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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: 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.