: unless there is actually a problem you can't say people are defensively "minimizing or dismissing evidence of an actual problem."
I think you're making a lot of assumption about the nature of this diverse collection of journals that we have no reason to credit. One of the Hoaxers is a magazine editor, I have no doubt she is capable to put together a relatively quick work-flow of writing. Moreover, I've known quite a few people in the hardest of sciences who work on five or more articles at a time. You have to, the peer-review is very slow. Seven *accepted* articles between 3 people over at least 2 years is not that surprising. And you'll noticed they kept pretty tight their wheelhouse: feminist ethnography, feminist philosophy, feminist poetry. The fat studies one was the only not quite feminist thing. I think you're overstating the trouble on this front.
I think your wrong about this "presumably the journal does reject articles, and preferred to publish the hoax to the exclusion of something else." Journals can stagger their articles from acceptance to publication. I actually just doubt you get how academic publishing works, honestly. I mean, I don't get how philosophers peer review either. Go ask philosophers. But it can't and won't be like how social scientist, biologists, or historians peer-review. And, anyways, the real problem is as follows:
> In short, the broader problem exposed here is that if these very explicit bad faith actors with no real knowledge are able to blend in so well, then how in the world can we trust that articles not explicitly written in bad faith are based on any real knowledge or expertise?
Isn't that the golden question of "how can we know anything?" Well, historians have a part of the answer: [it's about trust babe](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK231971/). Bad-faith is precisely a poison to the enterprise, there's no getting around this hard fact.
>I think your wrong about this "presumably the journal does reject articles, and preferred to publish the hoax to the exclusion of something else." Journals can stagger their articles from acceptance to publication.
This is half nonsense and half evasion. Unless the journal literally rejects no articles, its editorial staff and reviewers express preferences of what is worth publishing. That is the *entire* question: What are those preferences based on?
>Isn't that the golden question of "how can we know anything?" Well, historians have a part of the answer: it's about trust babe.
It's not that question, except in the most reductionist sense.
My point is they're rejecting articles *not* necessarily cuz they're out of room. Articles are rejected for scope, standards, importance, etc. If you paid attention to what the hoaxers have written, you'd notice two things: 1) some articles did get rejected for these reasons, 2) some articles were sent back with requests for revision bring them up to standard. These points directly fly in the face of the claims the journals have no standards.
Your line of question doesn't even make sense broadly: at the very least the hoaxers believe that these journals have an *ideological* bent, they hammer on that over and over again that that's the standard they're trying to unmask. Of course, I already defused that concern: theory-ladenness. I don't get why you even bring "standards" up like that's the crux of concern. You sound evasive, **be more specific** if you've got a point about standards.
So wait, do you believe there to be a solution to knowledge-making despite bad faith that doesn't involve trust. I'd love to hear this magical alternative the rest of us have failed to apprehend.
Clearly I'm not communicating well, because what you're responding to isn't even my claim.
> These points directly fly in the face of the claims the journals have no standards.
Not a claim I made--I said the opposite, that they obviously *do* have standards because they reject papers. You reply by repeating this fact back to me as though it's something I didn't believe.
>I don't get why you even bring "standards" up like that's the crux of concern. You sound evasive, be more specific if you've got a point about standards.
The specific point is that the standards (of these particular journals in these particular cases) fail to distinguish fabrications by laypeople and expert research. Do you think that matters? Do you think that's unavoidable?
Seriously then, what don't you understand about standards having nothing (or I should say, little and circuitous relations) to do with protecting against fabrication, bad faith, etc except in the most egregious of circumstances?
These people hoaxing aren't lay people, that should answer your question btw.
>Seriously then, what don't you understand about standards having nothing (or I should say, little and circuitous relations) to do with protecting against fabrication, bad faith, etc except in the most egregious of circumstances?
This just isn't true across disciplines. I guarantee you I could not get published in a microbiology journal by aping the language of other papers. I know nothing about it. I understand that social science is going to face a completely different set of challenges for reviewing, but then that is the *point*. Some disciplines are better equipped to resist this kind of thing, perhaps by material facts of what they study, or perhaps by culture, or perhaps by some institutional feature. Acknowledging that social theory might have *unique* challenges in that respect, and that people should take those challenges seriously and not just shrug flippantly and say "Well, how can we know anything? We just have to trust!" is not the same as admitting defeat to STEMlords in the culture war.
