Has anyone linked the Slate article on this yet? It’s quite informative.
Keep that in mind - this isn’t “obviously bullshit methodology”. It’s data fraud. That’s kind of a different story altogether. The papers being hoodwinked believed that fraudulent data was real. That’s a systemic problem everywhere (click through to Slate and you’ll find plenty of links of examples). Here’s an actual sociologist weighing in on the dog rape study, and his conclusion is that the study would be quite interesting if it weren’t fabricated. If I’m allowed to outright fabricate data, thousands of hours of interviews, for example, chances are good I can publish a bogus study in just about any field.
The Slate article then goes into detail on the potential motivations of the authors, and notes that they’re both quite ardent antifeminists (and, as should come as no surprise when talking about antifeminists, are kind of douchebags about it). But the important thing here is that this “scandal” is nowhere near as big a deal as some people are making it out to be. A handful of papers, most of which are based on fraudulent data (not obvious bullshit like “Get me off your fucking mailing list”, just data that’s not actually real!) passed peer review in low-tier sociological journals. And we’re supposed to conclude from that that, as the OP states, “these journals will publish just about anything as long as it fits into their mindset no matter how crazy the paper is”?
I dunno if I’m all in with the nickname of the trollery, IIRC the original Sokal paper was a one-shot thing, not an attempt at a takedown of the whole ecosystem of a particular branch of sociological publishing. And AFAIK he did not introduce fake research in the trolling attempt.
Yeah, I fail to see the “hypocrisy”. ISTM as happens so often the word doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means.
As to how people keep insisting on the notion that Univerisites should only exist to teach people job skills, that is a long running battle.
That is how it should be. Heck that’s the point of publishing.
It has been questioned earlier in the thread “Uh… well, what if I wrote a paper proving there is NOT a gender-identity problem with this? Would they publish THAT, huh?” …well, in an unpoisoned-well environment, maybe we *could *have run that experiment, by presenting real studies that indeed proved the contrary to the subject’s academic orthodoxy. Then we could argue that they’ll just publish whatever fits their preconceptions.
Now Og knows how long it will take to be able to do so without everyone being on the defensive.
Look, I get that some people believe the fields of study themselves are worthless obvious BS. The way to address that is to show with real research that they are just wrong. Not to seek to convict them of silliness in the court of public opinion.
My argument is that the hoaxers are misrepresenting the experiment and the journals that were fooled by the hoax, and the basis for their decision to target “grievance studies” journals.
The hoax does nothing to prove that “grievance studies” journals accept hoax papers at a rate more than any other field. The hoax had no comparison on which to base that conclusion because they deliberately did not target journals in fields that they did not have a grievance with. “Get me off Your Fucking Email List” is only one of many hoax papers that have been accepted by journals in other fields, in this case, Computer Science. Others have been mentioned in this thread already, including geology and medicine, which are “hard” sciences and seem to be presumed to be immune to this type of falsification by the hoaxers.
The hoaxers represent the journals as influential. They’re not. Hypatia is not “feminist philosophy titan." Characterizing GPC as “highly ranked” is misleading at best and true only because it’s the highest ranked on a list that may only consist of GPC. The hoaxers did not target influential papers. By and large, they targeted the bottom 1/3 of influential journals. They targeted niche journals with niche articles tailored to sucker journals in those niches.
Finally, the hoaxers targeted “grievance studies” because they perceive a threat from the field of study. That implies that the field has strong influence, but that’s simply not the case, as seen in the influence scores.
Why the field should exist is another debate entirely and something that the hoax does not speak to.
Discover (not Discovery) magazine is not a journal of the type described here. It is a popular science magazine. The difference is that journal submissions are full papers, magazine submissions like for Discover (and also Scientific American) are pitched. That is, you send the editor a proposal. Pitch guildelines..
I’d be very surprised if Discover had any sort of relevance ranking, and if you even referenced an article in it (except perhaps to show what the public is thinking about) you’d get laughed out of the process.
And it sure has hell wouldn’t count for tenure.
