yeah its bad, i guess i meant i've seen a lot worse.
Fake News Comes to Academia (warning SJW related)
yeah its bad, i guess i meant i've seen a lot worse.
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.
Soldato
They’re both peer reviewed scientific journals (albeit different science). They are like for like in that sense. The impact factor comment was more directed to the previous poster.
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.
Soldato
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String theory says hello
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.
Soldato
The first two words of the thread title drew comparisons in my head...
I would be interested to see how many alternative medicinal therapy courses are taught compared to the number of feminist philosophy courses in UK universities.
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.
Man of Honour
I was also waiting for our resident SJW RSS feed to post.
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”.
I think that's a forlorn hope. The regressive left have already acquired too much power. Anyone who comes out and says "these people don't speak for me" can expect to be condemned as far-right, alt-right, facist, etc, etc, and will face losing their jobs. They will be marginalised, deplatformed, etc. They will lack the power to counter the regressive left. Their speech has already been corrupted beyond redemption - whatever small voice they have will be commandeered by the regressive left and its Orwellian newspeak. If they use words like "left", "progressive", "liberal", "equality", "tolerance", "diversity" they will be playing into the hands of the regressive left that has corrupted those words and thus those concepts...pretty much anything they'd say would be playing into the hands of their enemies.
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..."
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."
Caporegime
Never forget that Alan Sokal was the first to fight back against this nonsense.