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)
(Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:42AM (2 children)
Both links point to the same article
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:52AM (1 child)
Fixed. Plus, archive links added (Chronicle of Higher Education is down for maintenance).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:01AM
Thanks!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:00AM (4 children)
The unspoken reason: It's a profit center. The college's donors are paying for it.
Which donors? Money launderers for foreign psychological warfare departments.
Reminder: there was near zero [catbox.moe] discussion of "privilege" and "microaggressions" and all that stuff in 2011, even on far left college campuses. Someone paid for it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:13PM (2 children)
Yea right.
Like alumni donors and the state of Oregon?
I notice that the link you referred to throws out US intelligence and the FBI as your "foreign psychological warfare departments". And the jargon of the snowflake movement changes all the time. It's not relevant that terms in use now came about in the past few years. That's the nature of the beast which is viciously status signaling. A key way to status signal (particularly among people who can barely afford the lifestyle) is using the latest and shiniest vocabulary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:09PM (1 child)
Here are some snowflakes with experience rooting out infiltration by GPU and FBI assets [wsws.org]. Daniel Golden’s Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and foreign intelligence secretly exploit America’s universities [wsws.org]:
More recent links:
Portland State University threatens to fire Peter Boghossian for authoring “Grievance Studies” hoax [wsws.org]
US astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson targeted by #MeToo campaign [wsws.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 13 2019, @05:08AM
In other words, a small number of academics also worth for US intelligence. Not much point to the entire two quotes you copied. So many words to say so very little.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @03:44PM
I personally know someone who was active on a far left college campus in 2011.
There was a lot of discussion of privilege, and the checking thereof, and the nature of privilege in determining complicity in, or victimisation by, various forms of bigotry.
If you think that this cropped up in the last ten years, I have an inside line on a bridge going cheap.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:03AM (3 children)
This could really backfire on Portland State. As a higher education institution they should consider which actions serves the pursuit of truth and which do not. But hey, it's in Portland, OR so we all know the brakes broke on their crazy train about 10 years ago.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:04PM (1 child)
Indeed.
The journals have ONE job. To filter the bullshit so that the precious time of academics is not lost on irrelevant stuff. They failed and fail and will fail because there are too many stakes against them from multiple parties.
The behaviour of the uni is wrong on two levels
1. They shoot the whistleblower. Nuff said
2. They protect the journals by implying they are the victims instead of the perpetrators.
If the journals have no means to distinguish truth from bullshit, it also probably isn't science in the first place.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sigterm on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:16PM
>If the journals have no means to distinguish truth fro
>bullshit, it also probably isn't science in the first place.
Precisely, and that's not something either the journal editors or the professors or even the university administration are likely to admit anytime soon. "Turns out we've spent millions on pseudoscience for the last 30-40 years, sorry about that" are words we'll hear from no one, ever, no matter what the evidence may say.
Expect to see more ad hominem attacks against the hoaxers.
(Score: 1) by Tokolosh on Saturday January 12 2019, @03:52PM
Cancel their Square account.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:13AM (2 children)
There is one option: murder the people putting them through the disciplinary hearing.
Torture those people to death.
Burn them alive on a breaking wheel after smashing their bones.
This is what men used to do to enemies.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:35AM
You forgot about the lamentation of their people who identify as women.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday January 12 2019, @12:06PM
Also, murder trolls who deflect and paint the skeptics as a bunch of Nazis with pitchforks.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sigterm on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:14AM (18 children)
By publishing these outlandish hoax papers, they've demonstrated that at best, the journals' peer review process is a joke.
At worst, the entire field is devoid of scientific merit. Looking at the non-hoax papers, I tend to lean toward this conclusion.
So what can they do? They obviously have no arguments for why we should take these fields of "study" seriously, otherwise they would surely have presented them by now. And that's no surprise, considering the ridiculous non-scientific methodologies they employ and the borderline non-sequitur conclusions presented as "facts" in many of these papers.
Fortunately, one can always resort to shooting the messenger. In this case, they have the absolute gall to accuse the whistleblowers of unethical behaviour for ... exposing highly unethical behaviour! But then ideologues rarely possess either self-knowledge or a sense of humour, so the irony of the situation is probably completely lost on them.
For another example of this, see the latest developments in the Wilfred-Laurier case: https://globalnews.ca/news/4799671/wildred-laurier-lindsay-shephard-sued-professors/ [globalnews.ca]
(Apparently, being outed as a totalitarian extremist who readily compares other people to Adolf Hitler should constitute defamation.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:11AM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:19PM (15 children)
There's a lot of slippage of "they" in this comment. The "they" meaning "journal editors" is not necessarily the same as the "they" in the case of an individual college's administration, which has responsibility over the integrity of their school.
