From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Reactions to an elaborate academic-journal hoax, dubbed “Sokal Squared” by one observer, came fast and furious on Wednesday. Some scholars applauded the hoax for unmasking what they called academe’s leftist, victim-obsessed ideological slant and low publishing standards. Others said it had proved nothing beyond the bad faith and dishonesty of its authors.
Three scholars — Helen Pluckrose, a self-described “exile from the humanities” who studies medieval religious writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University — spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrate and parody what they call “grievance studies,” and submitted them to “the best journals in the relevant fields.” Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors “had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded.” A skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising questions about some of the papers over the summer.
Beyond the acceptances, the authors said, they also received four requests to peer-review other papers “as a result of our own exemplary scholarship.” And one paper — about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore. — “gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.”
Not all readers accepted the work as laudable scholarship. National Reviewtook “Helen Wilson,” the fictional author of the dog-park study, to task in June for her approach. “The whole reasoning behind Wilson’s study,” wrote a staff writer, Katherine Timpf, “is the belief that researching rape culture and sexuality among dogs in parks is a brilliant way to understand more about rape culture and sexuality among humans. This is, of course, idiotic. Why? Because humans are not dogs.”
. . . .
The trolling trio wondered, they write, if a journal might even “publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” Yup. “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” was accepted by the feminist social-work journal Affilia.
. . . .
“Three intrepid academics,” wrote Yascha Mounk, an author and lecturer on government at Harvard, “just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals. Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia.”
In the original Sokal Hoax, in 1996, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal published a bogus paper that took aim at some of the same targets as his latter-day successors.
Others were less receptive than Mounk. “This is a genre,” tweeted Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke, “and they’re in it for the lulz” — the laughs. “Best not to lose sight of that.”
“Good work is hard to do,” he wrote, “incentives to publish are perverse; there’s a lot of crap out there; if you hate an area enough, you can gin up a fake paper and get it published somewhere if you try. The question is, what do you hate? And why is that?”
Reviews of several of the papers “were partly conditional on claims to have done some sort of actual (very bad) fieldwork,” Healy noted.
. . . .
“I am so utterly unimpressed,” wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, “by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it.”
Karen Gregory, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote that “the chain of thought and action that encourages you to spend 10 months ‘pulling a fast one’ on academic journals disqualifies you from a community of scholarship. It only proves you are a bad-faith actor.”
. . . .
Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian, reached by phone in Portland, said the papers that were rejected serve as a control of sorts. Better yet, they said, consider this meta-control thought experiment: Look at your journals and the articles they published, and see if you can distinguish them from the hoax articles. If the answer is often no, then there is your control.
Mounk, by phone, also said the control-group criticism is misguided. He called it a “confused attempt to import statistics into a question where it doesn’t apply.” If the authors were claiming that their work proves that some publications are, say, 50 percent more susceptible to hoaxes than the average, or that 100 percent of articles published are nonsense because these seven articles were accepted, then you would obviously need controls. But the authors “do nothing of the sort. They demonstrate that it’s possible, with relatively little effort, to get bullshit published.” It “sows deep doubt” about the nature of the academic enterprise in these disciplines.
. . . .
If the three are exiled from academe, said Mounk, that will be unjust and a shame. Through “courage and quite a lot of work,” they have shown that “clearly there’s a big corner of academia where the emperors wear no clothes.” He called the hoax “a more serious contribution to our understanding of the world than many Ph.D. theses.” The three of them, Mounk said, “should absolutely be celebrated.”
Link to the rest at The Chronicle of Higher Education
they couda done beter by getting a trad contract for satire. Their ‘studies’ would live then.
Id have to look at the journals creds who pub’d them online. Plus those who didnt accept and those that were pending.
Their experience is not mine; the journals with creds go through often more than one peer review to pub an article. But then we come through medical schools, not retired, refugee or etc states.
The precis in most of these appear to be coming before first readers with all red flags burning. You’d have to be dead to think to pass them. The papers/studies are to say where the funding money came from, and this is verified. There are other points missing that make me wonder what the journals actually are and who they are run by
I’d have to see the journals editorial and peer review board names.
