Real Truth Confronter Jonathan Haidt writes a letter of support for Boghossian delineating how he might have used an institutional position to commit outright research fraud, but ordinary fraudulent papers are not as ideologically useful as the ones he and his colleagues produced.
(https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1084326030825873409)
posted on January 15, 2019 06:48 PM by
u/LiterallyAnscombe
The things we found out over the weekend were that
Their resident galaxy brain Lindsay is already pivoting to describing their project as “postmodern from the start”
Pluckrose told me that they had hired their current documentarian long before the first papers were conceived because they assumed they would need the “help” to “get the word out” about their project. Apparently this is a very very normal thing for a scholarly endeavour.
chrisiousity told us that they had outside funding before starting the project that has not yet been revealed, but an ex-TA of Boghossian revealed just how far Boghossian was in alt-right circles shortly before the project began, including flying Sargon in for his philosophy class.
Fascinatingly, Haidt appears to take the view that it’s the “social constructionist” aspect of Sokal’s hoax that got his article published, suggesting he never read any of the relevant material - but more importantly rather bizarrely making it far more explicit than need be how much his letter of support comes from a place of preferential political sympathy with Boghossian.
Can someone give me the run down on when faking data is ethically acceptable? Is it just if it’s embarrassing for the journal that accepted the article with the fake data? Wouldn’t letting Boghossian off the hook because of his own political beliefs about the legitimacy of the “grievance studies” fields be exactly the kind of consideration of moral/political beliefs Haidt is decrying?
In fairness to Haidt, him misspelling Boghossian’s name as Bhogossian is pretty funny
Of course, the inevitable comparison with Alan Sokal is there, even though it doesn’t change anything to what Boghossian actually did.
Christ, the title of Haidt’s professorship is quite a load of bullshit.
This is what I don’t understand about the ‘grievance studies’ hoax. They wanted to prove they could get ‘conceptual penis’ style nonsense into more established journals, and they failed. So they wrote a bunch of ‘the kind of papers that get accepted by the kind of journals they wanted to laugh at’, and some of the more reasonable seeming of those got accepted. But surely you don’t have to write fake papers to laugh at ‘the kind of papers that get accepted by the kind of journals they wanted to laugh at’, because those journals are already publishing those kind of papers, and if you find them ridiculous you can just laugh at them without any additional effort. The only extra thing they brought to the table was that they didn’t believe in their own work. But LEJ Brouwer didn’t ‘believe in’ classical mathematics when he was publishing his early work in topology. Does that mean math is debunked? Should Math. Ann. be ashamed for publishing a ‘hoax’ paper?
It’s hard to buy the “fraud” argument since there was no intent to leave this on the permanent academic record. On the other hand I think failing to gain IRB (ethics) approval is a clear violation and he will have to face appropriate consequences for that.