36 ms·

Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor

178 points by rjf72 8y ago

staticautomatic 8y ago
He obviously did fabricate the data but that's also the point. I find the whole thing amusing and don't have a problem with it, even if it's coming from a position I don't necessarily agree with.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
When there are lots of people who have a vested interest in the Emperor's wardrobe, not surprising (but a bit sad) that the hammer is coming down on those that point out that the Emperor is naked.
umvi 8y ago
There's a good Joe Rogan episode interviewing the hoax paper authors in question: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg
- topspin 8y ago
  That interview begins thus; "There's many fields of study you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous. Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles. And then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world and they infect things; their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses." I suspect this view will not be welcome among a large fraction of HN types. Trumped up accusations that the perpetrators are guilty of unethical research involving human subjects are deeply disturbing. Lysenko would be proud.
- avar 8y ago
  And Joe Rogan interviewing Michael Shermer of The Skeptics Society published 3 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p5D-pN8tQw#t=1h02m48s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p5D-pN8tQw#t=1h02m48s
- geomark 8y ago
  I watched the first half of it. Hilarious. Definitely recommend.
21 8y ago
Wow, submitting a paper to an editor/reviewer is considered human research thus ethical board approval is required: > McLellan asked Boghossian to reveal any evidence that he had received approval from the university’s institutional review board for research involving both human and animal behavior. > The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal editors and reviewers. Any research involving human subjects (even duped journal editors, apparently) needs IRB approval first, according to university policy. So from now on, writing a CS paper on a new sorting algorithm will require ethical board approval.
- XMPPwocky 8y ago
  If I write a paper on a fake sorting algorithm and submit it to a real journal to see if it gets approved, it's not really a stretch to call that human subjects research.
  - taneq 8y ago
    But if you call it "bogosort" and make the algorithm blatantly terrible, then any journal that takes it seriously is showing its lack of expertise.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      Maybe it could work by sorting things based on political ideology and strength of coalition support plus willingness to shout down the opposition. I'm sure you can imagine how that applies to a list of integers. They probably sort themselves into intersectional groups recursively. So the algorithm starts off and the first pass sorts loosely into odd vs even. Then a next pass sorts the partitions further into positive and negative. Then the next pass sorts by prime factorization and so on until they are maximally sorted by all the ways in which they can be grouped intersectionally. Of course the result of the sorting is useless, but that's the moral of the story.
      - taneq 8y ago
twblalock 8y ago
Apparently the university is accusing Boghossian of unethical research involving human subjects, and those human subjects are the journal editors who published the nonsense articles he submitted. It's one of the most transparent excuses for a witch hunt and rigged trial I've ever seen.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  You haven't looked much into the grievance studies area much then. The whole field is a gangrenous foot that will kill academia if something is not done about it.
  - gumby 8y ago
    How will it kill academia? Will it suck up all the funding, starving other fields? If not, what damage can it do, any more than, say, topology could kill classics? This is a serious question, not a sarcastic one. Is this study area somehow affecting other academic disciplines? I'm long out of academia so this is all invisible to me.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person. If that were to happen, nobody would want to send their kids, tax money, or endowment fund donations to any universities, and the whole system would go away.
      - analog31 8y ago
        I actually don't think this is a new phenomenon, but an old one with evolving names and players. When I was a student 3+ decades ago, we called them "fluff courses." And my parents remember taking fluff courses too. We may have rolled our eyes, but in reality we were in on the game and had a vested interest in it, because the fluff courses were known to be an easy A. For one thing, a course that everybody in the college had to take, everybody had to pass. For another, teachers with a strong ideological agenda tended to be easy graders, because they wanted to be liked. So we sucked it up in those courses and were thankful for the boost to our GPA's. If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.
adamnemecek 8y ago
How can we provide support?
camdenlock 8y ago
It's coming to a head, finally. These academic dogmatists are being dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected. As usual, Steven Pinker sums it up best: > "Criticism and open debate are the lifeblood of academia; they are what differentiate universities from organs of dogma and propaganda," Pinker wrote. "If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them to try to punish and silence him."
- vkou 8y ago
  There's a lot of people who need to be dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected. The people that I imagine belong in that category almost certainly don't intersect much with the people who you imagine belong in that category. This sword cuts both ways.
dTal 8y ago
>Such behavior, they wrote, hurts the reputations of the university as well as honest scholars who work there. "Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued." I'm afraid this particular objection paints a rather damning picture - any critique of the field may be criticized under similar grounds. One who would make such a complaint has left the path of science. (Interestingly, the concession that it is damaging to reputations actually lends support to the thesis)
