But they have said those things. Every time someone makes up a stereotypical social science paper title, in this thread or elsewhere, they are implicitly claiming that the terms are meaningless and that they can tell just by looking at it, despite not having any experience in that field and not knowing what the technical meaning is of the jargon they find so obviously devoid of meaning.
It’s not just titles I could bring up. I could also post faked fluorescence microscopy or Western blot images that made it through publication, see if anyone can tell the difference, ask if that proves biological science is so devoid of meaning that no paper is worth publication, but somehow that sort of thing leads to people “simply” arguing how to best detect malice and not the wholesale and self-satisfied attacks we see on the field such as in this thread.
I don’t know when or where you went to college, what you majored in, or whether you graduated, but your ideas of what college is like today suggest your current concept of university life is taken from people like Stossel and not recent and objective experience.
Let’s start with your last statement, that academics can very well be a waste of money. That’s true if, like John Stossel, you lackeintellectual curiosity and admit to daydreaming through class. It can also be a waste of money if you attend college with the sole objective of increasing your earnings but major in an area that’s not likely to pay well, such as myth and folklore, which is probably why almost nobody DOES major in those areas. So even if there WERE some sort of liberal conspiracy to get those kids into esoteric majors, it’s clearly not working. And the profs in much more popular, better-funded areas like business (#1 major) or medical sciences (#2) wouldn’t stand for it. Anyone who’s ever taught on a college campus knows that college students are not a bunch of gullible sheep ripe for the manipulating.
I agree with you that college tuition is far too high, that’s not due to diversity centers or fancy gyms. It’s due to states cutting funding. So if you TRULY feel bad about student debt, you should be eager to assume more of that burden, not less. And if you THEN want to gripe about students learning to get along with people from vastly different backgrounds than their own, you go right ahead.
Nobody is arguing academia should never be challenged, but it’s foolish to challenge it on false premises.
Please cite that the jargon is for the purpose of obfuscation or is pointless. Every field has jargon – why is scientific jargon better than legal jargon which better than business jargon which is better than social science jargon?
Jargon is a way of being very precise without having to explain everything over and over to an audience who should know better.
Unless you are studying the effect of Gender Normative Language on supermarket sales. Which probably wouldn’t be necessary because the marketing types have it figured out already.
Remember, the audience for papers is the reviewers and others in the field, who are going to understand the title better than Joe Schmo. If the researcher writes for the general public, the title will be simplified to match the audience. Why is this hard for you to understand?
It’s not hard to figure out their motivations, they have explained why they carried out that hoax, it was to expose junk science and gave out examples:
An ideological takeover of science is cause for concern, do you know about Lysenkoism?
Well, thanks for showing ITR champion my earlier point, that broad brush is what guys like Stossel wants everyone to look at; as I pointed already, it is OK in my book to ridicule journals that should not be taken seriously until others replicate the studies. But falling for the big brush Stossel made is underwhelming. (he did show very important journals at the beginning of his piece expecting others to treat them like the sorry ones the hoaxers swindled)
Are any of those links NOT from The Washington Beacon? I got tired of clicking on the links only to find they were all from the same highly biased source.
Let’s remember , part of the reason for publication is to invite both challenges and other researchers to duplicate results.
Special relativity was widely received as ludicrous after publication. Only through publication did it have the opportunity to be challenged or finally accepted.
It’s not really the responsibility of the journal to reproduce results and verify how correct a paper is.
Just basically whether it is even worth an opportunity to be criticized.
In the field of thaumaturgy, the issue of fraud seldom arises. Either one has, or has not, summoned a dark demonic entity. Duplicating experimental results is not practical. Attention to detail is crucial, as even something so simple as drawing a pentagram can be devilishly complicated.
The article quotes the authors of the hoax, and they cite the studies they bring up as examples.
You can hear themselves explain their motivations: “we did this to expose a political corruption that is taking hold of the university” “The fields we are concerned about put social grievances ahead of objective truth” “What appears beyond dispute is that making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated” “This is deeply concerning because the work of grievance scholars goes on to be taught in classes, to design educational curricula, to be taken up by activists, to be used to influence how media is produced and to misinform journalists and politicians about the true nature of our cultural realities”*
“My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can now say with confidence these people don’t speak for us”
“Grievance studies does not continue the work of the civil rights movement, it corrupts it”* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVk9a5Jcd1k
Rejecting objective truth, calling it science and then influencing education and politics it’s absolutely a cause for concern.
