The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
The "paper" itself isn't that long. My favourite part of the paper is:
Quote:
Manspreading — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide — is akin to raping the empty space around him.
Once post-modernism became legitimatized in the academy - once everything we see or believe came to be regarded as a social construct - all sorts of nonsense took root.
We're learning more and more about the mind and human behaviour, with real science and empirical data to back it up. The gulf between the deeply politicized social sciences and genuine science is getting wider and wider. Much of the content taught in sociology, etc is as arcane and woolly as traditional religion.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
The Following User Says Thank You to CliffFletcher For This Useful Post:
Once post-modernism became legitimatized in the academy - once everything we see or believe came to be regarded as a social construct - all sorts of nonsense took root.
We're learning more and more about the mind and human behaviour, with real science and empirical data to back it up. The gulf between the deeply politicized social sciences and genuine science is getting wider and wider. Much of the content taught in sociology, etc is as arcane and woolly as traditional religion.
Spent a lot of time in social science faculties recently have you there, Cliff? This trite wouldn't make the reading lists of even the fringiest of gender studies classes.
Spent a lot of time in social science faculties recently have you there, Cliff?
No. But Steven Pinker has.
Spoiler!
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.
(And yes, he's talking about the humanities here, but he's come out against the dogmatic insularity of the social sciences before, namely in The Blank Slate).
And so has Debra Soh.
Spoiler!
Despite this, censorship continues to impose constraints on academics in serious ways, because there has been increasing pressure for scientific research to toe the party line. Emotional grievances are being prioritized over logic and facts. For example, in my field of sexology, even if academic researchers have tenure, they will avoid particular areas of study completely (such as the topics of gender dysphoria in children or biological sex differences in the brain) because they know their professional – and personal – reputations will be at stake if their findings aren’t socially palatable.
Many of my colleagues have been bullied into silence, terrified of becoming the newest casualty in this unpredictable war. I can’t count the number of people who have told me that they walk on eggshells, keeping a low profile, avoiding social media and interview requests, out of fear of inadvertently inciting the mob. It has become a form of mind control.
JONATHAN HAIDT: The academic world in the humanities is a monoculture. The academic world in the social sciences is a monoculture – except in economics, which is the only social science that has some real diversity. Anthropology and sociology are the worst — those fields seem to be really hostile and rejecting toward people who aren’t devoted to social justice.
JOHN LEO: And why would they be hostile?
JONATHAN HAIDT: You have to look at the degree to which a field has a culture of activism. Anthropology is a very activist field. They fight for the rights of oppressed people, as they see it. My field, social psychology, has some activism in it, but it’s not the dominant strain. Most of us, we really are thinking all day long about what control condition wasn’t run. My field really is oriented towards research. Now a lot of us are doing research on racism and prejudice. It’s the biggest single area of the field. But I’ve never felt that social psychology is first and foremost about changing the world, rather than understanding it. So my field is certainly still fixable. I think that if we can just get some more viewpoint diversity in it, it will solve the bias problem.
...JONATHAN HAIDT: This is a disaster for social science because social science is really hard to begin with. And now you have to try to explain social problems without saying anything that casts any blame on any member of a protected group. And not just moral blame, but causal blame. None of these groups can have done anything that led to their victimization or marginalization.
OHN LEO: Well, but there’s always a possibility of truth and accuracy. I mean, why is the professoriate so…
JONATHAN HAIDT: Spineless? Nowadays, a mob can coalesce out of nowhere. And so we’re more afraid of our students than we are of our peers. It is still possible for professors to say what they think over lunch; in private conversations they can talk. But the list of things we can say in the classroom is growing shorter and shorter.
JOHN LEO: This sounds like the Good Germans.
JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Exactly. It is. It’s really scary that values other than truth have become sacred. And what I keep trying to say – this comes right out of my book The Righteous Mind – is that you can’t have two sacred values. Because what do you do when they conflict? And in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.
I think that the exposure of the pay to publish problems in this article are obviously more important then the paper itself which almost read like an encoded document for the CIA.
