
Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor - rjf72
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Proceedings-Start-Against/245431
======
high_derivative
As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via
student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it.

I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their
all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive
STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march
through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar
standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level
onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on
asserting their importance through these politics.

To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To
them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational
choice most people take is to try to ignore this.

However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose
sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being
(for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending
events happening to you.

I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as
fast as I can.

~~~
danieltillett
As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need
to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the
related fields it has infected.

The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and
when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is
that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the
damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk
of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.

~~~
brodo
In my 10+ years in academia, i‘ve seen only a few STEM people in university
politics. From what I have read over the years, it’s the same in ‘real’
politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do
not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities
have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know
people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who ‘do
not belive in truth’. This leads to different values and different politics.

~~~
PinkMilkshake
> I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’

This is such an important point that it needs to be emphasized. Large chunks
of the humanities and social sciences operate under a _completely different
epistemology_. This epistemology rejects reason. And I don't mean that as a
jab, I mean it literally rejects the philosophical concept of Reason itself.

Everything is about ideology. It has at it's core the notion that there is no
objective truth, and that any assertion of truth is merely the application of
power of one group over another. Under this epistemology, lying,
contradiction, hypocrisy, fallacy, and rhetoric are all acceptable and even
encouraged.

Dig a little in to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and
deconstruction and so much of the Social Justice movement will make sense.
You'll start to find very little about Social Justice is about social justice.

~~~
WaxProlix
I'm not an expert but I think this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of
these philosophical bents, sort of like quoting "I think therefore I am" and
going about telling people that Descartes was purely a solipsist. There's
something to it, but it's not the whole truth, and in a sometimes-violent
climate of name-calling (and worse) I think it can be damaging when
misinformation is wielded as a club against political opponents like this.

~~~
torstenvl
Explain, then, the epistemology that leads someone with a degree in
international relations and economics to say that being morally right is more
important than being factually correct?

I agree that misinformation can be wielded like a club; I disagree that GP is
the one doing so.

~~~
jackvalentine
If you're going to throw quotes or references to news in to conversations out
of nowhere at least source them.

For those playing at home: he's quoting stripped of context Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez. Watch the video here:
[http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio-
cor...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio-
cortez_people_being_more_concerned_about_me_being_factually_correct_than_morally_right.html?jwsource=cl)

~~~
leereeves
What about that context contradicts torstenvl's interpretation?

It seems to me that saying that Washington Post fact-checkers are "more
concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than
about being morally right" is one step away from saying they are morally
wrong, an example of the "post-fact" attitude that holding the right position
is more important than reality.

I suppose it was inevitable that when fact-checkers became inconvenient for
politicians, politicians would attack them. How long until the same thing
happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than
being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?

People who still care about facts need to stand up to those who don't, lest
facts cease to matter entirely.

Edit:

In response to the claim that the WaPo is being "pedantic" and "petty", I
should include their response:

> The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her
> falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s
> Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s
> when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for
> a singular claim.

...

> What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the
> idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being
> “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be
> weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was
> wrong, but at least my cause is just.”

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandria-
ocasio-cortezs-very-bad-defense-her-falsehoods/?utm_term=.620d814d33d3)

~~~
jackvalentine
The point she is making is that playing 'gotcha!' with relatively minor errors
(in this case misinterpreting 21 trillion dollars worth of unaccounted for
income AND expenditure as merely 21 trillion dollars of cash unaccounted for)
misses the greater conversation about huge military spending vs civilian
spending.

Sure you can spend your life being pedantic about things and us nerds commonly
fall in to that trap, but it doesn't engage the conversation in a meaningful
way and is very petty.

The reason I linked it is because the larger back-and-forth with Cooper where
she admits facts are important and talks about when she makes mistakes
provides colour that is missing from the misleading snipped quote "being
morally right is more important than facts".

~~~
torstenvl
It is not a minor error. It's not pedantic. It's not petty. She claimed the
DoD _lost_ more money than it has ever had, cumulatively, in its entire
history, including when it was the Department of War.

If you want to have a conversation about military spending vs. civilian
spending, fine. Let's have that conversation. But it's only worth having that
conversation with people who will be honest and admit when they're wrong.

------
twblalock
Apparently the university is accusing Boghossian of unethical research
involving human subjects, and those human subjects are _the journal editors
who published the nonsense articles he submitted_.

It's one of the most transparent excuses for a witch hunt and rigged trial
I've ever seen.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
IRB approval is a standard requirement for any research done when interacting
with human test subjects. The researchers unquestionably didn't apply for IRB
approval, and hence they're under scrutiny. No need to dream up conspiracy
theories.

~~~
saulrh
Yep. AFAIK you have to get IRB approval to do _literally anything_ with humans
involved. Zero discretion is permitted because _any_ amount of discretion
degrades trust in the system (and if you thought anti-intellectualism was bad
these days, boy do I have a dystopia for you to imagine) and allows
unacceptable failures to creep in purely due to human error.