>These people hoaxing aren't lay people, that should answer your question btw.
With respect to the discipline they're publishing in?
I just realized that at the end this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/9l0sig/five_academics_submit_their_grievances_about/e748qzy/) you subtly shifted the issue in a way I didn't pick up:
> ...if these very explicit bad faith actors with no real knowledge are able to blend in so well,...
Bad faith actors, but "no real knowledge." I don't think that's the case here. It wasn't even the case with Sokal, originally. Sure, Sokal is no genius by any measure, but he did pick up the content of the arguments he wanted to lampoon, and he did reproduce those arguments in *rough* summary (I read his original paper, I don't go along with all his interpretation, the worst he does is over commit to some ideas that are at least worth entertaining). All three of these hoaxers have graduate training, one is a university lecturer.
The problem isn't that these people don't "know" this stuff, the problem is that they don't believe it and they're intent is to use that disbelief to compromise their opposition's politics. I mean (I really shouldn't be telling you over and over to read what they wrote) read what they wrote: what is the specific, substantive evidence of scholarly failings they're bringing to the table?
I asked someone else earlier, as a rhetorical question: is it not possible for a biologist, believing in creationism but adhering to all the norms and "methods" of natural science to publish work he does not "believe" in? I'm a wacked out pomo, but I believe that is very possible. If you believe otherwise, I'd love to hear it.
Anyways: I stand by all my trust stuff, I don't care if you don't get it. You've changed the subject, pray I don't change it further.
I agree we may have been arguing under different assumptions, but it's unfair to claim I "subtly shifted the issue." If you look higher up in the thread, I had already said:
>The writers of these articles don't have any training whatsoever in the fields they were publishing in, as far as I am aware.
So I did clearly articulate how I was framing my objection, although you may not have noticed.
I see both your arguments having merit. On the one hand, it's extremely valuable for people to have a place to think publicly about unfalsifiable propositions (lots of the propositions I live by are unfalsifiable) and receive pre-publication critical feedback on them from anonymous reviewers, without having to run the gauntlet of withering hostile scrutiny. On the other, if that's the explicit standard of a forum, it's hard to see why publication there should carry any authority .
You cited unfalsifiability of ethnographic work as the explanation for why peer review couldn't have prevented the publication of the fake Hooters and Dog Park papers.
wtf are *you* going on about. You saying that we can't publish ethnographies because, you know, they are records of actual happenings that can't be "reproduced" in any kind of experimental sense. Cuz that's the implication of the other dude, and I can't teach all of you how to think about science and knowledge. I'm not being paid enough, want to sign up for my patron?
>You saying that we can't publish ethnographies because, you know, they are records of actual happenings that can't be "reproduced" in any kind of experimental sense.
Just stop. I never once said ethnographies should not be published, and at least once *explicitly* made that point. Nor did I say, anywhere, that falsifiability and experimental reproducibility are the universal standard.
Perhaps your Patreon can fund some remedial reading classes.
>On the other, if that's the explicit standard of a forum, it's hard to see why publication there should carry any authority .
Because you T R U S T them, my dude.
Yes - for instance, see this from somebody who was a reviewer of one of their papers: https://twitter.com/dwschieber/status/1047497301021798400
Essentially, tried to give a constructive rejection without utterly rejecting the premise because that's unhelpful. It was his first time reviewing a paper. This got turned around. A quote: "Anyways, I guess I could be more critical in the future, but I assumed a grad student had written a confusing paper and I tried to be constructive. I'm embarrassed that I took it as seriously as I did, I'm annoyed I wasted time writing a review, and I'm glad I rejected it. "
But also, think: if people rejected these papers because of their awful politics, isn't that exactly the sort of problem they're trying to highlight as well? The fake paper folks are methodologically confused.
>It was his first time reviewing a paper.
God, imagine this being your first experience as a reviewer.
And it's scummy that it's a grad student whose time got wasted with this.
The worst part of this is that if these folks get punished for their academic misconduct, which they should, they'll do just fine for themselves in a conservative crank-o-sphere.
But the implication (or explicit defense) has been that you couldn't pull off a stunt like that at an actual peer reviewed journal. Hostile as their expreiment is, it definitely refutes that claim, no?