It would be interesting to know how many professors use this type of service just to keep up their publication list and that their actual work submitted was not as much reviewed and understood, but published upon the clearing of their check.
In other words the publication's integrity itself was put on trial.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Nothing new under the sun, but I have a huge problem with this being framed as somehow a social sciences thing.
Well known fact: a lot of supposedly "peer reviewed journals" are BS. This is not a social sciences phenomenon, it's a publishing phenomenon. I'd go as far as to say that these guys are not really sceptics trying to unlight pseudoscience, but just some guys (unsurprisingly guys) purposefully framing a real issue incorrectly so they get to badmouth gender studies and social sciences in general.
Here's another example of what gets published in other fields. Digging up more examples isn't hard.
A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote it.
Quote:
The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research (SciEP) accepted the paper, but asked for a $360 fee, which I didn’t pay. Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof. Here’s the paper from the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access (MedCrave), Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (Austin) and American Research Journal of Biosciences (ARJ) I hadn’t expected this, as all those journals charge publication fees, but I never paid them a penny.
Here's an example of what "peer reviewed" can mean. In other words: just because a journal says it's peer-reviewed, doesn't make it so.
The applicant’s nom de plume was not exactly subtle, if you know Polish. The middle initial and surname of the author, Anna O. Szust, mean “fraudster.” Her publications were fake and her degrees were fake. The book chapters she listed among her publications could not be found, but perhaps that should not have been a surprise because the book publishers were fake, too.
Yet, when Dr. Fraud applied to 360 randomly selected open-access academic journals asking to be an editor, 48 accepted her and four made her editor in chief. She got two offers to start a new journal and be its editor. One journal sent her an email saying, “It’s our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities.”
In other words:
A whole bunch of "science journals" have figured out that science publishing is basically free money. The reviewers don't get paid and scientists desperate to get published are willing to pay for the privilege of getting their work out. Once people get published in a journal, they have no interest in calling those journals out because it might hurt their own careers.
It's a natural result of the "publish or perish" science funding system really.
Last edited by Itse; 07-24-2017 at 06:22 AM.
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Itse For This Useful Post:
For a minimal payment of $625, Cogent Social Sciences was ready to publish, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.”2
There seems to be a deeper problem here, however. Suspecting we may be dealing with a predatory pay-to-publish outlet, we were surprised that an otherwise apparently legitimate Taylor and Francis journal directed us to contribute to the Cogent Series.
I think this comment from that page puts this in the proper light:
Quote:
Who got hoaxed here? It looks like the respectable journal sniffed out that your stuff was stinky and decided you could be fleeced for a few bucks in a vanity publication.
Which I would agree is a problem and highlights an ethics problem with scientific journals.
However, I still think the guys writing this article are being ridiculous.
Take this part for example:
Quote:
Portland State University has a fund dedicated to paying fees for open access journals, and this particular journal qualified for disbursement. For ethical reasons, however, we did not apply for funding, which in this case was virtually guaranteed. Instead, the article was externally funded by an independent party. We never received an invoice from the journal. We did not pay to have this published.
So in other words they got someone else to shell out $600+ to publish their drivel, but go out of their way to obscure that fact and keep insisting that the main problem here is gender studies.
The article is a fair parody of some of the post-modern gibberish that gets published in gender studies journals these days. Reading it is fairly hilarious, and its accuracy is obvious just by looking at https://twitter.com/realpeerreview and seeing what gets past peer review in these fields.
That being said, this hoax failed - they tried to get it published in a bunch of journals and were rejected. Like, desk rejected, not even getting to the peer review process. Then they published it in a "pay to play" journal, and treated that as if it proved their point. Not that the point needed to be proved, but if you were trying to out a journal as having inadequate standards, well, at best, this incident was evidence to the contrary.
Moreover, here's the O.G. of academic hoaxes, writing a paper about how little they actually demonstrate even if they do go off as planned: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/noretta.html
So yeah, funny... and Lindsay and Boghossian are smart dudes with good heads on their shoulders for the most part. But their reach exceeded their grasp on this one.