How many times have you submitted a small PR that obviously can't break
anything, complaining about the annoyance all the time, only to find out that
your "obviously right" PR was in fact badly wrong? How many times have you
seen some bit of code and thought "this is weird, but it had to have been
approved to get merged, so I probably don't have to worry _too_ much about
it"? Now multiply that by research with human subjects.

~~~
jrumbut
Incredibly good reasons for extensive review of human research can be found
here, for the skeptical or curious:
[https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timel...](https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timeline/index.cfm)

Another more recent one:
[https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&pag...](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&page=1)

More examples aren't hard to find at all, including the case last year of the
gene-edited girls: [https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr-
bab...](https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr-babies-could-
face-1831553751)

When you've got a burning question in mind and visions of tremendous benefits
for all humanity (or saving some academic fields from themselves) it seems
like a good idea to get your ideas reviewed.

------
dTal
>Such behavior, they wrote, hurts the reputations of the university as well as
honest scholars who work there. "Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’
reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued."

I'm afraid this particular objection paints a rather damning picture - _any_
critique of the field may be criticized under similar grounds. One who would
make such a complaint has left the path of science.

(Interestingly, the concession that it is damaging to reputations actually
lends support to the thesis)

~~~
daodedickinson
>it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may
become devalued."

Hahahaha

Could you imagine how different schools would be if they put that motivation
over money? At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have
to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that
have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.

~~~
twblalock
> At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give,
> without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no
> idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.

This is why we have such stringent interview processes in the software
industry. Credentials don't mean anything when a large percentage of graduates
aren't qualified to do the work.

------
m0zg
I hope they fail to suppress Boghossian. As far as I'm concerned, he's done
academia a great favor by shining a light on the inane horseshit people
"review" and publish, especially outside the hard sciences where it can't be
reliably verified. Instead of systematically addressing the problem, these
people are choosing to claim that the emperor's clothes are just fine as they
are. I very much hope this backfires, and I also hope this is made as public
as possible.

------
wgerard
This took me a minute and a second read, for anyone else who was similarly
confused:

> The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition
> for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal
> editors and reviewers

The university's basically saying that the project itself is the problem, not
the individual articles themselves. As the author stated, the goal was to:

> "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is
> corrupting academic research"

which is a behavioral research meta-study involving humans (in this case,
journal reviewers and editors). Of course, behavioral research involving
humans almost always requires IRB approval.

I realize on a third reading this is stated pretty clearly ("the hoax project
met.."), but took me a minute nonetheless.

~~~
tomlock
> which is corrupting academic research

Considering this paper was presumably hoping to bring about better standards
in academia, how is this claim supported by the hoax AKA experiment?

~~~
naasking
They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical
methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or
understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data that's
presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by reporting data
with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass review in other
fields, to see if any of the reviewers or editors would catch the obvious
bullshit. They did not, across 7 published papers thus far IIRC.

In fact, the hoax authors even told the publishers they couldn't provide the
raw data because it had been printed out on paper that had then been recycled.
Publisher's response: sure, no problem, we'll publish anyway.

In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are
themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression. As such, they remain wilfully
ignorant of these biases and proper statistical methods.

All told, would you consider this a corruption of academic research?

~~~
tomlock
> They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical
> methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or
> understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data
> that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by
> reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass
> review in other fields,

Let me stop you right there. The replication crisis has shown repeatedly,
across disciplines that have testable hypotheses, that bad articles are
accepted in academic journals.

> In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are
> themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression.

I'm assuming you're talking about the conclusion many have drawn - which I
think is pretty uncontroversial - that science, logic and math are not fields
free from bias. We only have to got back to relatively recent history to
encounter periods when women were excluded from universities and phrenology
was considered science. Unfortunately I think what you might mean is that
people in "this field" (what field?) think science should be entirely thrown
out. You'll struggle to show that more than a tiny majority (please quantify
in your response) of people in any field (even theology) saying that science
is in itself a "corrupt enterprise".

~~~
naasking
> Let me stop you right there. The replication crisis has shown repeatedly,
> across disciplines that have testable hypotheses, that bad articles are
> accepted in academic journals.

The replication problem is worse the less rigourous the field. The hoax
authors managed to publish their first 7 articles, with 20 more still in
review IIRC, over the span of 10 months. They were quite confident that the
rest would have gone through had some journalists not prematurely unearthed
their subterfuge.

For instance, in the dog park paper, the authors claimed that they had
inspected the genitals of 10,000 unique dogs in a single dog park over a short
time span, and then questioned the dog owners on their sexual orientation. If
you can even look past the absurdity and take it seriously, the sample being
analyzed is clearly biased in various ways. What dog park would have 10,000
unique dogs and owners visiting in such a time frame? How is this a
representative sample? What sort of owners would be open to strangers fondling
their pet's genitals and then questioning their sexuality?

Each paper had distinct and meaningful bias or clear cherry picking injected
into the data, and not a single one of them was caught in review. The hoax
authors have emphatically claimed that this field is more akin to theology
than any kind of meaningful science, where any paper that reinforces the
orthodoxy gets published, no matter the methodological flaws, and that's what
they attempted to demonstrate (and they did I think). This result is far, far
worse than the replication crisis.

> I'm assuming you're talking about the conclusion many have drawn - which I
> think is pretty uncontroversial - that science, logic and math are not
> fields free from bias.

No, I mean quite literally that these "academics" think that the scientific
method, and that logic and mathematics itself, are tools of white oppression.
I won't vouch for the rest of the site, but the description presented here is
a decent introduction to the "reasoning" they employ:
[https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/the_scienti...](https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/the_scientific_method_is_racist_.html)

Edit: or just google "the scientific method is oppressive" if you want to find
further evidence. There are thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts
debating this claim. See: [https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/the-science-march-
sparked-a-b...](https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/the-science-march-sparked-a-
big-argument-about-objectivity.html)

~~~
tomlock
> The hoax authors have emphatically claimed that this field is more akin to
> theology than any kind of meaningful science, where any paper that
> reinforces the orthodoxy gets published, no matter the methodological flaws,
> and that's what they attempted to demonstrate (and they did I think). This
> result is far, far worse than the replication crisis.

