Fake News Comes to Academia (warning SJW related)

Caporegime
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I thought this was quite amusing, there has been for some time a rather unchecked culture within academia where some academics within the social sciences are publishing all sorts of stuff re: race, gender, sexuality etc.. which can often be accepted without much criticism as to do so would be bigoted, wrong, evil.

And of course online you'll then get SJWs referring to these opinions: "ha you're wrong bigot, my opinion is right because some academic has said so in this paper"

Seemingly some academics have decided to take a bit of a stand against this by showing it up for what it really is, they've done this by submitting nonsense articles for publication, resulting in some being published.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fake-news-comes-to-academia-1538520950


Affilia, a peer-reviewed journal of women and social work, formally accepted the trio’s hoax paper, “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” The second portion of the paper is a rewrite of a chapter from “Mein Kampf.” Affilia’s editors declined to comment.

The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.

Gender, Place & Culture, for instance, published a 2017 paper that wasn’t a hoax analyzing the “feminist posthumanist politics” of what squirrels eat. This year Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, published an analysis of a one-woman show featuring “the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat.” The performance supposedly offers “a synthaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychological fallout.”

The trio say the biases in favor of grievance-focused research was so strong that their hoax papers sailed through peer review, acceptance and publication despite obvious problems. The data for the dog-park study, Mr. Lindsay says, “was constructed to look outlandish on purpose. So asking us for the data would not have been out of sorts. It would have been appropriate, and we would have been exposed immediately.”

One hoax paper, submitted to Hypatia, proposed a teaching method centered on “experiential reparations.” It suggested that professors rate students’ levels of oppression based on race, gender, class and other identity categories. Students deemed “privileged” would be kept from commenting in class, interrupted when they did speak, and “invited” to “sit on the floor” or “to wear (light) chains around their shoulders, wrists or ankles for the duration of the course.” Students who complained would be told that this “educational tool” helps them confront “privileged fragility.”

Hypatia’s two unnamed peer reviewers did not object that the proposed teaching method was abusive. “I like this project very much,” one commented.
One wondered how to make privileged students “feel genuinely uncomfortable in ways that are humbling and productive,” but not “so uncomfortable (shame) that they resist with renewed vigor.” Hypatia didn’t accept the paper but said it would consider a revised version. In July it formally accepted another hoax paper, “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire”—an argument that humor, satire and hoaxes should only be used in service of social justice, not against it.
 
Caporegime
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Ah, didn't see the youtube video, their reactions to getting the paper's published :D, well deserved. They've done pretty damn well exposing the "grievance culture".

Intersectional Feminist version of Mein Kampf getting accepted tho.... :eek:
 
Man of Honour
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Ah, didn't see the youtube video, their reactions to getting the paper's published :D, well deserved. They've done pretty damn well exposing the "grievance culture".

Intersectional Feminist version of Mein Kampf getting accepted tho.... :eek:

Why is anyone surprised? They're both biological group identity politics. They're both acceptably within the range of opinions within the ideology. There's nothing in Mein Kampf that hasn't already been in feminist material, over and over again.
 
Soldato
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Not all journals are born equal. There are a ridiculously large number.

Any citation should normally take into account how respected that journal is as well as the content.
 
Soldato
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Heh, saw an article on a similar subject in the spectator today.

How three pranksters exposed the insanity of the social sciences

One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘the conceptual penis as a social construct.’ This was an academic paper which proposed that:

‘The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.’

This gobbledegook was presented in an academic journal, was peer-reviewed and published in Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax. A big, beautiful brilliant hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immersed themselves in the academic BS of their time. In that paper they successfully punked an academic scene which (in the humanities at least) allows the most insane and untrue claims to be presented as truth so long as they are suffused in fashionable grievances and coated in a form of academic doublespeak which is an insult to intellectual inquiry and an offence against language.

Since the authors of that paper exposed their own spoof, the Cogent Social Sciences journal has unpublished the article. But the article and the background on it can still be read here.

Now the authors of that hoax – with the addition of a third, Helen Pluckrose – have released a video saying that they have spent part of the last year working on a wider-ranging demonstration of the problems in ‘peer-reviewed’ academic studies. They have been firing off more papers. And a number of them have been accepted. One of these papers, published by an academic journal, claims that dog-humping incidents in parks can be taken as evidence of ‘rape-culture’. It is worth watching the 1 minute video here, and the longer video explainer here. Partly because it is very funny. But also because the deeper point it makes is far from frivolous.