It's worth listening to the podcast Lindsay did with VBW about this (they were hugely critical of him and Boghossian, and Shermer for publishing about it in Skeptic). https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/118?t=1875 - The interview starts somewhere around the 31 minute mark.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to CorsiHockeyLeague For This Useful Post:
We're learning more and more about the mind and human behaviour, with real science and empirical data to back it up.
This statement conflicts with this statement.
Quote:
The gulf between the deeply politicized social sciences and genuine science is getting wider and wider. Much of the content taught in sociology, etc is as arcane and woolly as traditional religion.
I would call bull#### on this. While I do find there is a lot of junk research going on, I don't think it is is any different in the social sciences from any of the other schools of scientific inquiry. The requirement to publish drives scientists from all schools to produce, and some of the stuff is pretty sketchy. Oh, and if you believe that the social sciences are a monoculture, try walking into any of the sciences departments and observe them. They are no different. Why? Because they all are trained to think about their subject matter in very specific ways and are from the same school of thought with the same interest. They are who they have been trained to be and who they wanted to be. This isn't news to anyone who spends five minutes on a campus.
While I do find there is a lot of junk research going on, I don't think it is is any different in the social sciences from any of the other schools of scientific inquiry. The requirement to publish drives scientists from all schools to produce, and some of the stuff is pretty sketchy. Oh, and if you believe that the social sciences are a monoculture, try walking into any of the sciences departments and observe them. They are no different. Why? Because they all are trained to think about their subject matter in very specific ways and are from the same school of thought with the same interest. They are who they have been trained to be and who they wanted to be. This isn't news to anyone who spends five minutes on a campus.
As someone who's dabbled in many social sciences, I'd actually agree that there is a real problem of worthless pseudoscience or now debunked theories being treated as relevant, and I doubt the same problem exists with hard sciences. However, it's more an issue of wasting disproportionate amounts of time with what is in essence the history of the field. (Creating a small army of confused and/or frustrated students in the process.) Whether or not for example Lacan is pseudoscience doesn't much matter because you're not expected to take it as a fact. It's just "interesting" or "a tool for analysis".
By far the worst I've gotten into is economics, where people constantly refer to unproven or in some cases even debunked macroeconomic models as if they were facts. Some of those people even make serious high-level economic decisions based on them, often causing serious harm. (Mostly to someone else.)
I took a quick look at that. You seriously think that's worth your time? That's like a parody of a some old guy frothing at the mouth for all the liberal nonsense these days.
At the top of the page, they're just repeatedly demonstrating their confusion between the concepts of heterosexuality and heteronormativity, thus completely missing the point of an article they're supposedly "poking fun at". Many articles linked are not even from peer-reviewed sources. A lot of "fun" (which sounds more like anger to me) is just about the fact that people actually study things like interpretative dance, or female queer bathhouses. Oh the morality, people study things I'm not at all interested in!
It's not like there isn't a lot of bad papers out there, but that's a pretty sad feed. I've read a lot funnier stuff by people in the actual fields. I guess the difference is that it's actually funny when the critic knows what their talking about.
The abstracts that they put up are consistently hilarious. Some of them are mind-boggling in the "how could anyone think this was worth writing about" sense. But in just about every case, it's borderline Onion material. I mean, here's the most recent one:
How is that not inherently funny?
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 07-24-2017 at 09:04 AM.
The abstracts that they put up are consistently hilarious. Some of them are mind-boggling in the "how could anyone think this was worth writing about" sense. But in just about every case, it's borderline Onion material. I mean, here's the most recent one:
How is that not inherently funny?
Okay granted, that one is pretty funny
I'll still stand by my main crititicism. For my tastes, too much of the stuff seems to be either bad faith readings, misunderstandings of the topic, stuff not actually peer reviewed or just rants against people generally studying things like queer female bath houses.
EDIT:
Actually reading it further it just seemed that my quick sample size wasn't really representative of the whole. Which I guess is mildly ironic
The conceptual penis as a social construct
