"Sokal Squared" project exposes fraud in academia

Great Debates
121

I find it hard to believe that we’re really arguing about this, but:

[ul]
[li]This has nothing do to with any meme from right-wing media or from anywhere else. I had not heard or seen a single word about the squirrel paper until I found it in the journal and posted about it here. I don’t have the slightest clue why you would think that it’s a right-wing meme.[/li][li]I’ve traveled across the country to many places where the emerald ash borer is a threat, participated in city planning meetings about the topic, and so forth. I have heard the phrase “chink beetles” a grand total of exactly zero times. In fact the “Asian” at the start of the name is, I’d estimate, only used about 1% of the time, and I have never heard anyone draw any connection between the species and Asian people or immigrants in any way, shape, or form.[/li][li]For that matter, in all the discussions that I have ever had about any invasive species, I have never heard any use of a racial slur of any kind.[/li][li]If you’re used to squirrels of one color, and then squirrels of another color invade your neighborhood, it is entirely logical to note that the new squirrel species is a different color and came from elsewhere. For that matter whenever anyone encounters two species or breeds of animal that differ by color, it is entirely logical to note the color difference, and whenever an invasive species appears, it is entirely logical to note that it is an invasive species. This obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone’s beliefs about race or immigration. There are black labs, chocolate labs, and golden labs, which differ by color. Noting this truth is not racialized thinking. Saying it is not racialized speech.[/li][/ul]

The bottom line is this: human experience is vast. All of us think about and talk about countless thousands or maybe millions of topics in our lifetime, and the enormous majority of those topics are completely unrelated to race or gender or any of the other victim/oppressor paradigms that fill up the pages of the journals that we’ve been talking about. But the academics who write this stuff have shrunk their minds to the point where they seemingly can’t talk or think about any topic other than race or gender or sexuality. Thus the endless of explosion false claims that this word or phrase or behavior or argument is all about race or gender.

(As one obvious example of how this type of thinking is spreading outside academia, just consider how much talk about movies center around how many women and minorities are in a given movie, rather than the quality of the movie. Most people don’t care about who’s represented in a movie; they care about whether the movie is fun to watch. People lashed out against The Last Jedi because they though it sucked, not because they’re racist or sexist.)

122

One of the things I most admire about academic science is its sheer ruthlessness. Scientists compete, like the violinist wants to be first violinist, the baseball player want’s .500 batting average, the primary difference is that the urge to be admired is expressed through science.

And the Golden Orgasm is the brilliant new theory. And for every genius so blessed, there are ten very smart people who don’t buy it. At least. And so it begins, and so it goes. Perhaps the motivation may have a tinge of pettiness, but the effect of policing is healthy.

Main reason my convictions about global warming are so solid, I watched the fight over a generation. Thunder and lightning, hammer and tong, most of it in tones of reasoned gentility that our Mods can only dream of. A cool and austere form of combat.

The consensus has formed, the jury is in. It took one hell of a long time, but that speaks well of it. Minds changed by sheer force of fact and reason, a wonder for the ages. If I were not a mathtard, I might appreciate it even more, but I am a tone-deaf man admiring the orchestra.

123

Because you can find soundbites about it from Spring 2017 all over right-wing media, including at Breitbart and PowerLine blog.

You still seem to be missing the point. The issue is not about people having problems with an invasive rodent population. The issue is about people expressing negative reactions to animal species by means of racialized or otherwise bigoted rhetoric. Like this, for example:

Sure, but one of the things that we as a world culture have been realizing over these past couple of decades is that a lot of the ingrained unconscious habits in our thinking and talking are subtly influenced by race and gender and other such paradigms, and we don’t magically overcome that effect just by consciously disclaiming bigotry.

Look, for example, at the recent flap I mentioned earlier over the remark by Rep. Ilhan Omar about politicians being influenced by pro-Israel donors, and whether or not it was anti-Semitic. It is not innately worthless or pointless to examine ways in which systemic prejudices and privileges inadvertently (or not so inadvertently, in the case of folks like the users of that charming idiom “squigger”) color our use of language.

People can have whatever negative opinion they like about any pop-culture product, for whatever reason they like. But if you imagine that negative reactions to The Last Jedi were all completely unrelated to racism or sexism or other forms of bigotry, you are absolutely deluding yourself:

I just don’t get why you’re so bent out of shape at the idea of somebody recognizing the fairly self-evident fact that the cultural legacy of various forms of bigotry still has an effect on our culture and behavior even if we don’t want it to, and even if we consciously reject the open bigotry of vile assholes like those quoted above.

