7 ms·

To be flippant, it sounds like you're quick to assume bad faith, which would seem to support the first point you quote. The experiment they ran was to try to g

To be flippant, it sounds like you're quick to assume bad faith, which would seem to support the first point you quote. The experiment they ran was to try to get terrible papers published in authoritative journals in certain fields. If they succeeded, this would point towards a serious problem with established practice in those fields; their suspicion of such a problem might be labeled a "chip on their shoulder" or a "hypothesis". According to what they say, they succeeded. As for it being "identitarian madness" and "coming out of the academic and activist left"—do you think either of those parts is false or is irrelevant to what they're studying? If not, how would you suggest they talk about it?

candiodari 8y ago
You're oppressing the GP with your white straight male science. You see your argument only makes sense if objective reality exists, as the argument fundamentally is about measuring objective reality. But objective reality has been firmly demonstrated to be false, and nothing more than a tool for oppression of women and minorities.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't low-rent ideological flamewar here. It's staggeringly boring.
slivym 8y ago
They literally have a video in the introduction which documents them deliberately submitting papers that they've engineered to have problems in bad faith to try and manufacture evidence that bad studies can get into journals. They establish that they act in bad faith.
- claudius 8y ago
  While authors ideally should act in good faith and only submit good papers, the whole idea of having journals and editors and peer review is to filter out bad papers. The problem here is not some people "deliberately submitting papers" which "have problems", the problem is that those papers were accepted by "academic" journals. This is not "manufacturing" evidence, this is simply evidence. The bad guys here are not random authors but the journal editors and peer reviewers accepting this stuff.
  - slivym 8y ago
    Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than academic journals. The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether it's possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but it's stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are deliberately publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article calls "Grievance Studies". The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece.
    - claudius 8y ago
      > Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than academic journals. Not really, given the miserable quality of the papers they publish. Maybe ‘newspaper‘ or ‘journal’ might be ok, but ‘academic journal‘ requires a certain amount of quality. > The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether it's possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but it's stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are deliberately publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article calls "Grievance Studies". Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’ publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the ‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers. > The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece. Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like blaming your upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of cards imploding. If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was never an academic institution to begin with. The completely sufficient evidence for this is the acceptance and publication of those papers.
      - Yoric 8y ago
        > Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’ publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the ‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers. Academic journals certainly publish papers (good or bad) deliberately because the peer reviewers consider them of a sufficient quality and interest for the domain. It has always been known that it's possible to get low quality papers in certain journals – sometimes good ones, if one puts sufficient efforts – in pretty much all domains. Concluding that these publications are accepted "to push an agenda" requires a leap of logic. In the past, it has been shown that simply mimicking the language (using Markov chains) was pretty much sufficient to get into some journals. > > The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece. > > Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like blaming your upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of cards imploding. If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was never an academic institution to begin with. The completely sufficient evidence for this is the acceptance and publication of those papers. On this point, I mostly agree with claudius. While the authors have written something that looks much more like a poitical clickbait than actual research findings, they have exposed weaknesses in the process or reviewers of some journals. These journals now have the ability to fix their mess, which will make everybody the winner.
- stupidcar 8y ago
  So if you suspect a problem with epistemology, you can't conduct an experiment, because to do so is "bad faith"? Do you display bad faith in the theory of gravity by conducting an experiment? Is the whole scientific process a bad faith attempt to determine objective truth by underhanded manipulation of the universe?
  - slivym 8y ago
    You can't conduct an experiment to establish why gravity happens. This experiment is like someone dropping a tennis ball and a bowling ball from the tower of pisa and then writing a conclusion that gravity has a liberal bias against bowling balls because it slows them down to the same speed as a tennis ball.
    - brohee 8y ago
      In that specific experiment (no vacuum), the bowling ball will be faster...
- elcapitan 8y ago
  It's not bad faith, it's a penetration test of something that was supposed to be a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper failed.
- gadders 8y ago
  It's not bad faith in case of the premise that they were trying to prove, namely that you can write any old rubbish and get it published if it has the right agenda.
UncleMeat 8y ago
Would it point at a serious problem? I think a lot of people misunderstand how review works. The problem exists if these papers become highly cited and influential. Plenty of garbage gets published, even in good outlets. This approach takes advantage of the public's incorrect understanding of the expectations of peer review. It also doesn't help that the article seems to deliberately hide which papers actually got accepted.
- collyw 8y ago
  I think natural sciences will be self correcting in this respect. If something new and important has been discovered, people will want to use it / build on it and thus it will have to be replicated.
ergothus 8y ago
> you're quick to assume bad faith, which would seem to support the first point you quote I don't think that follows. If you start with "there's no point in good faith" (paraphrase), you can't say that someone taking offense at their approach has proven their point. It doesn't DISPROVE it, and I'm not claiming I have, but it certainly doesn't prove the point, because they themselves weren't doing anything that relies on that point (which is why they used it as justification). > their suspicion of such a problem might be labeled a "chip on their shoulder" or a "hypothesis" Suspicion is indeed a hypothesis. Conviction is more "chip on their shoulder". At that point of the document the reader is open to the hypothesis, but has not yet seen any evidence. > do you think either of those parts is false or is irrelevant to what they're studying? I think if someone is trying to persuade me, extravagant up-front declarations, name calling, and labels are not the way to establish your credentials as an objective judge. I honestly am in no position to know if their suspicions are false - presumably, someone reading the paper seeking to expand their knowledge would likewise be someone ignorant or at least unconvinced (Why else read it?) Coming across as someone unreliable due to bias is not an effective way to convince that audience - it's a way to build an echo chamber. That said, I said I wanted to revisit and plan to, once my initial impression has died down to reduce my own bias.