Interesting claim, considering
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-
th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best-
evidence-for-austerity-based-on-an-excel-spreadsheet-
error/?utm_term=.6494a4515b12)

It is interesting to me that sometimes people seem to argue that the
"grievance studies" subjects are useless practically, and then in the next
sentence to argue they have a massive impact on other disciplines. In fields
like economics we can, however, often see and measure the effects directly.
And the effects of the orthodoxy that wants to justify, in this case
austerity, using bad papers, with publically available data, that anyone could
have checked, is far worse than the sokal squared hoax.

> No, I mean quite literally that these "academics" think that the scientific
> method, and that logic and mathematics itself, are tools of white
> oppression.

> There are thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts debating this
> claim.

The first article you linked quotes an orientation video. The second rests on
the "feminist glaciology" paper, which I've seen parroted by the right as an
example of this claim you're making, many, many times, and another article
posted on a website. I might be justified in asking you to provide evidence
that "thousands" of papers defending the claim that "the scientific method is
oppressive" but I don't expect you to, or be able to, defend that statement.
Lets focus on a smaller scope, and try to prove that there exist papers _in
the two articles you 've linked here_ that make that claim.

People who read these papers often make the mistake of reading an argument
against all knowledge by conflating a few things:

1) That the institution of science represents pure infallible access to
scientific knowledge

2) That objective truth is equivalent to, and accessed by scientific knowledge

We only have to go back a short period of time to see scientific
justifications of awful things. But, the vast majority of academics aren't
arguing that we should discard all of science. And, anyone can make a blog
post. Objective truth is always necessarily filtered through humans.

It is also a good point that scientists should listen to indigenous people and
their theories about natural phenomena. There are many examples of scientists
correlating myths and stories with natural events and discovering that there
was an eruption at a particular time. Understanding those perspectives
advances science.

~~~
naasking
> Interesting claim, considering
> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-
> th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-th..).

False equivalency. A single calculation error is not the same as a whole field
that eschews scientific methodology. Which isn't to say that other fields
don't suffer from biases and errors as well, but they have processes in place
to rectify them, and your article points out exactly how this happens.

Notice how it took a _hoax_ to point out that there's a problem with
grievances studies. That's a bad sign that the methodology and/or culture is
fundamentally flawed.

> It is interesting to me that sometimes people seem to argue that the
> "grievance studies" subjects are useless practically, and then in the next
> sentence to argue they have a massive impact on other disciplines

That's not inconsistent. For the sake of argument, suppose grievance studies
argues for affirmative action and hiring quotes to counter innate bias.
Suppose that companies buy into this, and implement such policies. Now suppose
that such measures are actually impossible to implement in practice, and are
illegally discriminatory. All of these can be true simultaneously (and
probably are true at this present time), which makes grievance studies a)
practically useless, b) have a massive impact, and c) harmful. I think an even
stronger case can be made in fact, but this thread is long enough as it is.

> And the effects of the orthodoxy that wants to justify, in this case
> austerity, using bad papers, with publically available data, that anyone
> could have checked, is far worse than the sokal squared hoax.

Maybe, but that doesn't somehow negate the harm from grievance studies, any
more than the existence of genital mutilation of women abroad somehow negates
any milder forms of sexism that might still exist in the west.

> I might be justified in asking you to provide evidence that "thousands" of
> papers defending the claim that "the scientific method is oppressive" but I
> don't expect you to, or be able to, defend that statement.

Interesting strawman. You've alleged that I said there are thousands of
_papers_ that are _making_ this claim, rather than what I actually said, which
is that there are thousands of _papers, articles, blogs and posts_ that have
_debated_ this claim. The latter is easily verified by looking at google
search results without even going into the academic literature. The former is
a clear attempt at casting me as unreasonable making absurd and overreaching
claims.

> We only have to go back a short period of time to see scientific
> justifications of awful things.

There is no legitimate "scientific justification" for awful things. Certainly
some people have _claimed_ scientific justification for awful things, but that
does not entail that such justification actually exists.

> But, the vast majority of academics aren't arguing that we should discard
> all of science.

I agree. And yet, that doesn't negate the evidence that a particular academic
field does advance claims that are equally dangerous, nor does it negate the
evidence that such a field has influence that isn't congruent with the
empirical evidence.

> It is also a good point that scientists should listen to indigenous people
> and their theories about natural phenomena. There are many examples of
> scientists correlating myths and stories with natural events and discovering
> that there was an eruption at a particular time. Understanding those
> perspectives advances science.

Except few people argue otherwise. Historians and geologists have connected
mythical events to possible historical events countless times (see for
instance, geomythology which was coined in _1968_ ).

That's a very different claim to saying that such myths should be given _equal
weight_ as demonstrable facts, and that science has no particularly unique or
meaningful claim to truth about the natural world over other views. That's
patently false.

In fact, I'll make an even stronger claim and say that it's _logically and
mathematically_ false. Solomonoff Induction grounded scientific inquiry with a
_proof_ that it converges on the truth. No other process aside from math can
demonstrably produce real truth. Of course, people deep in grievance-type
fields disavow logic and math as well, and so they would find such proofs
unconvincing.

~~~
tomlock
I think its time to pin down what fields you believe are in "grievance
studies" which is just name calling since...

> A single calculation error is not the same as a whole field that eschews
> scientific methodology. Which isn't to say that other fields don't suffer
> from biases and errors as well, but they have processes in place to rectify
> them, and your article points out exactly how this happens.

