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posted by takyon on Thursday October 04 2018, @07:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the mein-wort dept.

In an effort to show how politically correct nonsense and evil (but I repeat myself) can get through academic peer review and be published, some academics did just that with seven papers. More are partly through the process.

A particularly funny and horrifying case is the Gender Studies journal Affilia. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf only needed to be translated with wording in the typical style of intersectionality theory, and it passed muster.

Another published paper, considered exemplary scholarship by the journal that published it, contains this whopper: "Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."

The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond

Now, three academics have submitted twenty spoof manuscripts to journals chosen for respectability in their various disciplines. Seven papers were accepted before the experiment stopped; more are surviving peer review. This new raid on screamingly barmy pseudo-scholarship is the Alan Sokal Opening, weaponised. Like dedicated traceurs in a Parkour-fest, the trio scrambled over the terrain of what they call Grievance Studies. And they dropped fire-crackers. One published paper proposed that dog parks are "rape-condoning spaces." Another, entitled "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is "revise and resubmit") is a "Feminist Approach to Pedagogy." It proposes "experiential reparations" as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.

Also at WSJ.

Related: Publishing Stings Find Shoddy Peer Review
Absurd Paper Accepted by Open-Access Computer Science Journal
Media World Fooled with Bogus Chocolate Diet Story


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:09PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday October 04 2018, @05:09PM (#744183)

    They are "smart people"

    As Michael Shermer puts it: Smart people are better at defending ideas they arrived at for not-smart reasons.

    Three fallacious conclusions that I'm sure some people will have reached about all this:
    1. The study of humanities is completely useless. Humanities done right pushes folks towards better writing, better reading, and thus more precise communication. Humanities also can, if taught properly, help finely hone people's BS detectors - for instance, history majors can make for skillful lawyers because they study how to sort out truth from fiction in historical documents, which transfers relatively easy to modern legal documents.

    2. I studied one of the hard sciences, so my subject isn't full of crap. You'd think not, but there are some BS artists in fields like mathematics, physics, and computer science that are absolutely thriving, mostly because they say what somebody else wants them to say.

    3. All those smarty-pants university types know absolutely nothing useful. Successful accomplishment requires both theory and practice: Those who know only theory tend to make very impractical proposals. Those who know practice but no theory tend to be extremely dogmatic because they know that in their experience A is better than B but don't know why, so they can't understand why C might be better than A. The smarty-pants university types are concerned with theory, and that does mean that they'll get impractical, but it's up to those of us outside the ivory tower to snag their better ideas and put them into practice.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @07:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @07:10AM (#744540)

    I usually defend my positions with math, but have found, at least on the web, most people are almost completely innumerate and I never get any followups.