candiodari 8y ago

You're oppressing the GP with your white straight male science. You see your argument only makes sense if objective reality exists, as the argument fundamentally is about measuring objective reality. But objective reality has been firmly demonstrated to be false, and nothing more than a tool for oppression of women and minorities.

dang 8y ago
Please don't low-rent ideological flamewar here. It's staggeringly boring.

slivym 8y ago

They literally have a video in the introduction which documents them deliberately submitting papers that they've engineered to have problems in bad faith to try and manufacture evidence that bad studies can get into journals. They establish that they act in bad faith.

claudius 8y ago
While authors ideally should act in good faith and only submit good papers, the whole idea of having journals and editors and peer review is to filter out bad papers. The problem here is not some people "deliberately submitting papers" which "have problems", the problem is that those papers were accepted by "academic" journals. This is not "manufacturing" evidence, this is simply evidence. The bad guys here are not random authors but the journal editors and peer reviewers accepting this stuff.
- slivym 8y ago
  Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than academic journals. The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether it's possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but it's stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are deliberately publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article calls "Grievance Studies". The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece.
  - claudius 8y ago
    > Well firstly, I don't why you're putting "academic" in quotation marks, it would be a wild assertion to try and claim these are anything other than academic journals. Not really, given the miserable quality of the papers they publish. Maybe ‘newspaper‘ or ‘journal’ might be ok, but ‘academic journal‘ requires a certain amount of quality. > The problem with this article is that what it's methodology tests whether it's possible to get low quality papers into certain academic journals, but it's stated theory and conclusion are that academic journals are deliberately publishing bad science to push an agenda that this article calls "Grievance Studies". Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’ publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the ‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers. > The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece. Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like blaming your upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of cards imploding. If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was never an academic institution to begin with. The completely sufficient evidence for this is the acceptance and publication of those papers.
    - Yoric 8y ago
      > Academic journals publish papers deliberately. They don’t ‘accidentally’ publish bad papers, I can assure you that nobody accidentally clicks the ‘publish’ button. Whatever further agenda the article may or may not push pales in comparison to the actual problems it uncovers. Academic journals certainly publish papers (good or bad) deliberately because the peer reviewers consider them of a sufficient quality and interest for the domain. It has always been known that it's possible to get low quality papers in certain journals – sometimes good ones, if one puts sufficient efforts – in pretty much all domains. Concluding that these publications are accepted "to push an agenda" requires a leap of logic. In the past, it has been shown that simply mimicking the language (using Markov chains) was pretty much sufficient to get into some journals. > > The bad guys here are the random authors who have designed a bad experiment, deliberately set out to undermine academic institutions, and then rather than presenting real evidence have written a political hit piece. > > Claiming these people undermine academic institutions is like blaming your upstairs neighbour stomping on the ground for your house of cards imploding. If a journal accepts and publishes such submissions, it was never an academic institution to begin with. The completely sufficient evidence for this is the acceptance and publication of those papers. On this point, I mostly agree with claudius. While the authors have written something that looks much more like a poitical clickbait than actual research findings, they have exposed weaknesses in the process or reviewers of some journals. These journals now have the ability to fix their mess, which will make everybody the winner.
stupidcar 8y ago
So if you suspect a problem with epistemology, you can't conduct an experiment, because to do so is "bad faith"? Do you display bad faith in the theory of gravity by conducting an experiment? Is the whole scientific process a bad faith attempt to determine objective truth by underhanded manipulation of the universe?
- slivym 8y ago
  You can't conduct an experiment to establish why gravity happens. This experiment is like someone dropping a tennis ball and a bowling ball from the tower of pisa and then writing a conclusion that gravity has a liberal bias against bowling balls because it slows them down to the same speed as a tennis ball.
  - brohee 8y ago
    In that specific experiment (no vacuum), the bowling ball will be faster...
elcapitan 8y ago
It's not bad faith, it's a penetration test of something that was supposed to be a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper failed.
gadders 8y ago
It's not bad faith in case of the premise that they were trying to prove, namely that you can write any old rubbish and get it published if it has the right agenda.

UncleMeat 8y ago

Would it point at a serious problem? I think a lot of people misunderstand how review works. The problem exists if these papers become highly cited and influential. Plenty of garbage gets published, even in good outlets. This approach takes advantage of the public's incorrect understanding of the expectations of peer review. It also doesn't help that the article seems to deliberately hide which papers actually got accepted.

collyw 8y ago
I think natural sciences will be self correcting in this respect. If something new and important has been discovered, people will want to use it / build on it and thus it will have to be replicated.

ergothus 8y ago

> you're quick to assume bad faith, which would seem to support the first point you quote I don't think that follows. If you start with "there's no point in good faith" (paraphrase), you can't say that someone taking offense at their approach has proven their point. It doesn't DISPROVE it, and I'm not claiming I have, but it certainly doesn't prove the point, because they themselves weren't doing anything that relies on that point (which is why they used it as justification). > their suspicion of such a problem might be labeled a "chip on their shoulder" or a "hypothesis" Suspicion is indeed a hypothesis. Conviction is more "chip on their shoulder". At that point of the document the reader is open to the hypothesis, but has not yet seen any evidence. > do you think either of those parts is false or is irrelevant to what they're studying? I think if someone is trying to persuade me, extravagant up-front declarations, name calling, and labels are not the way to establish your credentials as an objective judge. I honestly am in no position to know if their suspicions are false - presumably, someone reading the paper seeking to expand their knowledge would likewise be someone ignorant or at least unconvinced (Why else read it?) Coming across as someone unreliable due to bias is not an effective way to convince that audience - it's a way to build an echo chamber. That said, I said I wanted to revisit and plan to, once my initial impression has died down to reduce my own bias.