In order for a society to remain even vaguely healthy it has to have healthy institutions. And for institutions to be healthy they need to be justly respected – not respected because they ‘demand’ it or play-act at earning respect.

When institutions – like academic institutions and academic journals – become corrupted by ideologues of any political stripe, people are left able to respect almost nothing and believe almost anything. Anyone need only glance at numerous fields of ‘academic studies’ today (gender ‘studies’, queer ‘studies’ and more) to realise that much of the humanities, and nearly all of the social sciences have become pulpits for frauds and megaphones for radical inadequates.

The first foray of Boghossian and Lindsay may not have been enough for people to call time on this fraud. But with the addition of Pluckrose, perhaps the wider point will now be heard. Or to put it another way, perhaps rape culture among dogs will break through where the conceptual penis could not.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/...-exposed-the-insanity-of-the-social-sciences/
 
Caporegime
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Not all journals are born equal. There are a ridiculously large number.

Any citation should normally take into account how respected that journal is as well as the content.

True and the slightly worrying thing here is that these journals aren't exactly obscure, Hypatia does seem to be a prominent feminist philosophy journal!

Here are some further comments on the story from five other academics:

https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/
 
Soldato
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I saw this yesterday morning, I was waiting for a thread on it. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end but I doubt it.

Very commendable effort from the academics involved. Are they in hiding now? :D
 
Soldato
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I was also waiting for our resident SJW RSS feed to post. :p

I read about it yesterday and had a good chuckle, but it’s not really that funny.

The thing that really stood out for me in the YT video above was the conclusion: “My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can say with confidence that ‘these people don’t speak for us’. This is now a plea to all of those progressives and minority groups that these people claim to speak for. We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you”.

It’s so often banded about (especially in GD) that ‘the left’, as one homogenised unit, are behind all of this. Hopefully, this shows that is not the case.

I also hope this is the start of a wider movement against the insidious side of ‘grievance studies’, and more people come out and say “these people don’t speak for me”.
 
Soldato
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This gobbledegook was presented in an academic journal, was peer-reviewed and published in Cogent Social Sciences.

I'll be reminding D. P. of this every time I see him pull the a peer reviewed social science paper supports my otherwise unsupported assertion angle in threads here.....

If a paper can't produce an independently testable and repeatable result from its hypothesis its usefulness is rather limited and 'peer review' doesn't mean a whole lot.
 
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Soldato
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I was also waiting for our resident SJW RSS feed to post. :p

I read about it yesterday and had a good chuckle, but it’s not really that funny.

The thing that really stood out for me in the YT video above was the conclusion: “My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can say with confidence that ‘these people don’t speak for us’. This is now a plea to all of those progressives and minority groups that these people claim to speak for. We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you”.

It’s so often banded about (especially in GD) that ‘the left’, as one homogenised unit, are behind all of this. Hopefully, this shows that is not the case.

I also hope this is the start of a wider movement against the insidious side of ‘grievance studies’, and more people come out and say “these people don’t speak for me”.
The thing is though. If I came up to you and told you that everything that’s gone wrong in your life is because you’re black/female/gay or it’s because of the patriarchy or male priviledge. You may be inclined to believe it, because it’s easy. It absolves you of all the wrong in your life. The second something goes wrong people look to blame someone else for their **** up, you see it at school, uni, work and even in little kids.

These grievance studies won’t go away until people start taking responsibility of their lives. But as we know, we live in an age of rights and not of responsibilities. So I don’t think it’s going to change soon.
 
Caporegime
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The thing that really stood out for me in the YT video above was the conclusion: “My collaborators and I are left-wing academics who can say with confidence that ‘these people don’t speak for us’. This is now a plea to all of those progressives and minority groups that these people claim to speak for. We suggest you spend some time critically engaging with the ideas coming out of these fields and decide for yourself whether they speak for you”.

The fact they felt they needed to do that is in itself a bit of a sad reflection of the state of things at the moment, there are plenty of people out there willing to screech "racist", "alt right", "nazi" etc.. at things they don't like. It is a bit silly but plenty of people will assume things and then attack their own assumptions of your position rather than the actual position you've put forth. It seems like in every other interview Jordan Peterson has to answer questions about the alt right or even if he is alt right himself when it has little relevance to what he's saying.

see also the comment by Neven Sesardic:

"I was in a similar situation in 1981 when I wrote my first article in a series of criticisms of Marxism in what was then Yugoslavia. A friend of mine, slightly worried about me and possible consequences of publishing that article, advised me to add one sentence and say that despite attacking Marxism I at least supported socialism. I refused to do that, not only because I was not a socialist, but primarily because I thought that the question whether I was a socialist or not was entirely irrelevant for my article.