...it seems you believe Art and Creative Writing are "grievance studies".

And your claim was this was "far worse than the replication crisis"... how?
Vast economic policy changes versus what, exactly?

> That's not inconsistent.

Yes it is - to claim that these academics (who are accused of being postmodern
neomarxists) can recruit corporate, capitalist HR departments, but not recruit
more students, is inconsistent.

> Maybe, but that doesn't somehow negate the harm from grievance studies,

What harm? What harm do you think is specifically proven by this hoax or any
other paper?

> You've alleged that I said there are thousands of papers that are making
> this claim, rather than what I actually said, which is that there are
> thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts that have debated this claim.
> The latter is easily verified by looking at google search results without
> even going into the academic literature. The former is a clear attempt at
> casting me as unreasonable making absurd and overreaching claims.

Sorry for misreading you. I thought you were making a non-trivial claim that
people in academia were debating the scientific method. If you're making the
claim that non-academics are debating a subject, that's a pretty trivial thing
to say. Flat earth, anyone?

> I agree. And yet, that doesn't negate the evidence that a particular
> academic field does advance claims that are equally dangerous, nor does it
> negate the evidence that such a field has influence that isn't congruent
> with the empirical evidence.

Awesome, lets discuss all the "dangerous claims" that this academic field is
making. This hoax has nothing to do with the field's "claims", but I'm happy
to talk about specific claims in specific papers, and compare their acceptance
and their magnitude. I would much prefer that discussion to one where we
allude to a vast academic conspiracy that doesn't exist.

> There is no legitimate "scientific justification" for awful things.
> Certainly some people have claimed scientific justification for awful
> things, but that does not entail that such justification actually exists.

See, here's the core of the point. If scientists and presumably, people like
yourself, were so sure they'd found scientific knowledge previously, and it
"didn't exist", couldn't the same doubt exist for the claims you make today?
Who gets anointed to decide what scientific knowledge does, or does not,
exist? Perhaps all these academics saying that we must be suspect of anyone
who proclaims such a thing have a point.

> That's a very different claim to saying that such myths should be given
> equal weight as demonstrable facts, and that science has no particularly
> unique or meaningful claim to truth about the natural world over other
> views. That's patently false.

I'm happy to discuss papers that you think make those claims.

~~~
naasking
By the way, I believe the hoax authors actually cited many examples of papers
that they found problematic, so if you're interested in actually examining
some objectionable work, that's your way forward.

~~~
tomlock
Sure, and if you'd like to point out what claims in those papers indicate that
the authors believe "myths should be given equal weight as demonstrable
facts", I'd love to hear it.

------
hn_throwaway_99
When there are lots of people who have a vested interest in the Emperor's
wardrobe, not surprising (but a bit sad) that the hammer is coming down on
those that point out that the Emperor is naked.

------
letitgo12345
The guy _fabricated_ data to fool the editors. Academia relies on researchers
being honest and not doing so -- there simply aren't any resources for
journals to do independent replication of all received papers before accepting
them for publication. That's precisely why data fabrication is taken so
seriously and the consequences of doing so are basically career ending -- it's
the deterrent to incentivize people to be honest.

Edit: Also can we not lump all of academia into the same basket? The standards
in computer science/math/physics are very different from that in
biology/medicine which in turn are very different from those in humanities

~~~
maxlybbert
So if he had actually collected data on rape culture among Portland-area dogs,
it would have been legitimate research ("One of their papers, about canine
rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore., was initially recognized for
excellence by the journal 'Gender, Place, and Culture', the authors
reported")?

~~~
claudiawerner
If it is relevant data, why shouldn't it be legitimate research? Because you
personally think the topic is ridiculous, absurd or not worth consideration?
Many ideas seem that way (including very important ones, such as the study of
language) so that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss them outright.

~~~
maxlybbert
I thought people were overstating the case that humanities departments across
the country are converged. But if investigating whether dogs actually get
consent before mating in dog parks (or is there another definition for "rape
culture among dogs"?) is considered possibly legitimate research, I may need
to revisit my judgement.

------
currymj
It seems like some people are actually pleased the hoax worked. If this is
you, try to honestly imagine how you would feel if it had failed -- if the
journals immediately called BS and refused to publish.

Would you be happy or unhappy about that? If unhappy, are you really so sure
you're on the side of truth, or are you just a member of one tribe pleased
that the other tribe has been embarrassed? The world where the hoax failed
would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity.

~~~
fenomas
As far as I can tell the hoax _did_ fail. As I recall from the authors'
writeup, the initial round of hoax papers they sent out _all got rejected_. By
any reasonable standard they could/should have stopped right there and
published a paper called "social science journals aren't as gullible as we
thought".

Instead they iterated on the papers, and kept iterating until they got
something published. What's bizarre is that the authors don't seem to realize
that this changed the whole nature of their study, and they were now testing a
completely different thesis than the one they set out to test.

~~~
jdminhbg
I’m sorry, but if the barrier to entry for publishing is a few weeks of
revising made-up papers, that’s still a gigantic problem. The hoax succeeded.

~~~
fenomas
Look past the false dichotomy - there can still be a gigantic problem even
though this particular hoax didn't do a good job of exposing it.

I mean, the social science journals targeted by this hoax could be awful, I
have no idea. But the hoax started with the thesis "if we submit an awful
paper it will get accepted" and that thesis turned out to be false. This
implies that the journals are not as bad as the hoax authors originally
expected, right? They could still be bad, but the hoax doesn't establish that.

