What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia

[sl8]

From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/

What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia
Three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions.

OCT 5, 2018
Yascha Mounk
Lecturer on government at Harvard University


James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoax
MIKE NAYNA

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

We’ve been here before.

In the late 1990s, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, began a soon-to-be-infamous article by setting out some of his core beliefs:

that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

Sokal went on to “disprove” his credo in fashionable jargon. “Feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity,’” he claimed. “It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

...

More at link.

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On edit:

The hoax is not without its critics, e.g.:

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/15/17951492/grievance-studies-sokal-squared-hoax
The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained
The “Grievance Studies” or “Sokal Squared” hoax aimed to discredit gender and critical race studies. Did it work?

[marylandblue]

1. I am disappointed in my own field, fat studies.

Last edited Sun Nov 4, 2018, 01:22 PM - Edit history (2)

I am currently working on the theory that eating ice cream after midnight doesn't make you fat. I was ready to submit for publication, but now I have to go back to do more research to make sure I am right.

[sl8]

2. It is always after midnight, correct?

[marylandblue]

3. Yes, it only works if you eat after midnight.

I haven't figured out why yet. I've correlated it with my wife being asleep already, but as you know, correlation is not causation.

[sl8]

13. My point is, no matter what time it happens to be, it is after midnight. n/t

Last edited Sun Nov 4, 2018, 07:18 PM - Edit history (1)

[GeoWilliam750]

15. Brilliant!!!

Amazing insight!!!!

[MosheFeingold]

17. Perhaps

You are part mogwai.

Do you burn when exposed to the Sun?

Multiply when you get wet?

[Submariner]

5. Please let me know where you submit for Peer Review

I am currently drafting an abstract for a position paper that argues that the local Hood Creamery should sell Hood's Limited Edition Golden Eggnog year round and not just in November and December.

I see no reason why I should have to stress out almost 10 months of the year due to the laziness of the creamery in not producing my favorite egg nog all year long.

If I am elected president, I will nationalize all creameries and make them produce egg nog year round, and I will force Medicare Prescription coverage to cover the cost cholesterol pills 100%.

[marylandblue]

7. You have my vote!

[marylandblue]

12. Calorie Counter Quarterly is the leading journal in the field

Recent articles include "Bacon: It's not just for Breakfast Anymore," and "Recommended Daily Allowances for Cheeseburgers."

[Blue_Tires]

20. +1

[TreasonousBastard]

4. I sorta did that back in the '60s, when I submitted a completely bullshit paper in a Psych class...

Full of jargon and assumptions but no actual "facts" presented, it was a joke but did start some discussion on the conclusions, not on whether or not it was a joke.

There is an assumption that when you submit something that looks like it took some work, it did take some work. If my class assumed it it was a legit paper, why wouldn't a journal assume a submission was real?

[marylandblue]

6. We expect journal editors and reviewers to be gatekeepers. Not sleepreaders.

We expect students to be discerning too, but they are still learning, so at least in theory may not have developed the skills yet.

"you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."
-John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. Agreed. Undergrads fooling around with some ideas in a fake paper is not...

the same as a journal submission.

(But, in its own way, is peer review...)

[Igel]

11. The expectation is that a peer reviewer knows the field and has standards.

One of them is to (a) use critical thinking in evaluating the submission and (b) be thoughtful about ways in which the paper could be improved, made more rigorous, and come up to standards. You never know if it's a grizzled old researcher who rushed the writing on a new researcher submitting work for the first time.

And at least in fields I'm familiar with there are always three reviewers, the author's and any identifying information (apart from the contents) is kept confidential.

Sadly, many reviewers do this in fulfilment of a service requirement for tenure or merit review, so it's just a box to be checked off and they slight their self-assumed obligation. After all, there are two other reviewers, so what if one of them is a bit flakey--surely the other two will do due diligence. Uh-huh.

I've seen grad students do the reviewing for their advisors and write a quick summary/recommendation that the advisor signs off on. On a good day, it's the grad student's field; on a bad day, it's so that the grad student acquires "breath" or familiarity with an "important subfield" s/he wouldn't otherwise run into that year.

And I've seen reviewers say, "Oh, Al was talking about this research, and if Al wrote it, it's good." Or they skim the abstract and maybe the conclusion, like what it says (because it agrees with what they suddenly always have known to be Truth) and approve it.

A good reviewer seldom just says, "Sure." A good reviewer provides details for things to be included, possible errors, and maybe ways to improve the analysis. They should indicate whether a fix is required for acceptance, optional to improve that article, or just an idea for perhaps later work. I've seen articles come back dripping with petty things to be cleaned up, none crucial, or with comments that show serious misunderstanding of the field--and with an editor's comment pointing this out and saying, "Um, I have to pass along all the comments, but don't take to heart this particular reviewer." Typically the reviewers sign off "pending" certain corrections that are obligatory and leave it to the editor's discretion to confirm they were done. Once at a lab meeting the PI passed out a draft and reviewers' comments for our edification--what to fix, what not to fix, what was misunderstood and how to make it crystal clear. Another time the reading was to be critiqued at the next meeting--it was an article sent out for review, so the grad students would have opportunity to play junior reviewer. (And the PI got his box checked off.)

[marylandblue]

9. I agree that there is a problem in certain parts of academia and the left

We've become less interested in truth and more interested in grievance. There is a parallel problem on the right, but we are not on the right and should not be using their problems as a justification for our own.

[Sneederbunk]

10. Fat Studies?

[FSogol]

14. Is it too late to found the College of Drunk Studies?

Asking for a friend.

[MosheFeingold]

19. Professor Kavenaugh

Was the leading expert in the field.

But he's left for the judiciary.

[Mosby]

16. Academia is a cult

As a teenager growing up in the Living Word Fellowship, an international Christian organization widely regarded as a cult, I aspired to be a writer. Instead, I spent seven days a week at church: It was where I worshiped, socialized, ate, volunteered and even went to school. One summer, at the fellowship’s “School of Prophets” camp in rural Iowa, a senior pastor took his turn at the pulpit to encourage the youth of the congregation to skip college, work for the church and live in one of its communal homes in Hawaii or Brazil, which many in my graduating class went on to do. My parents, who joined the cult as graduate students in the 1970s but have recently left, were an educated anomaly in a culture that valued faith over reason. I’m grateful for my father, who in passing later that day told the pastor in seriousness disguised as joviality, “Stay away from my kids.”

I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.

But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/academia-is-a-cult/2018/10/31/eea787a0-bd08-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da_story.html?

[MosheFeingold]

18. Was it this study

That took chapters out of Mein Kampf and substituted "men" for "Jews"?

And then got it published in peer reviewed journal?

I thought that was pretty clever.