Besides, even if I had been a socialist I would still have been against publicly subscribing to socialism on such occasions. For, although in this way it might have been somewhat easier for me to attack Marxism, the widespread practice of declaring one’s political views might have made the discussion more difficult for those who were not socialists and who had political opinions that were widely and more strongly condemned."



It’s so often banded about (especially in GD) that ‘the left’, as one homogenised unit, are behind all of this. Hopefully, this shows that is not the case.

Not really, there is a problem with this stuff within the left but I'm not sure anyone is claiming that all left wing people believe X, that would be silly. For example take a look at youtube videos by Jonathan Pie - he's pretty left wing, seemingly a fan of Corbyn but he's also critical of a lot of this recent SJW/identity politics nonsense.

I also hope this is the start of a wider movement against the insidious side of ‘grievance studies’, and more people come out and say “these people don’t speak for me”.

Yup, I'd hope so too. :)
 
Soldato
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Orban was right to ban courses like gender studies etc in Hungary. All they do is churn out agitators. Let the private sector offer them, but they shouldn't be clogging up seats of learning.
 
Caporegime
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The problem in the US is that they don’t necessarily have a particular degree program immediately but instead have a wide range of options and some compulsory courses, which can mean having to take a gender studies class where the teaching is based on some of the bat **** crazy stuff that appears in these journals. Whether you like it or not, over there you’d best brush up on your oppression league tables and if you’re a straight white male then just apologise for even existing.
 
Soldato
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The thing is though. If I came up to you and told you that everything that’s gone wrong in your life is because you’re black/female/gay or it’s because of the patriarchy or male privilege. You may be inclined to believe it, because it’s easy. It absolves you of all the wrong in your life. The second something goes wrong people look to blame someone else for their **** up, you see it at school, uni, work and even in little kids.

These grievance studies won’t go away until people start taking responsibility of their lives. But as we know, we live in an age of rights and not of responsibilities. So I don’t think it’s going to change soon.

Yes — I said in the Jordan Peterson thread that it's a sad indictment of modern society that his message of self-responsibility is seen as so revolutionary, especially for younger people.

The fact they felt they needed to do that is in itself a bit of a sad reflection of the state of things at the moment, there are plenty of people out there willing to screech "racist", "alt right", "nazi" etc.. at things they don't like. It is a bit silly but plenty of people will assume things and then attack their own assumptions of your position rather than the actual position you've put forth. It seems like in every other interview Jordan Peterson has to answer questions about the alt right or even if he is alt right himself when it has little relevance to what he's saying.

Agreed. I enjoyed reading the quillet article you posted, but I thought Neven Sesardic's comments were particularly striking.


Not really, there is a problem with this stuff within the left but I'm not sure anyone is claiming that all left wing people believe X, that would be silly.
For example take a look at youtube videos by Jonathan Pie - he's pretty left wing, seemingly a fan of Corbyn but he's also critical of a lot of this recent SJW/identity politics nonsense.

I don't know… a quick search of GD for "The Left" would suggest otherwise, although sometimes it's hard to tell on here how literal people are being. :p

On the subject of Jonathan Pie, I went to see him about 18 months ago and he laid into the audience pretty heavily. I'm paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of "most of you are here because you're Guardian-reading Lefty Liberals, and I'm telling you that the current state of affairs [Brexit, Trump, majority Conservative Government] is your fault. The Left isn't providing any credible solutions to the issues and fears that many normal people face. What's worse, The Left is barely discussing those issues and fears. Instead, they are wasting time and energy on SJW/identity politics nonsense, and then they complain when the big votes don't go their way".

He got a huge round of applause, but I wonder how many people had forgotten the message by the time they left the theatre.
 
Soldato
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the journals have impact factors of 1.180 and 0.770 so not terrible

Erm, that is terrible.

Poor or even falsified scientific papers are published all the time in terrible journals. It should come as no surprise that terrible “research” has been accepted for publication.

When a certain Dr Wakefield managed to get a very famous (now retracted) paper into a journal with an impact factor of 53, that should have outraged the public. Not this rubbish.

@dowie Rather than spout Trumpesque bile about it, why not take the opportunity to reflect on the quality of news and research and its source?
 
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