- daodedickinson 8y ago
  >it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued." Hahahaha Could you imagine how different schools would be if they put that motivation over money? At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    > At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence. This is why we have such stringent interview processes in the software industry. Credentials don't mean anything when a large percentage of graduates aren't qualified to do the work.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
kristianc 8y ago
The grievance studies community very quickly pivoted to the 'but it was unethical!' line in the wake of the hoax - it's a shame but not at all surprising that they aren't interested in attacking the root cause.
foobar1962 8y ago
This is the person that wrote "A Manual for Creating Atheists" which contains a questioning technique that has been called "Street Epistemology". Could the hoax investigation be a punishment for the Manual?
m0zg 8y ago
I hope they fail to suppress Boghossian. As far as I'm concerned, he's done academia a great favor by shining a light on the inane horseshit people "review" and publish, especially outside the hard sciences where it can't be reliably verified. Instead of systematically addressing the problem, these people are choosing to claim that the emperor's clothes are just fine as they are. I very much hope this backfires, and I also hope this is made as public as possible.
wgerard 8y ago
This took me a minute and a second read, for anyone else who was similarly confused: > The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal editors and reviewers The university's basically saying that the project itself is the problem, not the individual articles themselves. As the author stated, the goal was to: > "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research" which is a behavioral research meta-study involving humans (in this case, journal reviewers and editors). Of course, behavioral research involving humans almost always requires IRB approval. I realize on a third reading this is stated pretty clearly ("the hoax project met.."), but took me a minute nonetheless.
- tomlock 8y ago
  > which is corrupting academic research Considering this paper was presumably hoping to bring about better standards in academia, how is this claim supported by the hoax AKA experiment?
  - naasking 8y ago
    They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass review in other fields, to see if any of the reviewers or editors would catch the obvious bullshit. They did not, across 7 published papers thus far IIRC. In fact, the hoax authors even told the publishers they couldn't provide the raw data because it had been printed out on paper that had then been recycled. Publisher's response: sure, no problem, we'll publish anyway. In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression. As such, they remain wilfully ignorant of these biases and proper statistical methods. All told, would you consider this a corruption of academic research?
    - tomlock 8y ago
buboard 8y ago
when you bite the hand that feeds you it will choke you
mensetmanusman 8y ago
Replication crisis + reputation crisis = lawyers
daodedickinson 8y ago
Hope he enjoys his struggle session.
high_derivative 8y ago
As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it. I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics. To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this. However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.
- ml3v 8y ago
  Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism plays a similar role. A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards. The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
    - ml3v 8y ago
      Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
letitgo12345 8y ago
The guy fabricated data to fool the editors. Academia relies on researchers being honest and not doing so -- there simply aren't any resources for journals to do independent replication of all received papers before accepting them for publication. That's precisely why data fabrication is taken so seriously and the consequences of doing so are basically career ending -- it's the deterrent to incentivize people to be honest. Edit: Also can we not lump all of academia into the same basket? The standards in computer science/math/physics are very different from that in biology/medicine which in turn are very different from those in humanities
- microcolonel 8y ago
  But the problem with actual data fabrication is that it is intended to permanently deceive, in this case the whole point was to publish the fact that these data were not correct. This is a case where an initial false disclosure (which you seem to think should be taken exactly the same as deliberate, permanent misreporting) is used as a means to bring more verified facts into the world, and zero permanent misinformation; it is no more like false disclosure than pennies are like Moscow Mule mugs.
  - letitgo12345 8y ago
    I don't think this is the same as fabrication with intent to commit actual fraud. But if you're trying to show that the editors are making biased decisions because of preconceived notions, submitting data that supports their notions is not evidence of them making biased decisions. A better study would be the following -- you submit one version of the paper supporting viewpoint X and another supporting viewpoint not X (where X is some issue on which there isn't much research been done so there isn't any sort of consensus on the issue) and fabricate data for both cases. But what they did, all that seems to show to me is that if you fabricate data, you can get a paper accepted. Which is not surprising. Edit: For the record, I do think academia, especially in some areas of humanities, is very biased but this study is just not well done imo.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
tomlock 8y ago
> Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars’ worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable. This hoax didn't demonstrate anything non-trivial about these fields. As we know from the replication crisis, it is relatively easy to get a paper accepted in academic journals. This hoax and the hoaxers were as guilty of the political bias and ethical malafice they were trying to accuse "grievance studies" of. The fields they target have all been shrinking since 2008, a clear sign they lack a vice-like grip on universities.