These weren’t fly-by-night pay-to-play journals. These were serious publications.
“Air quotes” around serious, right? 😉
People take ’em seriously.
I knew a guy at work who took Meatloaf’s TWO OUT OF THREE AIN’T BAD seriously. Said it touched his heart. And he definitely was serious. TMI but some folks…
Anyway, some folks don’t recognize parody when they see it. Especially if it hits too close to home.
What? He wanted the job, he needed the job, he just didn’t love the job? Yeah two out of three is bad … 😛
That I could accept.
But he was talking about his lady friend, just like the song.
That makes it even then because I have known some ladies like that as well. 😉
To me, all this is stupid piled on stupid. Honest people are easy to trick because they assume they are dealing with people as honest as themselves. That’s not smart, but easily excusable, yet nothing changes.
The more people expect honesty, the more vulnerable they are to dishonesty. That’s the way of the world.
Grifters say you can’t con an honest person.
Some make a living that way.
For a while, anyway.
Don’t underestimate people’s sense of self-importance.
I’m honest. Now, publish my stuff regardless of how stupid it is.
Ah, but it’s not what people are buying, just ask us. (We don’t accept it so of course it doesn’t sell! 😛 )
This doesn’t even slightly surprise me. Every time I am stupid enough to log into Facebook I see otherwise intelligent people sharing obvious fake propaganda pics.
It would take less than a minute to research them, but instead because it fits with their political view they pass them along unchallenged.
The fact that most papers are on new topics, or holes in knowledge, makes it even harder to challenge them without repeating whatever research is done. So if they accept that the papers are in good faith, they often have to go with their gut in the end despite claims to rigorously review submitted papers.
The hype around the EM drive come to mind for example.
Great stuff. I wonder how many citations they got?
God Bless “The Conceptual Penis.”
For another take, see
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/05/boghossian-lindsay-and-pluckrose-are-simply-incompetent-hacks/
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/03/give-it-a-rest-boghossian-and-pals/
Reading that, sounds like somebody’s ox got gored.
If the people pulling this off are “incompetent hacks” what does that say about the people who accepted for publication the work they did?
Why they were the innocent victims of fiendish master-minds of diabolical cunning, who just happened to be incompetent hacks, too!
The trio who pulled this off also claimed they were offered the chance to peer review other submitted papers, but turned it down due to the nature of what they were doing.
Potentially, it shows that if you’re saying the Right Things, no one questions your bonifides.
The flipside is, if you do serious research on Things Not To Be Discussed, you can be ejected from academia for life. Look at what “the Bell Curve” did to Mr. Murray. It’s not that they didn’t like the answer, they didn’t like the question.
It’s true, blacks and native Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites, that’s why they were conquered so easily.
That doesn’t mean we should treat them any differently, but it does explain a lot of things and why many people are opposed to mixed race marriages, the children will be genetically inferior.
Can’t tell if serious, or attempting to mock the straw version of The Bell Curve.
No, I’m being serious, though perhaps I could’ve been a little clearer in my language.
Murrays research shows that the average black is less intelligent than the average white, which isn’t to say of course that there aren’t intelligent blacks and less intelligent whites as well.
My problem is that all of grievance studies is based on the idea that people should be treated equally and then equal outcomes will develop, but this is infeasible when considering genetics.
Still, I find it quite sad that you jump to accusing me of attacking a strawman when I dare to say something that is not politically correct, the problem is not just confined to academia it seems.
Poe’s Law strikes again. I’ll leave aside the ludicrous notion that the European colonization of Africa and Asia demonstrated genetic superiority–as well claim that the Romans were genetically superior to the Gauls and Britons–and address the IQ issue.
Murray wrote the Bell Curve within a historical eyeblink of the end of Jim Crow, and IQ tests measure abstract reasoning capability, which requires proper training in addition to natural talent. Said training, at the time, was not as good for blacks as it was for whites. I’ll also point out that, based on the data we have, variation between ethnic groups of the same race is higher than between races.
Are you familiar with Jared Diamond’s GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL? It was even made into a PBS series. (Available on DVD, too.)