The fact that the authors later got other papers accepted, I don't think we
can say much about. If an experimenter's methodology is "keep iterating until
X happens", then obviously the fact that X eventually happened can't prove
anything about their thesis.

~~~
jdminhbg
There is a LOT of motivated reasoning in here. What method of experimentation
are you proposing where if the first attempt at validating a hypothesis fails,
you simply quit instead of tweaking the hypothesis and trying again?

The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to
become a published author in these journals. I do not expect that these
authors could, without any training or expertise, revise-and-submit a half
dozen papers to be published in physics or chemistry. That's significant,
whether you like it or not.

~~~
fenomas
> motivated reasoning

You have things backwards. I _agree_ with the hoaxers' motivation, and I
assume that what they were trying to prove is presumably true. But their
experiment didn't actually support those conclusions.

> What method of experimentation are you proposing ..

Lots of methodologies are valid, but if the whole thing is presented as
science then the conclusions need to be consistent with the methodology used!

In the hoaxers' writeup, they said they submitted a bunch of absurd papers,
but they all got rejected, so they gradually toned things down bit by bit
until some of them got accepted. That's fine, insofar as it goes, but you
cannot then turn around and claim to have proved that the journals will will
publish absurd papers, which is what the authors did. You can't call a result
significant if your methodology is to gradually lower the bar for
"significant" until you get the result you wanted!

What the hoax actually proved was that the authors could publish a paper that
they considered absurd, but which the journal considered fine. Which is neat -
but isn't that already true of the regular papers these journals normally
publish? Then what in the world did the hoax accomplish?

> The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to
> become a published author in these journals

I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting
that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not the
times or credentials involved.

~~~
jdminhbg
> You can't call a result significant if your methodology is to gradually
> lower the bar for "significant" until you get the result you wanted!

This didn't happen. You're the one who has post hoc decided that there is some
abstract bar of "significance" that they're moving up or down. The point is to
publish absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals. There is not some
absurdity equivalent to p < 0.05 that they manipulated. They just published
absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals. It's not like the absurdity of
Dog Rape Culture would be lessened if the first papers they submitted had been
the output of /dev/random.

> I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting
> that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not
> the times or credentials involved.

I'm getting it from the literal facts of what happened. They are not trained
in these fields, and papers they wrote were published in these journals.
Therefore, the hoax shows that you do not need to be trained in these fields
to publish in these journals.

~~~
fenomas
> They just published absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals.

You and I can say the papers were absurd, but an argument is only meaningful
to the extent that it has persuasive power to someone who doesn't already
agree with it. For anyone who disagrees that the papers were absurd, the hoax
has no argument to make - that's where it falls down compared to Sokal, or
SciGen-style hoaxes, etc.

I mean honestly, did you read the authors' writeup? I remember it had a bit in
the summary like: "so what has this experiment proved exactly? Well, we'll
leave that for you to decide". If that's a study that's proved its thesis, I'm
a banana.

> Therefore, the hoax shows that you do not need to be trained in these fields
> to publish in these journals.

I don't know what special training an academic from one branch of the social
sciences would need to publish in another, but again you're claiming the study
proves something the study authors didn't even discuss. That's not a tenable
position to hold, and you might reconsider why you hold it.

------
kristianc
The grievance studies community very quickly pivoted to the 'but it was
unethical!' line in the wake of the hoax - it's a shame but not at all
surprising that they aren't interested in attacking the root cause.

------
timkam
While I don't think Boghossian is a fraudster, his hoaxes are certainly poor
science. He should have conducted a rigorous empirical study instead. Of
course, he must have known that fabricating data can cost him his career. But
punishing him sends the wrong sign to academic whistle-blowers. IMHO, the best
thing Portland State can do is to establish rules for ethical and
scientifically valuable hoaxes as a lesson learned from this.

------
voidhorse
Sure, the criticism this hoax is trying to demonstrate may be legitimate, but
the methodology is one designed to highlight the cleverness of its executors
and diminish the credibility of a discipline, rather than point out
constructive areas for improvement. Basically, it is a methodology that does
not treat its targets as intellectual equals and is quite indecorous—you get
the sense that a major point of this operation is to discredit the field and
make its practitioners feel some kind of public humiliation or shame. A
childish tactic.

In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic
practices. Sokal's big hoax did a good lot for Sokal (whom everyone is now
familiar with—but it's funny: is the public acquainted with Sokal because of
the contributions he made to _his_ field? Arguably, no. Who's supposed to be
the sham academic again?) and caused a lot of drama—but was it an effective
means of enacting the sort of change in academic practice it claimed to be
striving for? Well, we simply need to ask ourselves why there's even a need
for such a thing as "Sokal squared" to answer that question.

This is a conniving way to go about improving academic practice—doesn't the
very practice sort of eschew the principles of open collaboration,
transparency, collective growth, and honest dissemination of thought/knowledge
academia should, in the ideal world, foster?

This is largely just an attempt to incite drama and gain notoriety on the part
of the authors, and it further drives wedges between already highly disparate,
specialized fields that may as well talk past each other.

Of course there are things to criticize about grievance studies, just as there
were things to criticize about the lingo and methods popular in the humanities
when Sokal devised his original hoax—but stooping to underhanded publicity
stunts instead of open intellectual conversation likely won't solve the
problem. Please don't give in to this sort of nonsense and stroke the pleading
egos of the 'academics' that pull these sorts of stunts. Boghossian is not a
hero.

~~~
twic
> In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic
> practices

So what is? Specifically, what is, given that the academic fields in question
demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not?