lainga 8y ago
"The three authors, who describe themselves as leftists..." Is that relevant to the case or just an aside from the story?
- abalone 8y ago
  Because one line of attack on the authors is that their exposure of flaws in the often left-leaning humanities is politically motivated. Stating their politics helps shut that down and support the idea that they are just champions of integrity.
rdiddly 8y ago
"Your efforts to conduct human-subjects research at PSU without a submitted nor approved protocol is [sic] a clear violation of the policies of your employer," McLellan wrote [ungrammatically] in an email to Boghossian. Maybe his efforts is a violation, maybe they isn't, but hey at least get the grammar right, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at a University.
tptacek 8y ago
I don't think HN's take on this story is especially sophisticated or well informed. Some things I think people could stand to know about this: The "Hoax" writeup in Aero is deceptive: Most of the papers these "researchers" came up with were rejected; almost all the papers submitted to high-status journals in the field were rejected; on the occasion (I think just once?) a high-status journal accepted one of their papers, their writeup gave the impression that it was a luridly insane paper about "white males not being allowed to speak in class", when in fact that paper was rejected and what had been accepted was a different, more banal paper about the nature of hoaxes. Here's the quote from their writeup: We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. Does this sound like "Progressive Stack" was rejected? Of course not: "the answer was 'yes'" is used in the same paragraph to indicate an acceptance, and, by "surprisingly warm to it", the authors simply meant they received suggestions for improvement from the journal review board. Whatever you think about the politics of this "experiment", you shouldn't be OK with being lied to. Also, how skeezy is it to attack reviewers for trying to help improve a paper? Meanwhile, look at the impact factors for the journals they actually got stuff accepted at. The researchers fabricated data for some of their submissions: This blurs (I think deliberately) the line between article review and replication, which is not the job of a review board, but rather constitutes an entire research project of its own. Nobody claimed to have replicated any of these papers, but the authors of the report are counting on laypersons not to understand how academic journal review works, and the extent to which it absolutely relies on good faith. Or, as Stefan Savage (can't help it, hero of mine) put it on Twitter last night: "This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result matters then the error is eventually detected." "But the I think the bigger issue is that Boghossian et al's work doesn't seem motivated by anything productive. So they ridicule niche area X for not being sufficiently scientific. Given that they don't even work in the area, this accomplishes what exactly?" "I think people get in trouble when they think academic publication has value in itself. Ideas become valuable when people care about them. Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn’t make your ideas matter." They didn't generate any real results: All the researchers have discovered is that social science fields --- just like STEM fields --- include a mix of low- and high-quality journals, and if they can't get something accepted in a high quality venue, a paper author can shop until they find a journal that will accept. And, that journal review is an eminently fallible process. Neither of these conclusions should surprise anybody. I have no idea what I think of the IRB process at play here; I don't know any of what the IRB involved knows. But these people wasted a lot of reviewer time, wrote a deceptive report, and and did it in the service of pointless, banal conclusions. They're not heroes.
gumby 8y ago
I am really torn on this. On one hand, there is an immense amount of vacuity in the social sciences, which is a tragedy; not only is it a waste of money and effort but it obscures and even crowds out actual, valuable work (yes, there is very good, useful, meaningful work in deconstructionism, not to mention often-impugned fields like women's studies...but it could be 1%). Pointing at the emperor is quite important. I liked Sokal's paper at the time too. Yet at the same time I do agree that setups like this are exploitative.
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
  The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. We can say a proposal looks stupid (and it might actually be) but huge swathes of current scientific consensus would look ridiculous at any point directly prior to its establishment, which might be considered the whole basis behind the Max Planck quote: "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's not really that many people are ever bowled over by something, so much as the next generation just grows up with a general idea in the atmosphere, so it's a little less alien. At it's heart, isn't the basic conflict between the two views of science as expressed by Drumlin and Arroway in Contact?
  - gumby 8y ago
    > The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow, modern fleshed-out work. Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and did take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment. So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an intellectual tradition. The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat) it's worthless. So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be absurd, you throw out something very important. My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors were unwitting human subjects...
ml3v 8y ago
I don't really buy the sympathy for this guy. Imagine if authors of the SCIgen papers conclusion was that all of computer science was fake. This is even more intellectually dishonest It's a performative criticism that contains an implicit political argument. The talking point of the Jordan Peterson types, that the whole field of 'humanities' is a political arm of leftist politics. How dare you complain about the lynchings of gays or blacks, you have no right to complain about conversion therapy or the bathroom bill. Go make your bed.