Look, first of all, I am all in favor of stuff like this "hoax" to expose BS in academia. On the other hand, there are some issues with the way the authors did this that were bound to raise ethical questions -- and I'm pretty sure this guy probably forced the hand of any college's review of ethics to raise questions.
Why? Well, you know, I've actually read some of the articles in this hoax. I got very interested in it after it happened, because I agree there's a lot of nonsense published out there.
And you know the article that got the most attention? The one that raised concerns in the Wall Street Journal that led the authors to give up the hoax early? It was an article with ACTUAL DATA. FAKE DATA.
You can say what you will about the BS in many humanities journals, but this article got attention because it purported to do an actual empirical study looking at dog behavior in Portland (and the supposed "rape culture" that existed there). There may be a lot of crap around (no pun intended) the argument in that article, but at its heart, the article got more attention than their other hoax articles because it claimed to be based on months of empirical research and observations.
In sum, the authors falsified data. And the fact that they falsified data gave that article a greater weight, which led to more attention, which eventually led to the hoax being exposed.
Let's take this out of the arena of the humanities for a moment, and imagine someone did this in some scientific field -- say, biology or chemistry. Even say they were purporting to expose the flaws in the peer-review process and low standards in journals. Then they simply make up data -- data that is not surprising or outlandish mind you, so it won't raise red flags -- and then write an article with it and publish it. They throw in a few BS bits that should raise some questions -- they are arguing about the peer-review process, after all. But the data looks reasonable.
And a journal publishes it. Yes, it could very well happen if it looked like a reasonable chemistry experiment or biological observations or whatever and seemed to go along with known science in the field. It might not happen in top journals, but it very well could happen.
Should the author of said fake data be held responsible for falsifying data? Because that's precisely what happened here. This was clearly a stunt, but if a university doesn't at least have a formal inquiry into this, aren't they opening the door for any scholar -- say a scientist -- just making up data and publishing articles, and if they get caught, they can claim, "Oops! I was just doing an experiment to test the peer-review process!? I wasn't doing anything unethical!"
So yes, while I completely agree with the idea of this "hoax" to draw attention to poor scholarly practices, I also completely agree that a university needs to maintain its integrity by at least having a disciplinary proceeding to look into what happened here.
Lastly, whoever wrote the headline here clearly has an ax to grind. Anybody university employee publishing fake data in a scholarly article should trigger an ethics inquiry. There's no evidence I see here yet that this is only "politically" motivated.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:25PM
Also, this is a bit implicit in what I wrote -- but I do think the ethics of making up data in hoax articles is a little sketchy. It's one thing to write a BS article that just makes a theoretical argument -- or at least pretends to (as Sokal did). It's quite a different thing to bolster that argument by making up BS empirical data and then offering that in bad faith to journal editors.
To me, that pushes the ethical boundary a bit too far... unless they got approval somehow from some official organization to support such an "experiment."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sigterm on Saturday January 12 2019, @01:44PM (11 children)
>And you know the article that got the most attention? The one that raised
>concerns in the Wall Street Journal that led the authors to give up the hoax
>early? It was an article with ACTUAL DATA. FAKE DATA.
>
>You can say what you will about the BS in many humanities journals, but this
>article got attention because it purported to do an actual empirical study
>looking at dog behavior in Portland (and the supposed "rape culture" that
>existed there).
Are. You. Serious.
The paper you're referring to is one that nicely illustrated the journal's willingness to accept nonsensical papers with questionable data sets, purportedly acquired using ridiculous methodologies, as long as the conclusion matched the reviewer's preconceived notions regarding patriarchy, misogyny and "rape culture".
For the uninitiated, the paper's fictional author claimed to have collected data about the behaviour of dogs and their owners in a dog park, including how often the owners addressed their dogs using the word "bitch" and how often they intervened when male dogs humped one another vs. when dogs tried mating. There was no methodology or no specific criteria for this "data collection", just a lot of numbers and a hilariously nonsensical conclusion about (dog?) misogyny and enforced "heteronormativity".
Besides the fact that the peer reviewers obviously knew nothing about dogs and their behaviour, they also didn't question the data or the method with which it was acquired.
And of course the data was fake! IT WAS A HOAX PAPER.