~~~
voidhorse
I think a mechanism that, first of all, promotes some kind of interaction
between fields and helps counterbalance the hyper-specialization our academies
currently promote.

It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no
interest in whether things are true or not". More likely is that people from
hyper-specialized fields use different criterion for the validity and
veridicality of statements and that their incredibly hermetic jargon and deep
reliance on interlocking field-specific concepts prevents them from
communicating with other academics from other disciplines in meaningful
ways—thus resulting in a great sense of misunderstanding and misjudgment
between members of the fields. In some sense, our pursuits are so hyper-
specialized at this point that they are incommensurable—there's an incredible
lack of 'generalists' able to act as liaisons and to produce the appropriate
meta-criticisms for each field of study.

That, I think, is a much more reasonable assumption than one that assumes a
cohort of people who "don't have interest in the truth" have somehow slipped
their way into academia and are using it as nothing more than a vehicle for
their political motives—that's a rather conspiratorial hypothesis and would
need much more evidence to support it than the publication of a couple of
papers in a couple of journals.

If we were to solve the hyper-specialization problem to a degree, I think it
would promote greater academic health and collaboration overall.

~~~
mpweiher
> It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have
> no interest in whether things are true or not".

Er, they are actually quite open about this.

For example:

 _Founded in 1974, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at
Stanford University has put research into action by inspiring innovative
solutions that advance gender equality._

The goal/purpose is "advancing gender equality", not "truth finding".

Most of these fields don't just not believe in truth as a concept, they
actually actively oppose and dismiss the search for truth or requirements for
evidence as being expressions of and mechanisms for maintaining illegitimate
power hierarchies.

Now hyper-specialisation is also a problem, but it's not _this_ problem.

------
gumby
I am really torn on this.

On one hand, there is an immense amount of vacuity in the social sciences,
which is a tragedy; not only is it a waste of money and effort but it obscures
and even crowds out actual, valuable work (yes, there is very good, useful,
meaningful work in deconstructionism, not to mention often-impugned fields
like women's studies...but it could be 1%). Pointing at the emperor is quite
important. I liked Sokal's paper at the time too.

Yet at the same time I do agree that setups like this are exploitative.

~~~
apocalypstyx
The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not
even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty
years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. We can say a
proposal looks stupid (and it might actually be) but huge swathes of current
scientific consensus would look ridiculous at any point directly prior to its
establishment, which might be considered the whole basis behind the Max Planck
quote: "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's not really that many
people are ever bowled over by something, so much as the next generation just
grows up with a general idea in the atmosphere, so it's a little less alien.

At it's heart, isn't the basic conflict between the two views of science as
expressed by Drumlin and Arroway in Contact?

~~~
gumby
> The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes
> not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for
> fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it.

I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a
model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of
the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math
problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately
had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they
are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow,
modern fleshed-out work.

Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and _did_
take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of
theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty
cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment.

So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon
centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to
say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some
of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my
paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an
intellectual tradition.

The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to
simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that
if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some
percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that
appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat)
it's worthless.

So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the
emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be
absurd, you throw out something very important.

My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors _were_ unwitting
human subjects...

------
staticautomatic
He obviously did fabricate the data but that's also the point. I find the
whole thing amusing and don't have a problem with it, even if it's coming from
a position I don't necessarily agree with.

------
umvi
There's a good Joe Rogan episode interviewing the hoax paper authors in
question:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg)

~~~
geomark
I watched the first half of it. Hilarious. Definitely recommend.

------
motohagiography
The process described is not an inquiry, it's a show trial. If the article is
accurate and complete, by what standard is this institution not considered
irrevocably compromised?

If the powers of an institution can be wielded in such a petty political way,
they are courting popular revolt. The broader risk is that in a stack of
applicants, if the only thing someone knows about Portland State University is
its hyperpoliticized environment, one could see how a CV might not make the
first cut of phone screens. These show trial people are disadvantaging their
students.

------
twic
> lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles
> if the topic is politically fashionable

Did they send any papers to string theory journals?

------
camdenlock
It's coming to a head, finally. These academic dogmatists are being dragged
out into the sunlight to be disinfected.

As usual, Steven Pinker sums it up best:

> "Criticism and open debate are the lifeblood of academia; they are what
> differentiate universities from organs of dogma and propaganda," Pinker
> wrote. "If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they
> should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them
> to try to punish and silence him."

~~~
vkou
There's a _lot_ of people who need to be dragged out into the sunlight to be
disinfected.

The people that I imagine belong in that category almost certainly don't
intersect much with the people who you imagine belong in that category.

This sword cuts both ways.

------
sullyj3
It's true that there's a fair amount of bullshit in humanities. However,
thinking in terms of fuzzy categories like "grievance studies" is lossy and
imprecise. It's not really a term which carves reality at the joints, so much
as a general purpose tribal rallying cry for STEM people against a hated and
feared outgroup. This kind of interdisciplinary tribal politics isn't
constructive. Rounding off everyone in "grievance studies" to the same
stereotype is the fastest way to irrational hatred and unnecessary conflict.

Also, this article is pretty good:
[https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-
th...](https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-the-pomoid-
cluster/)

------
bencoder
Original article and comments discussing the work:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811)

------
lainga
_" The three authors, who describe themselves as leftists..."_

Is that relevant to the case or just an aside from the story?