motohagiography 8y ago
The process described is not an inquiry, it's a show trial. If the article is accurate and complete, by what standard is this institution not considered irrevocably compromised? If the powers of an institution can be wielded in such a petty political way, they are courting popular revolt. The broader risk is that in a stack of applicants, if the only thing someone knows about Portland State University is its hyperpoliticized environment, one could see how a CV might not make the first cut of phone screens. These show trial people are disadvantaging their students.
claudiawerner 8y ago
There's a good critical overview of the various papers here[0]. [0] https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squared/ https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squa...
timkam 8y ago
While I don't think Boghossian is a fraudster, his hoaxes are certainly poor science. He should have conducted a rigorous empirical study instead. Of course, he must have known that fabricating data can cost him his career. But punishing him sends the wrong sign to academic whistle-blowers. IMHO, the best thing Portland State can do is to establish rules for ethical and scientifically valuable hoaxes as a lesson learned from this.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jancsika 8y ago
> The hoax was dubbed "Sokal Squared," after a similar stunt pulled in 1996 by Alan Sokal, then a physicist at New York University. This has as much to do with Sokal's hoax as those battery fire-hazards with wheels have to do with "hoverboards". A 'Sokal Squared' hoax should mean something like multiple journal articles getting published-- none of which contain any data to back up their claims-- all claiming to replicate an original journal article which also contains no data to substantiate its claim. The twist that makes Sokal's original hoax clever is there isn't any research being put forward. There is simply an assertion, non-sequiturs, and a repetition of the assertion as the conclusion. He completely left out the "research" part of his journal article. The reason his hoax was so embarrassing for that journal is that no university ever imagined they'd need to make a basic rule that researchers must actually include research in their research papers. That means that Sokal didn't directly break any rules with his hoax, and much of the spotlight remained on the journal for failing to do the trivial job of rejecting submissions that fail to contain content. I'd be willing to bet there was a dean or two and some administrators who met to figure out if Sokal actually broke any of the school's guidelines. I'd also bet they came up with some way they could apply a vaguely worded research guideline to discipline him but decided against it for fear of pushback within the wider research community. Still, it's a reasonable concern when a professor publicly states that they submitted an article to a journal in bad faith, even as a hoax. tldr; it's a nuanced situation that IMO requires lots of reflection. On a completely different topic-- some knuckleheads apparently falsified some data for reasons, and a university is going to discipline them for falsifying data. I don't understand what ethical conundrum I'm supposed to care about here.
winchling 8y ago
>2) No, he should not be fired. In fact, the punishment should be very mild (e.g. a warning, attending a tutorial on research ethics). Is attending a tutorial a form of punishment? What about an exam? If yes then what does this imply about the nature of the university education?
twic 8y ago
> lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable Did they send any papers to string theory journals?
nomdeguerre 8y ago
Sometimes, you gotta take one for the team. This prosecution will help the case far more than it will hurt.
currymj 8y ago
It seems like some people are actually pleased the hoax worked. If this is you, try to honestly imagine how you would feel if it had failed -- if the journals immediately called BS and refused to publish. Would you be happy or unhappy about that? If unhappy, are you really so sure you're on the side of truth, or are you just a member of one tribe pleased that the other tribe has been embarrassed? The world where the hoax failed would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity.
- twic 8y ago
  > The world where the hoax failed would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity. Yes, it would. But that's not the world we live in. That's the problem.
- lsd5you 8y ago
  It wasn't some test of the unknown. He knew the emperor had no clothes and set out to prove it. The people who are pleased also know the emperor had no clothes and of course would have been disappointed if the fields were some how impervious. .
- buboard 8y ago
  AFAIK there is not so much enmity from people in more exact sciences, rather than indifference. At least in neuroscience i rarely see any interactions and whenever discourse occurs, it is parallel orthogonal monologues that have been shaped meticulously in the past few decades to avoid each other.
- samatman 8y ago
  In scientific endeavors we should be equally pleased whether the hypothesis or the null is confirmed. Both add to the body of knowledge and this should be celebrated. Of course this is often not true, but it is the ideal.
- fenomas 8y ago
  As far as I can tell the hoax did fail. As I recall from the authors' writeup, the initial round of hoax papers they sent out all got rejected. By any reasonable standard they could/should have stopped right there and published a paper called "social science journals aren't as gullible as we thought". Instead they iterated on the papers, and kept iterating until they got something published. What's bizarre is that the authors don't seem to realize that this changed the whole nature of their study, and they were now testing a completely different thesis than the one they set out to test.
voidhorse 8y ago