>There may be a lot of crap around (no pun intended) the argument in that
>article, but at its heart, the article got more attention than their other hoax
>articles because it claimed to be based on months of empirical research
>and observations.
Several of them were, including the one about pornography which was not initially accepted, because the peer reviewer thought it contained too much data which made it a difficult read. Yes, I'm not kidding here; had the paper been more sloppily and subjectively written and contained less empirical data, it would have been accepted. The reviewer said as much, and encouraged resubmission.
>In sum, the authors falsified data. And the fact that they falsified
>data gave that article a greater weight, which led to more attention,
>which eventually led to the hoax being exposed.
No. You should read up on this again.
The hoax was NEVER exposed by any of the journals.
The authors themselves went public, and only THEN were the papers retracted (except in one case where I believe it just vanished from the journal's archives without a trace).
And the "dog park" paper was not only published in full, it was lauded by the journal as exemplary research.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @03:32PM (10 children)
Actually, you might try reading what I wrote. See, for example, this sentence that was in my previous post:
Yes, I know the authors identified their own hoax. They did so BECAUSE that article you discussed got so much attention which led others to start poking into the matter more, which led to a Wall Street Journal piece, which led to the authors giving up the hoax earlier than they had planned.
And yes, some of the other articles they falsified had fake data too. Perhaps in one of the other cases (I'd have to look back at the one you mention) they might have been requested to deemphasize or reorganize some data. (I was a reviewer for an article recently where I requested a similar thing -- there was a bit too much undigested data and some tables/charts that didn't contribute well to the argument and made things confusing. Again, I don't know what the case is with the article you mention, but it's not impossible that a journal that isn't used to having a lot of experimental data might ask for it to be more clearly presented.)
But that's all beside the point. Different journals, different reviewers, and different articles may have different standards. I would note, however, that many of the articles that were rejected or asked for significant revision had no such empirical argument. The dog park article did have empirical data -- fake data.
Is the article absurd? Obviously. Am I concerned that there are journals who would champ at the bit to publish BS? Obviously. But it doesn't change the fact that a person employed by a university with academic credentials falsified observational empirical data and then submitted it as if it were a legitimate work of scholarship. I would imagine if this school has ANY ethical guidelines about scholarship, falsifying data is against those guidelines. It would be utterly irresponsible for any academic institution employing someone in this situation NOT to have an inquiry into it.
Now -- let me be clear that I'm not arguing for significant punishment. I'm saying it's perfectly reasonable to have an inquiry, and I think definitely a judgment that said, "You should get someone's approval before misrepresenting yourself and using your credentials to publish false data." If the university had even a letter from this author before he submitted these things saying, "Note that I am engaged in a sort of study to test peer review and am submitting spurious articles with spurious data, etc...." that would likely have fended off a lot of criticism. There have been such studies attempted in scientific journals that got prior approval at least from some larger organizations before putting out insincere journal submissions.
And once again, I'm not going to excuse bad behavior anywhere. I think these journals have the perfect right to remove hoax articles submitted in bad faith. I do think they should publish some sort of official explanation and launch their own inquiry into their standards to address the issues raised here, rather than just "sweeping it under the rug."
Look -- let's be honest here: the authors did something that was vaguely unethical. Yes, the journals that are publishing them are also publishing BS. But if you want to test that in a scientific manner, you get approval -- as with any study involving human subjects. (Yes, the journal editors and reviewers were unwittingly participating in an experiment with human subjects.) If the authors had done this, it would be a different matter. If this author -- who is employed in a legitimate position at a legitimate university -- at least made the effort to inform his employer in advance that he was would be misrepresenting himself in a potentially questionable and insincere manner, I would give him more credit... and say this inquiry is more problematic.
But there are serious ethical issues here. You're being blinded from them because you like the outcome. 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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @03:47PM
I didn't look up the actual letter [amazonaws.com] this prof received until now.
Read it. It is very clear from the description of the authors' project (as I read in their press releases and articles about it) that they intended this to be a somewhat systematic investigation into journals in particular fields... not a one-off "hoax." They wrote it that way, clearly dressing it up as a research project.
And this research project involved human subjects (the editors, reviewers, etc. of journals). Federal regulations require approval for research involving human subjects.
Again, I'm not arguing for severe punishment here (or perhaps any punishment at all), but if the university didn't send him a letter like this and open a disciplinary inquiry, I would imagine it would put federal funding for the entire university in jeopardy.
Once again, the onus is on those would want to claim some ulterior motive to show this is the case and that this disciplinary hearing is solely politically motivated. I've been involved in experiments with human subjects. I've talked with those who have been on review boards who deal with work that involves human subjects. It's a serious ethical issue, and universities who just ignore it would do so at their peril.
