What the New Sokal Hoax Reveals About Academia
"Like just about everything else in this depressing national moment,
Sokal Squared is already being used as ammunition in the great American
culture war. Many conservatives who are deeply hostile to the science of
climate change, and who dismiss out of hand the studies that attest to
deep injustices in our society, are using Sokol Squared to smear all
academics as biased culture warriors. The Federalist, a right-wing news and commentary site, went so far as to spread the apparent ideological bias
of a few journals in one particular corner of academia to most
professors, the mainstream media, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary
Committee."
"By the same token, many leftists are willing to grasp at straws to
defend journals and fields of inquiry that they regard as morally
righteous. Some have dismissed Sokal Squared by pointing out that many
disciplines, from economics to psychology, have in the past years also
faced crises of confidence. Others have simply cited the conservative
instrumentalization of Sokal Squared as a reason to ignore it.
“Academics,” Alison Phipps wrote on Twitter, “please stand by colleagues
in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas
targeted by this journal article hoax. This is a coordinated attack from
the right.”
Tldr: Some pranksters made absurd science papers which tackled surface level progressive stuff and sent out to various scientific journals to see if they would get accepted, which they did. As a result the alt-right are using it as ammo against the left while some leftists refuse to acknowledge it as a problem cause that would be bowing down to the right or something. It's a big shitshow.
Academics,” Alison Phipps wrote on Twitter, “please stand by colleagues
in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas
I studied Computer Science in college but that's because I didnt know there was a degree in Fat Studies. I've been preparing for this my entire life
The paper that was published in Gender, Place and Culture seems downright silly. “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” claims to be based on in situ observation of canine rape culture in a Portland dog park. “Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?” the paper asks.
:V
reading the article, several publications they submitted to and get published in did suffer some massive scandals and loss of credibility while they were doing this
I know it's pretty lazy to dump a link as my post, but there's a mini-discussion on /r/badeconomics about this, with a few points on why this isn't quite as significant as they're making it out to be, mostly how the journals weren't really all that to begin with.
>“please stand by colleagues in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas targeted by this journal article hoax. This is a coordinated attack from the right.”
"Our institutions and ideologies have spiraled into the point of accepting "Dog parks are a petri dish for rape culture" and a dolled-up piece of the fucking Mein Kampf as legitimate studies? Quick, discredit the ones pointing it out! No way we could have possibly fucked up it's the OTHER GUYS who are WRONG and EVIL with their SHADOW CONSPIRACIES to RESURRECT HITLER"
Shit like this why the far-right on the rise smh
What leftists are defending this?
I'll quote myself from the other thread that we had on this exact same story
I think this story just means they need to work on their peer review process, not that gender studies or social sciences are totally bunk
damn, was hoping this was a Nathan Fielder stunt from the title
Keep in mind, before you flail in a temper tantrum against "~~the SJWS~~" that the use of "progressive" language isn't why journals would be accepting these things. They'd be accepting these things because a lot of journals are straight up paper mills with barely any peer review processes in place to filter out the actually bad papers.
Of course the far-right will use this as another reason to show why academia is a "leftist indoctrination camp", but they're all fucking idiots so why listen to them anyway.
This whole thing reminds me when someone submitted a paper generated by a random math paper generator to a journal and nearly got accepted.
It featured such bibliographical entries such as:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/109776/1ce7206d-b8a5-42b0-a6aa-a07ffffcfdb6/algebraically algebraic.PNG
Link
submitting junk papers to junk journals to own the libs #gamersriseup
I had a civil engineering journal contact me about becoming an editor/publishing with them because they were "impressed with my most recent work".
I do biophysics/biochemistry. I know nothing about civil engineering.
If you publish at all you will be contacted incessantly by the latest iteration of legalfakejournals.com
People that test the peer review process in prominent journals serve the public good. That's a sign that people are willing to put their personal credibility on the line and subject their own work to extended scrutiny just to ensure that their field as a whole remains credible. That's a brave trade-off with how cut-throat funding is.
We've been through this before.
And anyone thinking this is unique to Soft Sciences clearly doesn't realize we have a failure of validation rates at nearly 80% for every major discipline including the hard sciences. There are a shitload of bunk Physics and Mathematical papers being published, referenced and even used as fuel to poor further funding into experiments that won't work in the first place. Because of the lack of funding for replication, no one does at any significant level and that's leading to a gluttony of terrible terrible terrible economic, political, social and cultural decisions that have zero backing to them.
