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posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the won't-be-fooled-again,-or-will-they? dept.

Portland State University has initiated disciplinary proceedings against their philosophy professor Peter Boghossian for conspiring with colleagues to submit more than two dozen satirical papers to feminist theory and race-studies journals in an effort to prove those disciplines are academically fraudulent. The hoax papers, some of which were accepted by journals and which were revealed back in October, made Boghossian and his cohorts the international toast of "free thinkers" concerned that college campuses have become paralyzed by political orthodoxy.

After their ruse was revealed, the three authors described their project in an October article in the webzine Areo, which Pluckrose edits. Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars' worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable.

Sources:
The Chronicle of Higher Education : Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor (archive)
Willamette Week : Professor Who Authored Hoax Papers Says Portland State University Has Launched Disciplinary Proceedings Against Him (archive)


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  • (Score: 2) by sigterm on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:25PM (8 children)

    by sigterm (849) on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:25PM (#785561)

    >But there are serious ethical issues here. You're being
    >blinded from them because you like the outcome.

    You're not wrong about my position regarding the outcome of this hoax, but you are incorrect regarding my stance on the ethical side of the issue.

    The problem Boghossian et al is trying to draw attention to, is the consistent de-emphasis on rigor and the scientific method in the social sciences in favour of subjectively qualitative data (such as "lived experience"), and the fact that leading academics in this field seems impervious to any criticism of this lack of objective standards.

    This is not the first time someone has highlighted the fact that a paper containing the right buzzwords and empty retoric can and will be accepted by leading journals as long as it contains a conclusion that adheres to the orthodoxy.

    Sokal's "Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity"[1] is an egregious example of new-age nonsense dressed up as a scientific paper being accepted for publication (the whole paper seems to have been scrubbed from any scientific sites, but it's archived on archive.org[2]), while "The Conceptual Penis"[3] claimed that the phallus is best understood as a concept responsible for basically everything wrong and oppressive, including but not limited to global warming.

    Now consider that while "The Conceptual Penis" was published in 2017, Sokal's had his paper published in 1996.

    That's _21 YEARS_, and evidently no one has done ANYTHING to address the fact that there exists an entire field of academic study where a scientific paper is literally indistinguishable from pure nonsense. That illustrates the enormity of problem we're dealing with here, a problem that has been well known for 20+ years by the very people you suggested the hoax submitters should have asked permission to perform their little experiment.

    >I like the fact that poor standards and BS in journals
    >is exposed too, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't
    >question the manner in which we do that.

    Regarding the criticism of this hoax, consider this:

    Let's assume Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose had indeed gone to a dog park in Portland and collected the data in question. That way, the numbers would have been real. I mean, they COULD have been; there was really nothing outlandish about the raw data itself, the problem was the ludicrous interpretation and the resulting conclusions in the hoax paper.

    So, what if the data had been real? Do you honestly think everything would have been fine then?

    This faux outrage over "fabricated research data" is an obvious attempt at deflection. The university professors and journal editors who've been exposed as peddlers of nonsense are now trying to play us for complete fools. Rather than accepting the need to reform at least parts of their field, they shout "but muh ethics!" in an attempt to discredit what is perfectly valid and extremely serious criticism.

    [1] https://philpapers.org/rec/SOKTTB-2 [philpapers.org]
    [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20010221104143/https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html [archive.org]
    [3] https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf [skeptic.com]

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:50PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:50PM (#785570)

    The problem Boghossian et al is trying to draw attention to, is the consistent de-emphasis on rigor and the scientific method

    That is just a high-brow version of "actually it's about ethics in gaming journalism"

    If rigor and scientific method had anything to do with his goals he would have actually applied the scientific method to this endeavor. But he didn't. He didn't have a testable hypothesis. There were no control papers submitted to any journals to compare results with. He could have submitted bogus heterodox papers, he could have submitted bogus orthodox papers to journals in a difference discipline. He could have submitted valid orthodox papers. He didn't do any of that. But what he did do is learn from the rejected papers in order to refine his hoaxing methods until he could convince some journals to accept his hoaxes.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:10PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:10PM (#785606)

      The thing with guys like Boghossian is that they start out from a presumption of bad faith from the people they are opposed to (which in itself is problematic for a researcher, that's not a neutral viewpoint). And then they use that belief to justify acting in bad faith themselves. When that happens, they've moved out of the realm of research and into the realm of partisan advocacy. They became exactly what they imagine others to be. It reminds me of that Anaïs Nin quote - “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

      On a semi-unserious note, more and more I enjoy the theory of nominative determinism - the idea that one's name influences ones behavior. Some prominent examples:

      Amelia Earhart (air-heart)
      Anthony Weiner (dick pics)
      Usain Bolt (fastest man alive)
      Frank Oz (pay no attention to the puppetmaster behind the curtain)
      Diana Nyad (olympic swimmer - nyads are greek water sprites)

      And now this Boghossian dude's career is focused on writing bogus papers. Its like he's embracing his destiny.

      • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:59PM (1 child)

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:59PM (#785630) Journal

        And then they use that belief to justify acting in bad faith themselves. When that happens, they've moved out of the realm of research and into the realm of partisan advocacy. They became exactly what they imagine others to be.

        I completely agree with you that it would have been better if the researchers here adhered to a better methodology or at least got approval from some research-supervising body... or at the very least INFORMED such a body that they were going to do this in advance. It would have been better to have more rigor.

        On the other hand, I challenge your last phasing "what they IMAGINE others to be." There's no "imagining." Let's be absolutely clear that the vast majority of the journals they submitted to have loads of political preconceptions that the authors of the hoax articles played into. While I don't believe that all academics are as biased as people around here seem to think, there's no doubt that many of the journals involved here practice a kind of "partisan advocacy." And in fact many academics are out in the open about the fact that they believe "advocacy" for certain causes is essential nowadays.

        We can have a debate about what that means and whether it's ethical... but there's no doubt that the authors here are correct about what many of these journals represent in terms of political leanings.

        • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:07PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:07PM (#785667)

          Let's be absolutely clear that the vast majority of the journals they submitted to have loads of political preconceptions that the authors of the hoax articles played into.

          I think you are conflating a couple of issues. People do research because they think the area is important and they expect the investigation will improve conditions of the people affected by the topics being researched. Similar to reporters, c.f. the famous quote that 'The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.' That's not the same as advocating for an ideological viewpoint.

          But even accepting your premise, just because the authors of some articles are practicing advocacy doesn't mean the journal's editorial practices are necessarily biased. At least one reviewer of a hoax article came forward and said that he treated the hoax article on the presumption of good faith and gave feedback in that context - that the paper's author was inexperienced rather than partisan.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:47PM (2 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:47PM (#785626) Journal

    Sokal's "Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity"[1]

    You'll note that I mentioned Sokal in one of my previous replies. I'm well-aware of that. I remember it! I remember reading the collection of essays that was published in the wake of it.

    That's _21 YEARS_, and evidently no one has done ANYTHING to address the fact that there exists an entire field of academic study where a scientific paper is literally indistinguishable from pure nonsense.

    Okay, there's several things to unpack here.

    (1) Yes there are fields that publish a lot of BS that could be claimed to be BS by those outside of the field.

    (2) There was little that was "nonsensical" about most of the papers that were published here -- in the strict sense of NONSENSE. Sokal's piece was utter BS because it claimed to be about physics, and the error in that review process is that the editors of that journal apparently didn't bother to ask any other PHYSICISTS to review the paper and thereby identify that what Sokal wrote was nonsense. That's a bit different from what happened here. Here, the authors tried to publish papers that had a high level of actual nonsense -- that is, stuff that literally makes NO SENSE -- and they got papers rejected and asked to be revised significantly. The papers they actually got accepted often made arguments. They may be arguments you disagree with, arguments you even find offensive -- but arguments nonetheless. They cited other scholarly literature in a rational manner (as opposed to Sokal, who had a lot of utter nonsensical statements about physics with no support).

    I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of crap in the papers that got accepted here. But the authors here "played the academic game," as did the reviewers and editors in journals. Reviewers assume good faith in submissions -- they generally try to give constructive feedback even if they think the submission is badly written or even seriously flawed. A lot of the articles these authors submitted WERE rejected, or were sent back with instructions that there were serious flaws and they needed to be revised for consideration.

    Again, I'm not defending the loads of BS that are published every year. I'm saying this situation was a bit different from Sokal, and the authors here put in a lot more work than Sokal did to "play the game" and see if they could CONVINCE others to publish their BS.

    (3) You say "a scientific paper," but most of these things weren't "scientific papers." They were humanities articles, which often make arguments based not on empirical study but rather on some sort of theoretical apparatus. Yes, it's a lot easier to create BS there, and I'll certainly agree with you that there are serious problems.

    (4) On the other hand, IF these authors were actually submitting fake "scientific papers" with the same adherence to the style and substance of scientific papers, I'm not convinced their acceptance rate would be significantly lower. If the made up fake data that didn't seem too outlandish and constructed scientific arguments that played into commonly accepted notions in the various subdisciplines of science, I'd bet they'd get a high acceptance rate. The hardest part would be faking the fact that they had a real lab -- it would be easier to uncover the fact that something like that didn't exist. But in the present case, the authors borrowed the name of an actual academic for some papers, so if a team were allowed to appropriate the names of researchers in an existing lab, I submit that it would be relatively easy to get fake papers published in scientific journals too.