(Score: 2) by sigterm on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:25PM (8 children)
>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]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:50PM (3 children)
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)
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)
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
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)
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.
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).
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.
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)
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
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
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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:21PM
No, it would be data that is quite outlandish and for which they made no serious attempt to justify the data collection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:20PM
Thank you for this. The nugget that they falsified data is the crux. And you're right that the university *must* start an investigation.
Because: who cares if they spew bullshit? Anyone arguing based on it can be traced back to first principles and the flaw would be found.
But falsifying data - or providing false statistics claiming to be derived from true data or so on - is evil. Others might have taken the "data", drawn new conclusions, started or stopped funding... bad bad bad. It poisons the well.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:14PM
WTF how can you be so blindly naive?
"no arguments for why we should take these fields of "study" seriously, otherwise they would surely have presented them by now."
It is not true that because you haven't read good arguments, that none have been presented, or that none exist.
"And that's no surprise, considering the ridiculous non-scientific methodologies they employ and the borderline non-sequitur conclusions presented as "facts" in many of these papers."
You're so close! So close. "many of these papers" is really close! But you've missed the mark, which is that SCIENTIFIC and reputable journals have ALSO been hoaxed like this. Nature Whatever publishes retractions. Mistakes and fraud happen; bad analysis and flawed instrumentation, too. But would you say "let's get rid of the physics journals, since some have been hoaxed - look I found an example of one printing a perpetual motion machine!" hmm? No, of course not.
Stop conflating existence and universality. There are bad papers and journals in every field, and just because these fields have had that problem doesn't mean the fields of study are not useful. You are welcome to try to make such an argument, but if you do and you use flawed logic like this, you look pretty stupid, like the yokel who says "aww, y'll have a helluva time getting horses hitched t'that!" at an RV.
Finally, your linked article reveals ANOTHER chink in your knowledge: in Canada, defamation can be using true statements, and if you publicly accuse me of calling people Hitler, I can sue you. (Of course, the people I called Hitler, if I was public, could sue /me/, that's the magic of law, it's blind. Peterson is stupid for suing them for defamation, when they commented in private and were unwittingly recorded and played back publicly; intent is clearly lacking.) So. Is it a funny scenario? Yeah! Is it absurd? No, not really! Not in any way. Them's the laws, and if two cars were double and triple parked you wouldn't say it's weird to ticket the tripleparker *and* the doubleparker.
Ugh - you posted under a techy name. I hope you don't write code as full of holes as your arguments are here. Frustrating.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:19AM
Most conservative faculty only have their position by being related to someone with political pull. Almost none can claim competence in their field. Some got Kock appointments, by having Huge Kocks, but usually Bob Doles have to have medical assistance for that. So I just want to say, it is not discrimination, it is only peer review and quality control. Boghossian is a jerk, an nincompoop, a knave and a canard. He needs to be tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, filleted and fricassied. Nothing is too harsh or too bad for academic charlatans like this. I thing boiling in oil is called for, or at least denial of tenure. Could be stipulate that he always wear plaid and a bow tie, to falsely imply that he was a Rice graduate? Oh, the horror! Oh, the humiliation! Oh, what a flaming conservative ass.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:51PM (3 children)
There's a damn good reason there are at least two buildings here which have large murals reading "KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD".
At least when I contemplated attending UCB, Berkeley had actually swung quite far to the right. At the time, Portland was _highly_ conservative but then all those leftie big-city coders got imported by all the Mobile App Startups here.
The state as a whole has odd politics, in that most of the state is quite rural, with timber, farming and ranching being predominant, whereas Portland's major industry is no longer coding, but selling five-dollar lattes to all the coders.
This Is A Demonstrated Fact:
There are far more strip clubs per capita in Portland that _anywhere_ else in the world. It happens that one of my very closest friends is a bartender at Mary's Club. Say "Hi" to Beth when you fly in, sit right up front then tip one dollar per dance then buy at least one private dance - $25 - as that's they only way those women - I _never_ call them girls - can hope to feed themselves.
A stripper I've gotten to know has a Master's Degree, but as far as I'm able to tell, she really does like getting naked.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @03:53PM (1 child)
So what's the answer? Let the big west coast cities secede from the states that contain them?
The remainders of Washington, Oregon and probably California would turn blood red in a hot minute.