I have never argued that you couldn't successfully pull this shit in a respectable journal. What I have argued in the past is that the likes of Sokal and Boss Hog demonstrated shite all with their opportunistic bullshit. At one time the argument was that they'd shown nothing because they'd ducked the experiment by using shit journals or exploiting people's good faith. Exploiting people's good faith in better journals doesn't change much, because we all already know that journals are shit. All they've done is improve on their already terrible methodology, and made extra cash in the process.
It's a grift, get used to the idea that these people are bad actors trying to make more money
> Exploiting people's good faith in better journals doesn't change much, because we all already know that journals are shit.
I wasn't aware that the consensus was that these journals are shit.
that's not the claim though, the researchers' claim is that the peer review process at philosophy journals is more susceptible to false positives than at those of other fields, not just that there is a nonzero false positive rate for peer review, so these experiments do nothing to support their hypothesis one way or the other
Better source: https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
And I must say, getting a chapter of “Mein Kampf” accepted under the title “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” is really funny.
I can’t say whether the journals they submitted to were predatory author-fee trash or respected journals of their fields. If these were respected journals, then that is a very bad sign for their fields. If these were predatory author-fee trash journals, then, well, burning their reputations is a good service to their fields (if you submit a hoax math paper and waste reviewer’s time, then you are an asshole; if you submit a hoax math paper and get it accepted then you did good work, either by burning a bad journal’s reputation or by exposing flaws in a good journal’s processes leading to them getting corrected).
gotta fill that professional troll niche somehow
“Get ur politics out of my science!” yells three philosophers, a lit dude, and (am I reading this correctly?) and someone who studies dog IQs. Each begin to catalog their political disagreements.
EDIT: I am genuinely surprised that they led with the philosopher “of biology, broadly construed.” My first guess was that maybe the editorial process at Quit It, I’m On the Phone was to just not read what’s published. But now my thinking is this dude, broadly construed, is the crystallization of their conservative indignation at being called out for being complete “tossers.” (Did I do that right, I’m American and I only know how to speak English the natural, right, and morally correct way.)
I’m starting a journal called “Correct Studies” and we will only accept papers which are correct.
Academic publishing is completely fucked, but I read the entire thing and I’m totally not sure what it has to do with p0wn!g SJWs. Across all fields traditional peer review is a good filter in some specific ways and terrible in others.
This “experiment” or hoax is the equivalent of noticing that there are some potholes in the road outside the fire station, stealing a fire truck and driving it back and forth until a new pothole forms and then declaring that all potholes are due to out of control fire trucks.
Incoming tweet wars:
https://twitter.com/kjhealy/status/1047478400762503169
Worth looking at the feed for some info on the journals:
https://twitter.com/matt_blackwell/status/1047511391287087104
I remember Peter’s gnu-type stuff. Man, what is it with the 2000s atheist figures and the intellectual dark web BS?
I wrote some thoughts I had about it here. Short version is that the authors do something different from what most people seem to think they do, if you take them at their word at least - in that they explicitly deny that the journals in question were willing to publish hoaxes, but instead argue that their acceptance of the alternative papers they wrote proves that these fields are all infected with the dangerous ideology of “Radical Constructivism”. But in that regard the experiment is poorly designed, because all they’re really able to show is that if you use a certain jargon, you can get bad papers published; it doesn’t really prove what they want to prove, which is that this Radical Constructivism A) exists, B) is dangerous, C) corrupting, and D) undermines truth, science, and the American way. In fact nothing in the whole review process shows anything of the kind. I think if they had tried to use this as proof that the jargon of certain branches of cultural studies could cover up meaningless or shallow stuff, they’d have a good argument, but as proof of a Radical Constructivist conspiracy it really doesn’t work very well. (Also they accuse their opponents of being grifters who don’t care about truth, which is kind of hilarious from Quillette writers who cite precisely zero examples of anyone believing the things they ascribe to Radical Constructivism, but sure.)
Of course, in reality this is just an attempt to wage ‘Culture War’ by (among others) a guy who is on record stating he wants to defund gender studies entirely, but even so it raises some interesting questions.
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wasting money submitting to predatory pay-to-play journals to own the libs