    The part you find annoying is that rather than playing into scientific expectations for discourse and accepted elements of scientific disciplines, here the authors played into preconceptions that academics in some humanities disciplines have about politicized ideas -- that's again what got these papers accepted (as in Sokal's case). If they wrote pure nonsense, it wouldn't get published. It's because they played into the preconceptions of these journals that sometimes serious issues in the hoax articles were overlooked... and occasionally even lauded (as in the dog park article).

    So, what if the data had been real? Do you honestly think everything would have been fine then?

    No. I said as much in multiple replies here. By far the most serious charge is inappropriate experimentation on human subjects without approval. Federal policy requires an investigation here. I didn't think about that in my very first post here, but it occurred to me in my first reply, and I've since noted that others agree with my interpretation there.

    The university professors and journal editors who've been exposed as peddlers of nonsense are now trying to play us for complete fools.

    Sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Do you have evidence that the "journal editors" are behind this investigation? If so, please produce it.

    As far as I can tell, this is mostly an internal university investigation into an admittedly shady research project done by a university employee without appropriate approval for the methodology. If you wish to reply again, I suggest you take a moment to read the link I posted in another post here [soylentnews.org] to an article that actually talks to researchers involved with human research and the guidelines such studies must conform to. Look over that before you make a fool out of yourself some more.

    And if you want to have a serious discussion about how IRB guidelines are too conservative, I'm happy to do that. I think there are some issues with them. But they exist, and universities have a responsibility to have a discussion with researchers who don't seem to pay attention to such guidelines.

    Is there some political motivation here? Sure, there could be. The university doesn't necessarily need to make a big deal out of this. So far, the author who is accused seems to be the one playing for media attention, though. Note that -- it's important to see who might be trying to play you. But an ethics investigation was basically required here if the university wants to adhere to federal guidelines and accepted expectations regarding research ethics.

    I'm withholding judgment as to motivation until after we see whether this professor is actually seriously punished or not.

    • (Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:22AM (1 child)

      by The Vocal Minority (2765) on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:22AM (#785817) Journal

      (4) On the other hand, IF these authors were actually submitting fake "scientific papers" with the same adherence to the style and substance of scientific papers, I'm not convinced their acceptance rate would be significantly lower. If the made up fake data that didn't seem too outlandish and constructed scientific arguments that played into commonly accepted notions in the various subdisciplines of science, I'd bet they'd get a high acceptance rate. The hardest part would be faking the fact that they had a real lab -- it would be easier to uncover the fact that something like that didn't exist. But in the present case, the authors borrowed the name of an actual academic for some papers, so if a team were allowed to appropriate the names of researchers in an existing lab, I submit that it would be relatively easy to get fake papers published in scientific journals too.

      The part you find annoying is that rather than playing into scientific expectations for discourse and accepted elements of scientific disciplines, here the authors played into preconceptions that academics in some humanities disciplines have about politicized ideas -- that's again what got these papers accepted (as in Sokal's case). If they wrote pure nonsense, it wouldn't get published. It's because they played into the preconceptions of these journals that sometimes serious issues in the hoax articles were overlooked... and occasionally even lauded (as in the dog park article).

      Whilst I agree with most of what you have said on this topic you start to go off the rails here, and seem to be downplaying the significance of what has happened. Are you saying that someone from well outside of your field could successfully author a paper reporting primary research in that field and get it published in a legitimate discipline specific peer reviewed journal? This is the part of the exercise that to my mind is the most damning to the disciplines/journals involved - for a legitimate field of academic inquiry I would expect that that, as the work being published is advancing the body of knowledge within that field, considerable familiarity with that body of knowledge would be required to make a significant contribution to it and thus write a paper that merits publication. Quite aside form the political aspect the fact that non-experts have managed to get articles published in these journals suggests that there is very little of worth in these disciplines (culture studies etc.) - or at the very least there is a significant problem with the peer review process.

      I guess it would be possible to get a fake paper published if you really wanted to in most disciplines by taking an already published paper and tweaking it slightly so that is look like that content was original, but this is not what has happened here. These were completely original papers as far as I am aware (apart from the one that was based on Mien Kampf ...).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:55PM (#786005)

        Quite aside form the political aspect the fact that non-experts have managed to get articles published in these journals suggests that there is very little of worth in these disciplines

        These are new fields. They are still figuring out what expertise in the field actually means. It is not extraordinary for a new field to have a lot of fluidity and churn as it figures itself out.

        Your requirements are a prescription for the crib-death of any new field of study.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:25PM (#785678)

    If they had gathered real data and published spurious arguments there would be no problem. Lots of papers with conclusions that can't be reached from the data are published, no problem at all, and maybe a reader or five will write in to that journal's next issue to point out the flaw.

    The problem ABSOLUTELY IS poisoning the well by falsifying data.

    You're arguing that there's an underlying problem of journals not vetting data/articles well enough. True! But completely independent.