Concerning the attempt to punish Boghossian, there’s a roundup of several responses here. The main points being, first, that the hoax made a certain segment of academia look ridiculous, and some of those academics want to lash out, as opposed to actually addressing the issues that were exposed and improving the intellectual standards of their work.
Second, the attempt to punish Boghossian constitutes a misuse of the Institutional Review Board. The original purpose of IRBs was to protect experimental subjects against techniques that were harmful and abusive. They were a response to some well-known experiments that were harmful and abusive.
Back when people were working on proving programs correct, there was a paper which examined proofs in several published papers and found bugs in all the proofs. That’s the way to do it. The authors did not create a paper with buggy proofs and try to get it published. That’s not the way to do it.
If these people looked at papers published in these journals and outlined ones that were idiotic (probably pretty easy) no one would be having a fit.
I said fraud is “the crime of getting money by deceiving people”, which is a definition that the Cambridge Dictionary accepts.
So in other to be able to slap “fraud” and “unethical” claims on Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian, you expand the terms to cover people and situations that almost no one would ever label fraud or unethical. When Borat was released, it was broadly popular with critics and audiences, and I did not read any reviews calling it an unethical fraud.
Heck, plenty of experiments in psychology, behavioral economics, and other fields involve the researchers trying to trick subjects into believing that the experiment is measuring one thing when they are actually measuring something else. Is that fraud and unethical too? If so, our definitions are far apart. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Some definitions mention money, or that fraud is used “often to get money,” but it’s not a prerequisite.
As for the fake papers… there’s a lot of bullshit in academia, there’s a lot of bullshit in everything. If they submitted that many papers, to that many journals, and these PhD holders still couldn’t get their obfuscation papers published in most of them… it seems to me that there’s pretty good standards up already. The journals that did accept him were small, relatively non-influential and possibly in need of submitted publishable material, even if it’s rather weird.
And, as others have pointed out, sometimes exploration of things that seem obviously stupid to a casual observer actually have underlying value when you truly examine them. These papers might not have been ‘truly examined’ by that metric, but that’s not entirely the journal’s job (more the intellectual community, which will read and respond to or contradict the papers) annnnnnd… there still were more journals than not which wouldn’t publish these false papers.
If you set up an obvious joke twenty times a day, eventually you’ll get someone to ask you “What’s updog?” in response. Doesn’t mean you’re clever. :dubious:
A definition, sure. But not the definition. Not the only definition. Like saying that the definition of “Right” is the diametric opposite of left, and not accepting that it also means correct.
You are claiming that it is wrong to call these acts fraud, and you are choosing only to cherry pick a single entry of a dictionary definition in order to justify that, while ignoring the other definitions in the very same cite.
It was certainly fraud. He was not representing the truth of who he was and what he was about. Unethical is in the eye of the beholder, I personally wasn’t a big fan of it. But, once again, because you did not see anyone calling it fraud or unethical doesn’t mean that there were not those calling it just that.
Heck, plenty of experiments in psychology, behavioral economics, and other fields involve the researchers trying to trick subjects into believing that the experiment is measuring one thing when they are actually measuring something else. Is that fraud and unethical too? If so, our definitions are far apart. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
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Psychology experiments have very strict controls specifically for that reason. If you have ever participated in one, then you would also know that at the end, they are required to debrief you, and to tell you what the experiment was actually about. They also just use statistical data from their observations, not identifying individual behaviors. People also know that they are participating in a psychology study. They may not know exactly what it is about, but they are aware that they are being studying as to their reactions to various environments and stimuli, they know that there may be things that they do not expect. They know that their identities are being protected. They know that when this is all said and done, they won’t go home to their family who will make fun of them for being tricked into saying an ethnic slur.
If you are really trying to compare this to a psychology experiment, then you need to show that they followed the protocols required for psychology experiments. Did they?
I guess you’ll just have to disagree with pretty much the entire world, because the very narrow definition that you have picked here is not how anyone else would use it.
Keerect. One of my daughter’s PhDs is in psychology, and she knew the IPRB rules intimately.
In any case you’d hope that academicians would have higher standards than comedians. These three clowns clearly do not.