~~~
abalone
Because one line of attack on the authors is that their exposure of flaws in
the often left-leaning humanities is politically motivated. Stating their
politics helps shut that down and support the idea that they are just
champions of integrity.

------
nomdeguerre
Sometimes, you gotta take one for the team. This prosecution will help the
case far more than it will hurt.

------
mensetmanusman
Replication crisis + reputation crisis = lawyers

------
kristianc
The irony of this whole thing is that had the researchers reached a different
conclusion, there would be no investigation in the first place.

The entire Sokal Squared hoax was designed to prove motivated reasoning within
the social sciences, and the backlash and subsequent investigation is just
further evidence of that.

------
claudiawerner
There's a good critical overview of the various papers here[0].

[0] [https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-
squa...](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squared/)

------
adamnemecek
How can we provide support?

------
tptacek
I don't think HN's take on this story is especially sophisticated or well
informed. Some things I think people could stand to know about this:

The "Hoax" writeup in Aero is deceptive:

Most of the papers these "researchers" came up with were rejected; almost all
the papers submitted to high-status journals in the field were rejected; on
the occasion (I think just once?) a high-status journal accepted one of their
papers, their writeup gave the impression that it was a luridly insane paper
about "white males not being allowed to speak in class", when in fact that
paper was rejected and what had been accepted was a different, more banal
paper about the nature of hoaxes. Here's the quote from their writeup:

 _We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in
the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college
shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the
instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so
they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper.
The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been
surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d
publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The
answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist
social work journal Affilia has just accepted it._

Does this sound like "Progressive Stack" was rejected? Of course not: "the
answer was 'yes'" is used _in the same paragraph_ to indicate an acceptance,
and, by "surprisingly warm to it", the authors simply meant they received
suggestions for improvement from the journal review board. Whatever you think
about the politics of this "experiment", you shouldn't be OK with being lied
to. Also, how skeezy is it to attack reviewers for trying to help improve a
paper?

Meanwhile, look at the impact factors for the journals they actually got stuff
accepted at.

The researchers fabricated data for some of their submissions:

This blurs (I think deliberately) the line between article review and
_replication_ , which is not the job of a review board, but rather constitutes
an entire research project of its own. Nobody claimed to have replicated any
of these papers, but the authors of the report are counting on laypersons not
to understand how academic journal review works, and the extent to which it
absolutely relies on good faith.

Or, as Stefan Savage (can't help it, hero of mine) put it on Twitter last
night:

 _" This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase
Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all
the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the
result matters then the error is eventually detected."_

 _" But the I think the bigger issue is that Boghossian et al's work doesn't
seem motivated by anything productive. So they ridicule niche area X for not
being sufficiently scientific. Given that they don't even work in the area,
this accomplishes what exactly?"_

 _" I think people get in trouble when they think academic publication has
value in itself. Ideas become valuable when people care about them.
Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it
doesn’t make your ideas matter."_

They didn't generate any real results:

All the researchers have discovered is that social science fields --- _just
like STEM fields_ \--- include a mix of low- and high-quality journals, and if
they can't get something accepted in a high quality venue, a paper author can
shop until they find a journal that will accept. And, that journal review is
an eminently fallible process. Neither of these conclusions should surprise
anybody.

I have no idea what I think of the IRB process at play here; I don't know any
of what the IRB involved knows. But these people wasted a lot of reviewer
time, wrote a deceptive report, and and did it in the service of pointless,
banal conclusions. They're not heroes.

~~~
badatshipping
_" This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase Churchill,
peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others.
We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result
matters then the error is eventually detected."_

The journals didn't just accept papers whose conclusions were wrong. It's not
like there was a math mistake hidden on page 5. The entire paper was abject
nonsense.

Imagine you're designing a process to select rigorous papers out of a stack.
Surely you'd want the top of your funnel, the first round of filtering, to
weed out manufactured nonsense. The accusation isn't that these journals
didn't check the math carefully enough, or whether the paper replicated. It's
that they straight up couldn't tell they were being trolled.

I don't mean you or Savage specifically, but when I read the defenses against
this hoax, I feel like I'm watching mental gymnastics of epic proportions. The
most prestigious journals didn't fall for it; the paper didn't technically get
published; peer review isn't supposed to be perfect. This shouldn't have been
remotely possible! All of these papers should've been tossed straight into the
bin. If you sent the physics equivalent of a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf to
a low-tier physics journal, what are the odds they'd respond with "suggestions
for improvement"?

 _" Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it
doesn’t make your ideas matter."_

Finally, it's also weird to hear people now claim that publications don't
matter all that much. Why even have peer review then? Would these publications
themselves accept a description of themselves as "not having value"?

~~~
tptacek
I'm sure all the papers are, at bottom, terrible; they're made-up social
science papers. But Boghossian and his team are working hard to manipulate you
into believing they're "entirely abject nonsense" of the type any reviewer
should have been able to detect. Again: they're doing that by:

1\. Playing switcheroo with the papers they talk about and the papers they
actually got accepted, as they did with their dishonest description of the
Hypatia paper.

2\. Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the
paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia --- and forcing you to rely on
_their description_ of the ludicrous meaning of the paper, despite the fact
that they deliberately wrote abstruse papers from which you could take many
different meanings.

For instance, in a separate "Project Fact Sheet" the authors wrote, they
describe "HoH2" as a paper that says "social justice activists can make fun of
others, but no one is allowed to make fun of social justice." But that's not
really what the paper says at all; in fact, if I didn't have the background on
Boghossian's dumb project, I'd have called that an _uncharitable_ reading of
the paper, which is really just a dense survey of gender studies work on the
relation between humor and privilege (yes: I actually _read this stupid paper_
).

