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Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Grievance

From the grievance studies scandal  the logical conclusion is that there is no longer a "smell test" operative, a way in which someone could just say "that sounds ridiculous on its face so it probably is, let me look at the data and methodology even harder in this case." We have to be a bit cautious, because it is possible that something ridiculous-sounding is also a valid conclusion, or that today's ridiculousness is tomorrows boring consensus.

Of course the right-wing media love this sort of thing.  I'm not angry that someone has shown that many fields in the humanities are mostly bullshitty.  I am angry that they are like that in the first place.

4 comments:

Leslie B. said...

A few years ago there was that fake job candidate who got a lot of MLA interviews. He had a dissertation on pirates. It seemed ridiculous and I at least could tell the letter was a joke -- you could see that the person writing was laughing cleverly and devilishly -- but actually pirates are quite interesting and have been seriously studied since.

This is an interesting Twitter thread on the matter. https://twitter.com/punctum_books/status/1047602348233641984

Leslie B. said...

It is actually the social sciences that are the more b.s.-y though, and there are a lot of bad articles that get published that could be fake except that they are sincere, and gatekeeping is such that it is hard to get things that do not toe party line into certain journals. That's not as evident in Spanish but in Portuguese they have a lot of the same peer reviewers everywhere and your article cannot challenge what they said, cannot take a different point of view. So I am not sure about these people. On the one hand, it's funny, what they did. On the other hand, dayum -- everyone is supposed to overproduce, and the journals are understaffed, so what do you expect at the end of the day?

Leslie B. said...

AND here is the really good response, which I heartily endorse:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1047516105718124544.html



Leslie B. said...

Et finalement:

An interesting comment by faustusnotes, from the comments section on Henry Farrell’s post at Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2018/10/03/move-over-sokal-hoax/):

faustusnotes 10.04.18 at 1:04 am
This latest hoax is really shoddy. The hoaxers are claiming to have successfully placed lots of articles, but actually most got rejected. Four of the articles used either fraudulent data or plagiarism, which is not something peer reviewers are necessarily able to catch – recall that the Lancet published Wakefield’s fraudulent study and it took years to get to the bottom of that. Also using sections of Mein Kampf with words replaced is a really teenage prank. Most academics don’t read that book because it’s shit, and most of that book is not politically controversial, it’s just rambling about political tactics and contemporary events, so there’s no reason that peer reviewers should realize that they’re being pranked. Sure the journal should use plagiarism checking software but most don’t.

Two of the actually published articles cover topics that are of genuine interest in the field and worth studying, in particular:

1.The “Metasexual” article raises interesting questions about consent, and if we are to conclude that it can’t be taken seriously then we are on dangerous ground – this means that pornography like upskirting should be treated as no more serious a crime than any other surreptitious photography, and stealing women’s underwear is petty property crime.

2. The dildos question approaches an interesting issue in sexuality, which is why men don’t use sex toys when it is known that they could enhance male sexual pleasure. Is it practical, is it because they are considered women-only toys, or is it out of some fear of being homosexual? In the latter case we might have some insight into why many people found the sex scenes in Deadpool so confronting.

The fact that the hoaxers considered these two articles to be nonsense tells us a lot about how little they actually understood the field they were hoaxing.

This leaves us I think perhaps 2-3 articles that might be considered genuinely to have passed peer review despite being terrible articles. Out of 20 articles submitted, when they are deliberately trying to hoax the journals, I would say that’s not strong evidence that there’s a big problem in the field.