124

The three hoaxers are James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose. Lindsay’s PhD is in mathematics, Boghossian’s is in philosophy, and Pluckrose doesn’t have a PhD. They’re not experts in gender studies, critical race theory, or fat studies. Yet in ten months they were able to learn enough about these disciplines to produce PhD quality work. In their spare time. For a goof.

Doesn’t that imply that these disciplines aren’t worth studying at university? Like, you’ve got kids who are taking out huge student loans to learn about gender studies. What’s the point? These subjects are obviously easy enough that you don’t need professors to teach them. So why bother having and paying these professors?

125

If someone wants to pay tuition and study for a degree in worthless bullshit, shouldn’t they be free to do so? The alternative doesn’t sound very palatable, that we start laying down ideological lines of what is correct and acceptable scholarship. Besides, universities are a business like any other, just with more ruthless exploitation - if a degree isn’t putting bums on seats then it’ll be off the books in short order. And if the academics that teach it aren’t bringing in any research income, they’ll follow it out the door.

It’s true that young people are often badly advised by schools and universities on degree choice (esp if they don’t have an educated family network to help), so I have a lot of sympathy for people who take something that looks respectable on the face of it but really isn’t, or choose a university that they’re told is good but really isn’t (forensic science would be an infamous example - terrible employability and weak translation outside of the field. This is particularly an issue here in the UK as our degrees tend to be narrower than elsewhere). That’s quite a different scenario, though - I don’t think undergrads are being swindled by these nonsense degrees, as such, as they pretty much do what they say on the tin.

Besides, the sort of ersatz scholarship that the hoaxers are addressing isn’t commonly found anywhere good, nor is it prevalent at the undergrad level (at least over here). It would be more Masters qualifications where you can find the blatant bullshit, and if a bunch of Guardian readers want to pay for a silly hobby MA in these areas I don’t really see the harm.

126

Here I thought the SDMB was left-leaning, but since there’s general support for nuclear power, GMOs, and the rest of the things you ranted against here, I guess we’re a right-leaning board after all. I’m not planning on addressing your cite-free rant point-by-point, but you’re living in the past. Scientists are overwhelmingly left-leaning now because conservatives are anti-evolution and climate change denialists.

Thanks for the cites about jargon that I asked you for. Very helpful.

127

Ok, they might be business and medical majors but how many courses in “grievance studies” are they required to take anyways as part of the general curriculum? No, college students are not sheep. BUT, they are required to pay for such courses. What happens in orientation programs that again, students are required to take? Why have many colleges dropped requirements for courses such as US history in favor of courses in things like diversity?

No, you are wrong. Money for diversity programs and the people who run them is getting bigger and bigger all the time. How many colleges drop science researchers and instead hire “diversicrats” such as at UCD “Chancellor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”? Who pays her salary or the salaries of the other “diversity” leaders?

The student’s tuition.

Quit blaming lack of funding from the state.

128

No, the university then requires students to take courses in things like “diversity studies” as part of general education requirements in order to get other degrees.

129

Do you have a cite for any of this crap? You think that hiring a couple of gender studies professors (who probably don’t make a lot and don’t need labs) costs as much as cuts in state funding? Or fancy new dorms or football stadiums or even coaches salaries?
Cite that science people are getting fired in favor of gender studies? You are aware that science professors often bring in funding, right?
Any place I’ve worked an HR person would have found a course in diversity a lot more useful than a course in history. Look at how some tech companies are getting slammed on these issues.

When I went to MIT the class was about 16% female. I’m sure the admissions office would have said that they couldn’t get any more. Then they decided to make an effort, and now MIT is I think more than 50% female. Maybe people hired for to drive diversity have some value in a university, or a company.

130

Cites that this is actually happening? The vast majority of colleges and universities in the US have a pretty traditional set of gen ed requirements. I am not aware of any large-scale movement to drop or replace history requirements with something else. Some institutions include, among these requirements, that students take some sort of course with a multicultural or global component. Usually this can be fulfilled with somewhere between one and three courses, and there are a wide variety of courses that fulfill it. My current university has no such requirement, so I’ll use my graduate alma mater as an example. UNC-Chapel Hill requires that students take one course designated as a “US Diversity” course, one designated as “Beyond the North Atlantic,” and one as “Global Issues.” While some of the courses with these designations fall into the general category of ethnic or gender / sexuality studies (which I assume are the academic fields you’re sneeringly calling “grievance studies”), many do not. You can fulfill these requirements by taking “American History to 1865,” introductory Polish, and “The United States in World War II” if you want to avoid getting Grievance Studies Cooties all over yourself.