3\. Hyping up papers they managed to get accepted in bottom-tier journals, as
if the existence of those journals was a revelation. Once again: all
scientific fields have those journals! They're a consequence of the "publish
or perish" management of academia. Boghossian won't tell you how little impact
his team's papers have, because that would subvert the narrative they're
trying to deliver.

Here's a pretty interesting writeup from someone who actually worked out the
impact of this whole project. He used R! HN should love this!

[http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/](http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/)

Read this and see if you still feel the same about how important this project
was.

~~~
umvi
> Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the
> paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia

I thought they released a google drive containing all the papers in question:

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWP...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWPGs7Ue_i-
tkCw)

~~~
tptacek
They did, which is the only place you can find the HoH2 paper, but they don't
link to that paper from the writeup --- you have to dig into the Drive folder
to get it. That's because the HoH2 paper isn't an overtly absurd paper, unlike
the "Progressive Stack" paper, which they deceptively suggest got into Hypatia
and which they _do_ link to, despite it being rejected.

Their writeup is disingenuous, bordering on overtly dishonest.

------
21
Wow, submitting a paper to an editor/reviewer is considered human research
thus ethical board approval is required:

> _McLellan asked Boghossian to reveal any evidence that he had received
> approval from the university’s institutional review board for research
> involving both human and animal behavior._

> _The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition
> for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal
> editors and reviewers. Any research involving human subjects (even duped
> journal editors, apparently) needs IRB approval first, according to
> university policy._

So from now on, writing a CS paper on a new sorting algorithm will require
ethical board approval.

~~~
XMPPwocky
If I write a paper on a fake sorting algorithm and submit it to a real journal
to see if it gets approved, it's not really a stretch to call that human
subjects research.

~~~
taneq
But if you call it "bogosort" and make the algorithm blatantly terrible, then
any journal that takes it seriously is showing its lack of expertise.

~~~
james_s_tayler
Maybe it could work by sorting things based on political ideology and strength
of coalition support plus willingness to shout down the opposition.

I'm sure you can imagine how that applies to a list of integers. They probably
sort themselves into intersectional groups recursively. So the algorithm
starts off and the first pass sorts loosely into odd vs even. Then a next pass
sorts the partitions further into positive and negative. Then the next pass
sorts by prime factorization and so on until they are maximally sorted by all
the ways in which they can be grouped intersectionally.

Of course the result of the sorting is useless, but that's the moral of the
story.

~~~
taneq
Quick, write it up and get it published!

------
buboard
when you bite the hand that feeds you it will choke you

------
daodedickinson
Hope he enjoys his struggle session.

------
jancsika
> The hoax was dubbed "Sokal Squared," after a similar stunt pulled in 1996 by
> Alan Sokal, then a physicist at New York University.

This has as much to do with Sokal's hoax as those battery fire-hazards with
wheels have to do with "hoverboards".

A 'Sokal Squared' hoax should mean something like multiple journal articles
getting published-- _none of which contain any data to back up their claims_
\-- all claiming to replicate an original journal article _which also contains
no data_ to substantiate its claim.

The twist that makes Sokal's original hoax clever is there isn't any research
being put forward. There is simply an assertion, non-sequiturs, and a
repetition of the assertion as the conclusion. He completely left out the
"research" part of his journal article.

The reason his hoax was so embarrassing for that journal is that no university
ever imagined they'd need to make a basic rule that researchers must actually
include research in their research papers. That means that Sokal didn't
_directly_ break any rules with his hoax, and much of the spotlight remained
on the journal for failing to do the trivial job of rejecting submissions that
fail to contain content.

I'd be willing to bet there was a dean or two and some administrators who met
to figure out if Sokal actually broke any of the school's guidelines. I'd also
bet they came up with some way they could apply a vaguely worded research
guideline to discipline him but decided against it for fear of pushback within
the wider research community. Still, it's a reasonable concern when a
professor publicly states that they submitted an article to a journal _in bad
faith_ , even as a hoax.

tldr; it's a nuanced situation that IMO requires lots of reflection.

On a completely different topic-- some knuckleheads apparently falsified some
data for reasons, and a university is going to discipline them for falsifying
data. I don't understand what ethical conundrum I'm supposed to care about
here.

------
foobar1962
This is the person that wrote "A Manual for Creating Atheists" which contains
a questioning technique that has been called "Street Epistemology".

Could the hoax investigation be a punishment for the Manual?

------
winchling
_> 2) No, he should not be fired. In fact, the punishment should be very mild
(e.g. a warning, attending a tutorial on research ethics)._

Is attending a tutorial a form of punishment? What about an exam? If yes then
what does this imply about the nature of the university education?

------
rdiddly
_" Your efforts to conduct human-subjects research at PSU without a submitted
nor approved protocol is _[sic] _a clear violation of the policies of your
employer, " McLellan wrote _[ungrammatically] _in an email to Boghossian._

Maybe his efforts is a violation, maybe they isn't, but hey at least get the
grammar right, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at a
University.

------
tomlock
> 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.

This hoax didn't demonstrate anything non-trivial about these fields. As we
know from the replication crisis, it is relatively easy to get a paper
accepted in academic journals. This hoax and the hoaxers were as guilty of the
political bias and ethical malafice they were trying to accuse "grievance
studies" of. The fields they target have all been shrinking since 2008, a
clear sign they lack a vice-like grip on universities.