(For those trying to keep count, that would include the greater Seattle conurbation (Tacoma/Everett/Redmond kind of area), Portland (and the whole extended, annexed zone around it) and pretty much every city with a population over 100,000 on the Californian coast.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:21PM
Don't forget to let New York University (per this link) and University of South Florida, Tampa (per link further up) secede. NYU’s Washington DC campus: Academia aligns with the Department of Defense [wsws.org]
See also New York University: A center of militarism, mass surveillance and censorship: Part 1 [wsws.org], Part 2 [wsws.org], and Part 3 [wsws.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:06PM
Tampa has long claimed the same title. So in 2006 they commissioned a study to prove it. [politifact.com] They were disappointed to learn that Tampa is just 3rd. The top 3 were:
1. Las Vegas
2. Cincinnati
3. Tampa
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:09PM (11 children)
For those who want to separate out politics and want to know what the university might be ethically and legally REQUIRED to do in this circumstances, I just found a much better article [nymag.com] that involves interviews with those in human-subject research, IRBs, etc.
Bottom line from that link:
The article goes on to note some disagreement about whether falsified data in this case constitutes grounds for investigation, but again, most experts agree this is a concern for academic conduct that at least should trigger an inquiry.
Now, we can all have a nice debate about whether IRB protocol is too conservative. But it's tied to federal funding. It's something every researcher at every university has to be aware of. The author here took to YouTube because he knows he'll have a better chance with ignorant public opinion where people don't know the kind of ethical guidelines universities have to follow for research. That's grandstanding.
Doesn't mean there aren't politics involved at this university. Maybe there is. But if you're interested in nuance rather than polemical BS, you might read the link I posted here to understand what is actually required for a situation like this in academia.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:01PM (8 children)
If you want to understand why some people seem so predisposed to assume bad faith on PSU's part, and academia in general, check out collective narcissism. If you've ever had to deal with an individual with narcissistic personality disorder, it all makes so much sense. An NPD is always right, anyone who challenges an NPD is literally the devil and anyone praises the NPD is the best, most brilliant person. Gaslighting, scapegoating, love-bombing, projection, etc -- all defining traits of an NPD, are also standard operating procedure for these authoritarians who are having a collective reactionary freakout to social progress.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:13PM
Also DARVO - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
When I first learned about the DARVO tactic favored by narcissists it was like a light was turned on, illuminating so much of what I've experienced.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:24PM (1 child)
Does that description remind you of anyone who's been in the news a lot lately? Specifically anyone big, fat, ugly, small-handed, orange, and with the political acumen of a large bag of dog leavings...?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:42AM
The authoritarian personality type is designed to be subservient to people with narcissistic personality disorder. Its like hand-in-glove. That's not to say that NPD and authoritarianism are mutually exclusive in specific individuals, plenty of NPDs are also authoritarians. Its just that being an authoritarian makes a person especially susceptible to the persuasion techniques of the NPD. See flying monkeys [wikipedia.org] for a common one-on-one example where NPD's typically control subservient NPDs. If anything, successful NPDs are adept at activating authoritarian tendencies in people who wouldn't be particularly authoritarian under normal conditions. They get them jazzed up which makes them more vulnerable to the NPD's other techniques. For example - hyping status insecurity (racial, gender, etc). And that insecurity is precisely what drives boghossian and his crowd.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 13 2019, @06:26AM (4 children)
Or we could just discuss the merits of the case instead of fantasy psychology that is entirely irrelevant. The investigation already happened and a conclusion came out that was other than a complete dismissal of the investigation. That's a strong indication that something went wrong with the investigation right there.
Now, I don't think it's a secret that I don't respect the idea of institutional review boards in the first place. Here, it's particularly nasty since it's being used to suppress the speech of the professor in question. Even though employers normally have a right to condition employment on the public behavior of their employees, they forgo that right when they encourage, as most universities do, including Portland State, an atmosphere of open speech.
Thus, here's my counterargument against the above claim. First, there's real disagreement about whether ethics boards should have this sort of power. Second, the review board was stretching a lot to condemn the professor for these particular actions. Think about it - "human experimentation" and "falsification of data"? Sure, the interpretation was barely valid, but here's the important point. They could have interpreted it as not human experiment and falsification of data with equal legal validity. My view is that when regulation allows for an action to be both legal/allowed and illegal/unallowed, the presumption should be on it being legal or allowed.
Then there's the conflict of interest in the review board since as was claimed in a faculty letter, the research could have blowback on the university as punishment.
Notice the emphasis on the reputation of the university and harm it could do to students. Absurd, but something that could easily warp the conclusions of a review board.
