Fake News Comes to Academia (warning SJW related)

[dowie]

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.

 

[dowie]

Ah, didn't see the youtube video, their reactions to getting the paper's published , well deserved. They've done pretty damn well exposing the "grievance culture".

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

 

[dowie]

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/

 

[dowie]

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.

 

[dowie]

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.

 

[dowie]

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?

You're not really comparing like for like though are you - the Lancet has a higher impact factor than a journal covering feminist philosophy... well no ****

Are you being deliberately disingenuous or did you just not think that through?

They targeted prominent journals within the fields they were critical of in the first place. I won't claim to be an expert on feminist philosophy but that does seem to be one of the prominent journals.

 

[dowie]

There are also journals covering homeopathy, alternative remedies and aromatherapy. Many are highly critical of these fields too.

This is a total non story if you’re actually used to doing any sort of proper research or critical appraisal of evidence.

Homeopathy isn’t widely taught at universities, there are some universities unfortunately offering degrees in the subject but criticism of it isn’t likely to cause people to be labelled bigots etc..,

You came into the thread claiming some nonsense about trump-esq bile... I’m not sure what specifically you were referring to but you didn’t substantiate it anyway.

As for whether it is a non-story, it seems that various academics and indeed prominent media outlets will disagree with you there. Is postmodernism, identity politics as much of an issue as a vaccine scare story? Nope. But there is no reason why both can’t be commented on, just as people might comment on the ‘bedroom tax’ while people in the third world are dying thanks to inadequate water supplies in the rest of the world.

If you’re not interested in the story then that’s fine, the thread title made clear that it was SJW related so perhaps you’d be better off reading some other threads instead of moaning within threads you seemingly don’t think are of much value to begin with.

 

[dowie]

The first two words of the thread title drew comparisons in my head...

Well perhaps if you'd paid closer attention to the Wall Street Journal article in the OP you'd see that the thread title is simply the title of their article, albeit with an added warning on the end in brackets for people who don't like SJW related threads... then you'd perhaps not have to come in with needless comments accusing me of spouting "Trump-esq bile..."

I am interested in the interpretation of the story - hence I have posted. I took away a slightly different message: we need to be extremely careful in this era of information overload that we vet our information sources carefully as even the bastion of credible academia, the peer reviewed journal, is being threatened. There are so many open access journals which offer rapid peer review and publication that the credibility of academia as a whole should feel threatened and thus should redouble its efforts to maintain research integrity. I don't think that it really matters what the subject of the papers was (although it does make for a good headline), it's more about undermining traditional academic values.

Well I guess someone could try and find out what they can get away with in other journals. Certainly Psychology has had their replication crisis recently and there are issues within the pharmaceutical industry which gets highlighted frequently by, for example, Ben Goldacre. But again the fact those issues exist in other fields doesn't mean we can't criticise "grievance studies".

I think it would be silly to try and draw a false equivalence and assume that journals in general would suffer from issues to quite this degree, I think one of the comments on the Quillette article summed it up nicely:

"Whenever one falsely engages is scholarship, one can always be exposed by any work that mimics their own. Since these people are not scholars they fear being exposed and as such approve anything that appears similar to their output. They understand that if they call out any work similar to their own it is akin to calling themselves out or that others in turn might call them out. These are the properties of an echo chamber. They seek not scholarship but consensus. They seek to stifle debate because intuitively know their research can not survive scrutiny because in reality it lacks scholarship."