In my limited experience with academia, my conclusion is that there is too much pressure on instructors to get published, and academic journals - like all publications - have space to fill and deadlines to beat.
Among the “Intellectual Dark Web” guys Joe Rogan is one of the better ones out there. It does not mean that sometimes he could fall for concerns that amount to a small hill of beans.
I was going to comment that the hoaxers should had taken on someone bigger, or someone their own size… then I realized that… yes, they did take it with someone their own size.
But In the case of sources and the gross spin they are using, nelliebly’s point is a valid one, I wanted to see if the issue that The Washington Beacon made about the glaciers paper was a valid one, and was glad to see that my bullshit detector still works properly:
For starters the Beacon, or the one telling the Beacon, forgets that the glacial research grant was not only for that social studies paper, but part of other scientific research and efforts.
The tactic then from right wing sources is to mislead many by making them think that that the focus on how women and their societies are affected by the ice loss used all that grant money, that is not the case.
OK, so just the paper and the smaller amount of money for it, should be criticized, but is that criticism even a valid one?
What it is clear is that the focus was on how unfair science and society can be when a woman’s point of view is ignored when planning for issues like disruptions in locations where populations can be affected by the loss of cap ice. It is also looking at the issues of how, even valid research, is not being taken seriously many times when woman researchers try to publish. Finally the paper was published where it was more appropriate: In the Journal Progress in Human Geography with an impact factor of 5.010.
So, the implication that more serious research regarding the measurable loss of cap ice due to human released warming gases, is not the issue here. In reality it was just a part of the grant and it was dealing with social issues that do deserve a look also.
Having then established what the focus really was then it is the time to take it with the sources.
And the point of Stossel, the Beacon, and opinion pieces from the right wing are in reality made to disparage science on the whole, and not only the ones that do deserve criticism.
You can argue that the particular journals targeted by the hoax are unimportant and I’d agree. I’m sure that the total number of people who read a typical issue of any of them is small. Indeed, the dog-humping paper may get read more than anything else that Gender, Place, and Culture will ever publish. But taken as a whole, the ‘grievance studies’ fields are having impacts in important areas beyond their sliver of academia.
To take one example, it’s a common claim among social scientists that men commit rape not because of sexual desire, but rather because of desire for power and control over women. Which is false; the scientific evidence clearly shows that sexual desire is what drives rape. It’s an important issue that police, doctors, the criminal justice system, and others need to know the truth about, so the gender studies/anthropology/sociology academics and journals that push the wrong answer may be undermining efforts to fight rape.
(I read several conservative sources daily and can’t recall ever hearing anyone advocating “trickle-down economics”. I am aware that climate change denial is commonplace on blogs, YouTube, Reddit and other such places, but I’m not aware of any fraud in academic literature on that.)
First of all, thank you for the academics on this board writing in and explaining what the process is for getting things published and peer reviewed. To be honest, I have never liked the “publish or perish” system. If I sent my son to your college I would want you to spend your time teaching him say physics or biology or how to write better than his Dad. Not spending time writing papers in order to keep your job.
Some questions: What if an author, with all the academic credentials, submitted a paper for review to some journal on say feminism, who’s conclusions were NOT going along with the standard views of those in the field? Say they proved women were NOT being discriminated? Or there wasnt any “rape culture”?
Such papers could very well send shockwaves thru the fields. People jobs depend on those findings. Legislation depends on those findings.
Would they dare publish them or would said author have to find an opposing journal that expressively promotes that different point of view?
In theStossel segment at timepoint 4:20 the hoaxers talk about getting ridiculed and spit on by their fellow staff. The very people who claim to be “open-minded”.
if that actually happened, I might surmise that their fellow staff members are rightfully pissed that any papers they try to publish are going to be highly suspect by association.
I am aware of some of this. I have a relative who’s an assistant professor and his job is solely funded thru grants and he gets paid VERY WELL thru those grants. BUT, you dont get such grants if you dont get stuff published. He also gets paid to do research and lectures and advise different groups on his field of expertise.
