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> I remember at least two similar scandals in very much non-social-justice-related branches of Academia. One was in postmodern studies, if I recall correctly, t

> I remember at least two similar scandals in very much non-social-justice-related branches of Academia. One was in postmodern studies, if I recall correctly, the other one I think in epistemology. In one case, the paper had been written to deliberately mean nothing, in the other one, I seem to remember that the papers had been generated with Markov chains. The article is very clear in it's methodologies and is interacting with the community in a long-term peer-reviewed manner. They were invited to peer-review other papers. This is not one substandard paper that was published in a no-name journal. If your field of academia is this vulnerable to nonsense, perhaps we should start considering the field not academic and purge it from out institutions of learning.

Yoric 8y ago
> If your field of academia is this vulnerable to nonsense, perhaps we should start considering the field not academic and purge it from out institutions of learning. I seem to remember that the non sensical paper was in the top journal of postmodern studies. I don't remember details about the Markov chain papers. Also, I have seen bullshit papers in established journals in computer science. Not many, but then, computer science results are somewhat harder to fake than humanities, and I don't think there were many social engineering attacks on CS journals such as the one described in the OP. So, yes, it seems that the OP describes a real problem. For the reasons mentioned above, I do not believe it is limited to social-justice-related-branches. You are right that this should serve as a wake-up call. Personally, I believe that such wake-up calls are useful for a domain, once in a while. The ball is now on the side of editors. If they manage to raise the bar for accepting papers, their field will have benefited from this work. It is also possible, as you suggest, that the field is not of academic interest. As I have read exactly 0 articles from the publications targeted by the OP, I have no factual base to discuss this. edit grammar
- beautifulfreak 8y ago
  You might be thinking of the Sokal hoax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
  - Yoric 8y ago
    Definitely am :)
    - foldr 8y ago
      Then you are mistaken. The Sokal paper was published in a fairly obscure journal ("Social Text") where submissions were not even peer reviewed.
      - Yoric 8y ago
        Indeed, I just discovered that. My bad.
        UncleMeat 8y ago
        This is how this nonsense spreads. People hear this one example and assume that all of the humanities are bullshit without ever investigating further.
- jlawson 8y ago
  I think it's good to separate the problems. 1. Lack of rigor. This just means poor quality papers get published. 2. Ideological pre-conclusion. This means the field is dominated by a moralistic ideology, instead of being about neutral truth-seeking as it claims. This means that papers which conform to the ideology's pre-conclusions get published, while those that contradict do not, with insufficient regard to rigor in either case. It also means scientists/students with non-conforming beliefs are purged from the field as a whole, again, regardless of actual ability. These are related problems but not exactly the same. Number 1 doesn't imply number 2, but number 2 requires number 1. The hoax attempts to demonstrate both.
UncleMeat 8y ago
Is it vulnerable? Publishing a paper doesn't matter. Getting the paper cited matters.

Yoric 8y ago

> If your field of academia is this vulnerable to nonsense, perhaps we should start considering the field not academic and purge it from out institutions of learning. I seem to remember that the non sensical paper was in the top journal of postmodern studies. I don't remember details about the Markov chain papers. Also, I have seen bullshit papers in established journals in computer science. Not many, but then, computer science results are somewhat harder to fake than humanities, and I don't think there were many social engineering attacks on CS journals such as the one described in the OP. So, yes, it seems that the OP describes a real problem. For the reasons mentioned above, I do not believe it is limited to social-justice-related-branches. You are right that this should serve as a wake-up call. Personally, I believe that such wake-up calls are useful for a domain, once in a while. The ball is now on the side of editors. If they manage to raise the bar for accepting papers, their field will have benefited from this work. It is also possible, as you suggest, that the field is not of academic interest. As I have read exactly 0 articles from the publications targeted by the OP, I have no factual base to discuss this. edit grammar

beautifulfreak 8y ago
You might be thinking of the Sokal hoax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- Yoric 8y ago
  Definitely am :)
  - foldr 8y ago
    Then you are mistaken. The Sokal paper was published in a fairly obscure journal ("Social Text") where submissions were not even peer reviewed.
    - Yoric 8y ago
      Indeed, I just discovered that. My bad.
      - UncleMeat 8y ago
        This is how this nonsense spreads. People hear this one example and assume that all of the humanities are bullshit without ever investigating further.
jlawson 8y ago
I think it's good to separate the problems. 1. Lack of rigor. This just means poor quality papers get published. 2. Ideological pre-conclusion. This means the field is dominated by a moralistic ideology, instead of being about neutral truth-seeking as it claims. This means that papers which conform to the ideology's pre-conclusions get published, while those that contradict do not, with insufficient regard to rigor in either case. It also means scientists/students with non-conforming beliefs are purged from the field as a whole, again, regardless of actual ability. These are related problems but not exactly the same. Number 1 doesn't imply number 2, but number 2 requires number 1. The hoax attempts to demonstrate both.

UncleMeat 8y ago

Is it vulnerable? Publishing a paper doesn't matter. Getting the paper cited matters.