Peer review needs to be a little more savage and critical. A healthy dose of Philosophy of Science should be required for any reviewer.
Well there are several competing factors for this.
The first of which is that there's zero funding for Replication, its not sexy and those that do it get a thankless job because researchers are often hostile toward someone who finds their methodology less than wanting.
Secondly, due to the massive cuts of public funding in the Sciences researchers only have two routes, research in the private sector and watch your discoveries get locked away to a single company doing the least amount of good or go public and join an already cut-throat and destructively competitive market. The other option is to join a think-tank and manipulate your data for money.
And Thirdly, we have too many STEM majors. They already have a hard time finding work within their own field and the sheer number of so devalued their degrees that most places won't consider you unless you are working toward PHD or have a Masters.
Finally, combining all this shit together, you have a pay-to-publish industry that doesn't honestly give a shit about standards which means anything can get published the scientifically illiterate media will pick it up and then you get 15 minutes of fame.
Just like everything else in society right now, our systems to discovering some form of verifiable truth is fucked in the scientific world.
It is also quite ridiculous that we still use the old system of journals. In this day and age, there ought to be cheaper methods to publish because we have the internet. The problem is balancing accessibility with rigor.
This is not even to mention the problem you noted about replication. To fix that we need a fundamental change in the incentive system and academic culture. Replication ought to be no less important than doing any other necessary task in our society. People lay bricks for hours on end, why shouldn't academics have to lay some as well? Everybody wants to be an architect.
but remember right wingers, you have to cite peer-reviewed studies when making points or I won't listen
they're impartial and wholly unbiased fterall :^)
The three people doing this have claimed they're leftists.
I know a lot of leftists who really hate liberals though
If you look in to it it, they've said its not to say these fields of study are stupid, but its because they are important that this is such an issue. They're subjects that need to be studied by because there is a lack of integrity checking, it makes anything that comes out of them suspect.
They've released some videos detailing some basic thoughts on what and why they've been doing it, there's apparently going to be a much longer documentary about it all. But yea, none of this is "alt-right assholes trying to own the libs", they seem like they honestly want to encourage discussion. They do have quite a laugh at the dogs humping paper getting published though.
The Science Wars never really ended to be honest. The reasons behind the problem just get chopped and changed every so often. Reproducibility, for-profit publishing, ideological injection, etc.
Peer review will never be perfect either, so we're unlikely to ever truly eradicate the problem of hoax papers or junk studies. Even if we as a society wanted to fund sciences correctly and put the effort in, shit is going to slip through. And that shit will always be used as fuel against a science. Paper mill journals being removed would probably make a good impact on the fields, but there's just so much money to be made by taking the rights for a piece of research from someone, even if it's garbage research, and selling access to it.
It really sucks that this is the current state of affairs, as every PhD level student (or higher) I know who has published knows that their work might end up in one of these garbage journals one day. And every single one, post publishing, gets a shitload of spam from paper mills trying to coax them into publishing under them.
The peer - review process is very difficult to do in the humanities.
First of all, its all free-labor. Articles are sent to people in the fields who read/review them. They don't get paid to do it so stuff slides by.
Second of all, theres only so much they can do. In a 40~something page paper there's gonna be 100+ footnotes. Is the peer-reviewer supposed to fact-check all 100+ footnotes? Thats gonna take a lot of time. Keep in mind that in the broken system the turn-around time on sending out an article to publication and getting feedback/acceptance/rejection almost 6 months on average (because of the incredible large number of articles sent out to journals and the incredibly low number of staff doing the reviewing).
This is also the case in the sciences Authors have ownership over their data and don't submit it/records of getting it with their articles. There's nothing, in theory, stopping someone from doing the same thing and sending doctored data out to journals w/ big write ups of their impact. There's a huge replication crisis in scholarly work.
Naturally, like 90% of the problems in America, the root cause is that everything in this fucking shithole of a country is a game run for profit.
Our Struggle Is My Struggle
You do realize one of the papers accepted was a re-write of a section of Mein Kampf with feminist/critical theory buzzwords replacing "Muh international jewery" type shit, right?
If that happens, it's not an alt-right conspiracy or a partisan power grab to say that there's a fucking problem in academia with radical ideologues pushing something deeply terrible as "science", if you can dress up the fucking nazi manifesto as enlightened progressivism and have it published.
Also the alt-right is by definition collectivist identitarianism so they'd actually applaud that shit anyway.
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