131

I’m correct, and I’ll quit blaming it on lack of funding from the state when that’s no longer true. See, I RESEARCH instead of just posting stuff as if it were true merely because that’s the way I want to see the world. You rarely post links, but since evidence and cites are important, here are some to show that TUITION HAS GONE UP IN LARGE PART DUE TO CUTS IN STATE FUNDING:

Cite.

[Disinvestment accounted for a greater share of tuition and fee increases more recently, though. It is responsible for 29.8 percent of the tuition and fee revenue increase since 2000 and 41.2 percent since 2008.
[/QUOTE]
"]Cite](
[QUOTE).

Cite.

The fact is, states slashed funding during the Great Recession, and they haven’t restored it. Just because you don’t want that to be true doesn’t change the fact it is.

132

My son is in math, and he wanted to take a breadth course in archaology. Unfortunately, almost all the humanities courses, including archaeology, required a prerequisite course in ‘diversity and social justice’. My guess is that they don’t want anyone taking these courses until they’ve been indoctrinated into the ‘right’ way to think about them.

Of course, he would have had to pay for the course, and it would have replaced one of his other breadth courses. So, he didn’t get to learn about archaology.

It’s a required course for all students in the humanities. It’s also political indoctrination masquerading as education.

133

so its all the commie eggheads that’s hijacked the education system ike Nixon and agnew eh ?

Cause god forbid that people learn critical thinking that doesn’t help the white mans good christan corporations ……

134

Oh, I see you’ve taken the course.

Yes, we ‘white men’ are just the scourge of the Earth. And we’re all Christians, and so are our corporations, none of which are run by anyone but white men.

135

29.8 percent and 41.2 percent are both less than 50 percent. In other words, it is not true that cuts in state spending are responsible for most growth in college tuition. Further, cuts in state spending would only affect public universities, not private, but tuition has soared upwards in both public and private institutions.

Let’s try this.

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
…
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general.
…
a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

So Urbanredneck is correct that an increasing share of money is getting diverted to the university bureaucrats rather than to teaching. Bureaucrats dealing with “diversity” are one part of the problem, though obviously not the entire problem. For example, at the University of Michigan there are over 100 such bureaucrats with a net budget of over 11 million dollars.

136

What Sam ignores was something that I observed a long time ago when I worked there, in ‘left wing central’, The University of California at Berkeley, in the big department of economics and business building there was no painting or statue of Marx, but those biggies like Alfred Marshall or Adam Smith. Not much in the Humanities departments too, for that one has to go to areas like Critical Theory at Townsend Center for the Humanities. Point here is that even in Berkeley a lot of teaching is dedicated to not put guys like Marx in a pedestal.

Seems that there is really more fear than anything else when some areas of knowledge are avoided. Now on more recent times I had an encounter with a teacher aid in a public charter high school I substituted once. One time she saw me teaching a science class about brain development and how it works with an intro from Crash Course she complained that it mentioned evolution and it was too “Darwinian” :rolleyes: I managed to convince her to not complaining to management (It actually was okayed already by them) when I pointed that students need to learn at least what the other side learns, as in not as a need to adopt those views, but as a way to learn what the other side does learn. (A bit :slight_smile: but :frowning: at the same time)

Sam sounds a lot like that teacher aid. I was actually sincere about what I said to the student aid there, I do agree with evolution and I know some science but knows more about history and social studies, trying to avoid learning about how and why others learn and learned about societies is really more like an illogical appeal to fear.

137

Like this, right?

S O K A L
O P E R A
K E N E K
A R E P O
L A K O S

138

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with threads like this, and then something like this happens and I know exactly why :smiley:

139

Did you even read? I didnt cite hiring a professor. I cited hiring a CHANCELLOR. An administrator. A person whom they created a job for. What do they make? Something like $385.000!Not to mention their state money paid for car, student tuition money paid for travel budget, plus other perks!

You can bet parents love the idea how they are scraping by topay for a chancellors car!

Thats NOT a professor who’s salary depends upon grant money. Thats an administrator who’s salary comes from either the state money (which is supposed to go to things like paying for part of students tuition or teachers salaries) or from tuition. And as ITR Champion has pointed out, colleges have alot of administrator bloat.

And what the heck does a “Diversity Chancellor” do besides sit on on meetings once in a while? You can bet they DONT teach freshmen algebra or stay up late grading english papers! Heck I’d be surprised if a chancellor knows more than a couple of students names.

140

The Chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion at Berkeley has a staff of 150 people and an annual budget of $17 million dollars.