He takes a more neutral look at the historical disparities between societies and arrives at a pretty compelling thesis based primarily on geography, zoology, and uncontroversial facts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
His thesis boils down to: you work with what you have and it helps to be first in technology.
Throughout history the dominant societies started out with more (material and zoological) resources and better technology than their neighbors.
The one thing nobody can dispute is that in encounters between civilizations the ones with the stronger focus and better tech always come out on top. The ones doodling on the margins, focusing on trivialities, and riddled with factionalism always fall to the more focused and ruthless one.
It offers serious food for thought.
Also worth looking into, though a bit less rigorous but more directly applicable to present times is the Strauss-Howe theory of *American* generational cycles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory
They pretty effectively predicted today’s mess as an inevitable outcome of the 60’s boom in THE FOURTH TURNING.
We are in the midst of what Asimov termed a SELDON CRISIS, with internal strife blinding us to the bigger external threat.
The culture wars will continue until either the system collapses or an external threat (Russia/China/both) refocuses the country. And there is no guarantee which will come to pass.
Arguing over past grievances and genomes is what weakens us and makes us vulnerable. Try looking outwards to see the seeds of the new Chinese empire in south asia, especially in their encirclement of India or the Russians encirclement of Europe. There’s reasons the Russians are in Syria and the Chinese in africa. Geopolitics don’t care about identity politics.
There will be a new Pearl Harbor. In space, most likely.
Try imagining life without satellites to see why.
None of that matters if a 55-year-old guy in a dress can’t use the ladies room.
“Try imagining life without satellites to see why.”
Ha! I had to explain to a couple of beta readers that no, in deep space you can’t just yell for help if there’s a problem. Of course they also couldn’t imagine having to wait for a ship to come in to bring the news of other places.
A couple well-placed EMPs and it’s the wild wild west all over again – and we don’t have near enough horses to move the food into the towns/cities – if it could even be coordinated in the first place!
Plenty of guns where the food is, though.
The farmers are safe enough, a big EMP means no word of what’s going on, no cell phones or GPS, most city types couldn’t find their way out of town – much less walk it as their cars are dead too … 😉
What about straw women? Why are the straw men always men? Are we so cowed by the #MeToo movement that we’re afraid to attack straw women?
We’re too lazy to bother with them – which will also trigger those that would be triggered if we did. 😛
They were quantifying the extent of the ongoing idiocy, how entrenched and parochial the orthodoxy has become that obvious parodies wrapped in the right buzzwords gets embraced with nary a shred of critical analysis.
Then again in those circles, a crucifix in urine is “art”.
We’re simply too afluent a society, that such useless wastes of DNA can actually subsist off our excess productivity.
The russians just might be right about the west.
I agree with your overall point, though I don’t know if you can say that no critical analysis was done. From what I understand, the researchers had 20 papers and submitted 48 times meaning that each paper was submitted an average of 2.5 times, and of those, only seven were published.
When it comes to the Hitler chapter, the paper had to be resubmitted and edited greatly, and the most offensive parts taken out completely.
I think for a more detailed analysis, they would have to submit to multiple journals in different fields to see whether the social and humanities journals are more susceptible to this kind of thing, because I’ve seen some really crazy stuff published in top rated biology and physics journals as well.
But the authors … demonstrate that it’s possible, with relatively little effort, to get bullshit published.” It “sows deep doubt” about the nature of the academic enterprise in these disciplines.
Was their nature ever really in doubt? I mean, the study is amusing and all, and it calls for some soul-searching on the part of some — Mein Kampf passed muster for pity’s sake — but didn’t the humanities disciplines destroy their credibility decades ago? You no longer have to know anything to get a degree. You don’t even have to know how to read. Then there was that article in “The Atlantic” a while back, on John Ionnides’ discovery that peer review doesn’t mean what we were led to believe it means in the medical realm, either.
I just don’t know that we learned anything new with this latest hoax. It was funny. But also sad.
We learned that some of those that think they should be taken seriously shouldn’t.
Publish or die. Peer review. Slant and low publishing standards … so why are we sending kids to these places –
other than to run themselves into debt?
‘Hilarious and Delightful’ gets my vote.