Notwithstanding the OP’s lamentations, I’ll still trust science more than any religion, thank you very much.
In 1956 Horace Miner published “Body Rituals of the Nacirema” in American Anthropologist. Rather than a serious study, it was in fact a satirization of studies that represent distinctive cultures as narrowminded and defective without any insight or knowledge of the specific beliefs or values of the culture.
In other words, a completely made up, fraudulent paper.
The original article is now a staple used in anthropology texts to teach Miner’s message. Indeed, it’s now being deconstructed with debate over whether Miner himself trivialized and dismissed actual Native American cultures.
The thread title is interesting. Did anyone in this operation commit fraud other than the hoaxters themselves?
And what exactly are the implications? John Stossel has an interest in generally discrediting science and anything that’s counters his conservative ideas. That’s the ax he is grinding.
But what do we think he has proven? That science shouldn’t be trusted on other issues like mental health and homosexuality, climate science, evolution, health care and economics?
Is this just an excuse to discount any evidence when taking policy positions, because some hoaxters fooled some journal publishers? Don’t believe scientists when they say that homosexuality cures are abusive scams because someone somewhere once published a fraudulent article?
What do you think the stakes are here?
You are probably correct. The powers that be never take kindly to being rightfully ridiculed.
If journals want to be considered more trustworthy than Wikipedia or reddit they need to have high standards. We live in a world where false information and untrustworthy, either purposefully or hijacked, are used as a weapon.
For general interest, here’s a chunk of a referee report for a mathematics paper submitted to a fairly widely circulated expository journal…
When Donald Trump makes up something does it cause conservative voters to wise up and apply some king of intellectual rigor to their political views?
(Hint: the answer is no.)
The problem of people choosing to believe what they want to believe, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is much more of a right wing problem than a left wing one. And that’s not even counting the relative effects of an obscure academic journal article throwing out some bullshit and the President of the United States doing so.
Conservatives should be putting their own house in order before they start pointing fingers.
And this is even more important in the social sciences, because their subject matter is much more discursive than in more empirical sciences. That is, a publication on these topics should be viewed as a contribution to an ongoing debate, and will itself be subject to debate—in a way, these publications are themselves data, and can’t be very well judged by the same standard as, say, a physics paper, which is unambiguously either right or wrong, even if that might be hard to decide. So naturally, a bad faith actor has much more of an open gap to enter into.
So at least in part, things like the Sokal hoax simply misunderstand the subject they’re trying to attack, and use inapplicable means of judging it. Things that get published in a math journal are not subject to the same standards as things published in a journal of poetry, and anybody criticizing a poem for its mathematical inaccuracies is really just missing the point.
That said, the current academic system (across the board) is not well-designed to encourage meaningful contributions; rather, it encourages highly citable publications cranked out at high speed. As a result, many ways of gaming the system have emerged, and research gets published that never should have been (witness the reproducibility crisis in psychology, the current debates around naturalness in high energy physics, predatory journals and conferences, and AI generated nonsense accepted at conferences). So I think things like this do contribute to showing that this system needs an overhaul, and can be exploited by bad faith actors.
But it falls as far short of demonstrating that the entire discipline is intellectually corrupt as the Bogdanov affair does of demonstrating that all of high energy physics is bunk.
Lol. How does Trump find his way into every thread? His orangeness is truly omnipresent.
Look, politicians have always lied or stretched the truth. Academic journals and legitimate newspapers aren’t suppose to be in the business of propaganda. Outside their editorial and cartoon sections that is.
Advanced math papers are incomprehensible to every except experts in the relevant field. That’s certainly true, and likewise true for physics, engineering, etc… That’s because they deal with topics completely foreign to the experience of most people. It’s simply impossible to write a paper about high-energy particle physics that a layman could understand while still being rigorous.
But these journals instead write articles dealing with jobs, family life, shopping, newspapers and other common media. That’s the stuff of everyday life, so their articles should be easy for anyone to understand. Let me put it this way: if the scholars who publish in these journals honestly believe that they have something important to say about racism, sexism, or homophobia, wouldn’t they want the message to be clear and readable for as many people as possible? Writing mountains of impenetrable jargon would be the logical course for scholars who know, deep down or maybe subconsciously, that they’re not really saying anything.
Bottom line is this. In hard science journals, there is a difference between valid and invalid research, right? It’s based on the scientific method. Research which can be replicated is valid, otherwise it’s not valid. But what is the difference between a valid and invalid research paper in “Feminist Geography”?
Because the whole point of the hoax was to show that these subfields within academia are biased. They will publish anything that purports to find sexism, racism, homophobia, “fat-phobia”, and so forth. The more of these topics that you squeeze into an article, the more likely that the article will be published. Meanwhile, these journals won’t publish anything that challenges left-wing beliefs. If we read the current issues of all the journals that got hoaxed, would we find a single article challenging the claim that “patriarchy” exists? Or a single article challenging any progressive belief, except for those demanding even more left-leaning positions?
The squirrel article would seem to fit this pattern exactly. You say it’s about how “negative rhetoric used about a newly invasive squirrel species has a lot of semantic overlap with negative rhetoric used about, say, human immigrants”. Maybe it is; I’m not paying the $43.00 to get the full text. But from the abstract:
…this case presents a unique opportunity to question and re-theorize the ontological given of ‘otherness’ that manifests, in part, through a politics whereby animal food choices ‘[come] to stand in for both compliance and resistance to the dominant forces in [human] culture’. I, therefore, juxtapose feminist posthumanist theories and feminist food studies scholarship to demonstrate how eastern fox squirrels are subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking in the popular news media…
So a social science article about squirrels has to prove that they’re “subjected to gendered, racialized, and speciesist thinking”. You can’t even write about squirrels unless you make it about gender and race.