Finally, the board was created as a condition of federal funding:
That means when its federally-mandated actions hinder the free speech rights of one of its professors, it becomes a violation of the professor's First Amendment right to speech.
Calling this concern some weird psychology buzzword completely misses the point. There's reason for the concern when an investigation of academia gets attacked in this way.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
You are one of those reactionary authoritarians who is deep into the collective narcissism. And guess what? Your butthurt screed in response basically confirms it. The thing about narcissists, you are all so pathetically thin skinned. You shit on the people you resent and act like y'all are just clinically describing the facts without any political correctness. But when even a hint of that gets turned around on you, you go ballistic.
We see through your bullshit and we ain't having it any more.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 14 2019, @04:48AM
I notice you never ever say why you hold that opinion.
Why would a post presenting a sensible correction ever be considered evidence for "thin skinned"? It's interesting how accepting unquestioningly an asinine argument is considered more of a virtue here. Maybe being thin skinned, even when it actually happens, is by far the lesser of evils?
And by "shit", you mean what? "acting like y'all are just clinically describing the facts" isn't much of a thing.
I think there's a pop psychology word that completely describes what's going on here - "projection". For example, an AC (perhaps you?) blathered [soylentnews.org] on about "DARVO" (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) as if it were peculiar to narcissism. You are definitely going through the "ARVO" part with an attack that is without substance and then accusing me of "shitting" on you as if you were the victim (though how that supposedly works through the internet is left unmentioned). So odd that a supposed behavior of narcissism is discussed and then prominently described in your above post. But I suppose you'll just deny that my accusation is true, and then repeat the DARVO behavior.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13 2019, @09:59PM (1 child)
Seems to me that over the years you have demonstrated a real antipathy for psychology. Recently I had an epiphany. The problem is you don't understand yourself, I mean like your motivations and biases are a complete cipher to your own mind. You are a poster-child for living the un-examined life. And the idea that other people can figure you out using science really chaps your ass.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 14 2019, @04:55AM
Indeed. Ranting on the internet is not the place for psychology. You know nothing of the people you're speaking about.
It's a common weakness of many fields of knowledge. You're exposed to it for the first time and then think that you can readily apply it anywhere without consideration for whether you know enough to apply it, much less apply it well enough to be of benefit.
And hurling thoughtless insults is sure to make me examine my life.
Let's suppose that were true. So what is said chapping of the ass to you? Doesn't sound like you care except as a means to nettle me. Someone who can modify my behavior via brutal torture would also chap my ass. If it were as you say, it's a cruel use of knowledge.
But that's an "if" that's not true. The obvious sign that you're not using science, is that you don't deal in observation. Asserting things isn't observing things!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:24PM
You know, if PSU really wanted to smother this kind of "research" this ain't the way to do it. The "smart" play is to just turtle up and wait for it all to blow over. I mean the internet had collectively forgotten about it months ago. Instead they are drawing attention to it all over again.
If you hate progressives then you just think these people are bunch of malicious idiots who forgot about the streisand effect because idiots are gonna idiot and evil people are gonna do evil.
On the other hand if you think academics who study human interaction might be a little bit smarter about how humans behave than the average entitled multimillionaire, you might think there is something other than just evil doers doing evil here.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 14 2019, @01:42PM
The problem is that they've gone beyond a "reasonable" investigation to concluding that wrong-doing occurred. For example:
The proper solution should have been that the board agreed that approval wasn't obtained for human experimentation, but wasn't required due to the nature of the research in question. Same with the falsification of data analysis. Pranks and hoaxes operate differently and it's silly to shoehorn this into the pretense of formal research.
A key problem I see here is because the IRB protocol is tied to federal funding, it is subject to the laws that bind any federal actions, in particular the First Amendment. The hoax is a great example of a constitutionally protected act of speech. For example, the press and various protest groups have engaged in pretending to be someone else in order to ferret out wrongdoing (as long as the actions were done to further the investigation rather than for direct gain). College professors have no less protection. The First Amendment doesn't make exceptions for research. It's one thing to perform a perfunctory investigation to determine that the IRB doesn't have jurisdiction over the matter and that the nature of the supposed violations is negligible and unworthy of further consideration. It's another to be threatening and punishing the professor with serious sanctions via a contrived interpretation of the regulations and supposed code of ethics the IRB is enforcing.
So what's the problem with that? That's where a lot of his support is. And no one doesn't need to know the "ethical guidelines" as well as the experts to witness an act of injustice.