How would you know? Those people are would be social engineers. They support reforming society on new basis. If they’re bullshiters it could have tremendously bad consequences. I really think that people who don’t bat an eye when you’re talking about chaining white students and ignoring their pleas and accept that as valid “science” are a serious danger for society, on the same level as, say, white supremacists on the other side. Denouncing their bullshit, especially when you see that they receive significant recognition (like being head of university departments or such), are influential, and that ideas based on their “science” are spreading is of great importance.
I’m sure you’d have less issues with showing the truth equally bullshit social “science” if it was coming from the other side, wouldn’t dismiss it as unimportant, and at the contrary would consider it a very important endeavor.
So, no, I’m not going to admit that.
The “powers that be” rightfully get pissed when others use their academic credentials to commit fraud. If they were all that committed to expose wrong-doing, they could have exposed fraudulent papers that had already published. All they have done is pulled an elaborate prank that besmirches both them and the institutions that (formerly) trust them.
Conservatives lamenting duplicity in science isn’t just motes and beams, it’s motes and forests.
No. All of the specialized fields start out studying the very ordinary (since at the time, nobody knew these foreign topics where a thing, so how’d you start out studying them?). Physics studies what stuff is made off, and how it behaves. How it falls down, say, or what happens if you break it apart. Ordinary stuff. It just so happens that, after a couple of hundred years of diligent study, we’ve discovered that there’s a very deep explanatory bottom beyond the ordinary stuff—and it’s there that things get a bit less ordinary.
There’s no reason at all to assume that the same isn’t true in the social sciences—that beyond jobs, family life, shopping and so on being the way they are is a deep and counterintuitive explanatory bottom as removed from everyday experience with jobs as general relativity is from throwing pebbles into ponds. So as with any expert topic, that you as a non-expert find its jargon difficult isn’t in and of itself a strike against the discipline, but merely tells you you’re not an expert.
Even in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, things really aren’t that simple. Just witness the recent resurgence of the String Wars, with books like Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math and Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe, which essentially argue that large parts of modern theoretical physics basically have more to do with social factors than solid science (so shouldn’t we try and study such social factors?).
Indeed, even philosophically, drawing the line between legitimate and illegitimate research (the demarcation problem) is an important, and by most accounts unsolved, issue (no, Popper didn’t come down from on high to settle this once and for all).
That’s not to say that what’s being researched in the social sciences is not influenced by fads, and what’s being published is not subject to ideological bias. But this doesn’t point to an intrinsic fault with the discipline so much as to one with human nature.
And, as has been noted in this thread, the corrective measures to mitigate the influence of this flaw have actually worked: they had to pull the plug on their operation early, because their bullshit research was getting identified as such.
So, despite the fact that even in the hardest of sciences, nobody knows of a comprehensive way to tell legitimate facts from fiction or fraud, even in this case of deliberate and carefully crafted fakery, it was apparently possible to tell valid from invalid research. If anything, that’s a point in favor of the legitimacy of the targeted fields.
There’s nothing inherently wrong or even surprising with a legitimate paper not being easily understandable by the general public. Even if it touches on topic that is interesting for this general public. Psychology is of interest for the general public, and I wouldn’t expect a legitimate psychology paper to be easily understandable for instance (not that I necessarily assume that all research in psychology is legitimate, by the way). If you think you’ve established something that should be known by the general public, you can then expose them in general media or in books in a way that is understandable.
I also don’t necessarily assume that people dealing with bullshit science realize at any level that they are. I would in fact tend to assume that most of them are honestly convinced of the validity of their claims. It’s not difficult to see that many people honestly believe in, say, conspiracy theories or outlandish religious claims and build whole systems of thought around their bullshit beliefs in perfectly good faith. If you’re operating inside an echo chamber, surrounded by people who have swallowed the same bullshit you did, and can figure out some explanation as for why the outside world is out to get you (which wouldn’t be difficult in the realm of social sciences), you can easily spend your life never second-guessing your established beliefs and producing more bullshit, fully convinced that you’re bringing enlightenment to the world.
Undermining science? Stossel is part of the conservative wingnut movement to undermine higher education.
58% of Republicans and right-leaning independents say college education is hurting the country.. Not coincidentally, Republican voters increasingly are not college-educated.
Nothing makes conservatives who never went to college feel better about themselves than to believe higher education is all a scam. *We don’t need no stinkin’ college. And we don’t trust people who use big words and are hard for us to follow. * Add the carefully nurtured perception that colleges turn students into raging liberals, and you can see what Stossel and his ilk are up to.
IOW, there’s no “fraud in academia” that this so-called project exposed. It “exposed” fallibility, or at worst, confirmation bias. Quick, light the torches.
Swear to Og, if right-wingers committed half the brainpower they waste on little oneupmanship games like these into something constructive, we’d have warp drive, the cure for cancer, and every missing sock that vanished in the dryer by now.
So, this finally explains how so many otherwise well-educated scientists got conned by the whole “global warming” hoax. Libbruls pwned!
You’re setting up a false dichotomy here. Advanced studies and knowledge are advanced studies and knowledge, regardless of whether you believe as a layman that you are sure you know what should or shouldn’t be obvious.