Sure, the criticism this hoax is trying to demonstrate may be legitimate, but the methodology is one designed to highlight the cleverness of its executors and diminish the credibility of a discipline, rather than point out constructive areas for improvement. Basically, it is a methodology that does not treat its targets as intellectual equals and is quite indecorous—you get the sense that a major point of this operation is to discredit the field and make its practitioners feel some kind of public humiliation or shame. A childish tactic. In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices. Sokal's big hoax did a good lot for Sokal (whom everyone is now familiar with—but it's funny: is the public acquainted with Sokal because of the contributions he made to his field? Arguably, no. Who's supposed to be the sham academic again?) and caused a lot of drama—but was it an effective means of enacting the sort of change in academic practice it claimed to be striving for? Well, we simply need to ask ourselves why there's even a need for such a thing as "Sokal squared" to answer that question. This is a conniving way to go about improving academic practice—doesn't the very practice sort of eschew the principles of open collaboration, transparency, collective growth, and honest dissemination of thought/knowledge academia should, in the ideal world, foster? This is largely just an attempt to incite drama and gain notoriety on the part of the authors, and it further drives wedges between already highly disparate, specialized fields that may as well talk past each other. Of course there are things to criticize about grievance studies, just as there were things to criticize about the lingo and methods popular in the humanities when Sokal devised his original hoax—but stooping to underhanded publicity stunts instead of open intellectual conversation likely won't solve the problem. Please don't give in to this sort of nonsense and stroke the pleading egos of the 'academics' that pull these sorts of stunts. Boghossian is not a hero.
- twic 8y ago
  > In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices So what is? Specifically, what is, given that the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not?
  - voidhorse 8y ago
    I think a mechanism that, first of all, promotes some kind of interaction between fields and helps counterbalance the hyper-specialization our academies currently promote. It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not". More likely is that people from hyper-specialized fields use different criterion for the validity and veridicality of statements and that their incredibly hermetic jargon and deep reliance on interlocking field-specific concepts prevents them from communicating with other academics from other disciplines in meaningful ways—thus resulting in a great sense of misunderstanding and misjudgment between members of the fields. In some sense, our pursuits are so hyper-specialized at this point that they are incommensurable—there's an incredible lack of 'generalists' able to act as liaisons and to produce the appropriate meta-criticisms for each field of study. That, I think, is a much more reasonable assumption than one that assumes a cohort of people who "don't have interest in the truth" have somehow slipped their way into academia and are using it as nothing more than a vehicle for their political motives—that's a rather conspiratorial hypothesis and would need much more evidence to support it than the publication of a couple of papers in a couple of journals. If we were to solve the hyper-specialization problem to a degree, I think it would promote greater academic health and collaboration overall.
bencoder 8y ago
Original article and comments discussing the work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811
kristianc 8y ago
The irony of this whole thing is that had the researchers reached a different conclusion, there would be no investigation in the first place. The entire Sokal Squared hoax was designed to prove motivated reasoning within the social sciences, and the backlash and subsequent investigation is just further evidence of that.
sullyj3 8y ago
It's true that there's a fair amount of bullshit in humanities. However, thinking in terms of fuzzy categories like "grievance studies" is lossy and imprecise. It's not really a term which carves reality at the joints, so much as a general purpose tribal rallying cry for STEM people against a hated and feared outgroup. This kind of interdisciplinary tribal politics isn't constructive. Rounding off everyone in "grievance studies" to the same stereotype is the fastest way to irrational hatred and unnecessary conflict. Also, this article is pretty good: https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-the-pomoid-cluster/ https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-th...

178 points by rjf72 8y ago

He obviously did fabricate the data but that's also the point. I find the whole thing amusing and don't have a problem with it, even if it's coming from a position I don't necessarily agree with.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago

When there are lots of people who have a vested interest in the Emperor's wardrobe, not surprising (but a bit sad) that the hammer is coming down on those that point out that the Emperor is naked.

umvi 8y ago

There's a good Joe Rogan episode interviewing the hoax paper authors in question: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg

topspin 8y ago
That interview begins thus; "There's many fields of study you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous. Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles. And then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world and they infect things; their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses." I suspect this view will not be welcome among a large fraction of HN types. Trumped up accusations that the perpetrators are guilty of unethical research involving human subjects are deeply disturbing. Lysenko would be proud.
avar 8y ago
And Joe Rogan interviewing Michael Shermer of The Skeptics Society published 3 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p5D-pN8tQw#t=1h02m48s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p5D-pN8tQw#t=1h02m48s
geomark 8y ago
I watched the first half of it. Hilarious. Definitely recommend.

21 8y ago

Wow, submitting a paper to an editor/reviewer is considered human research thus ethical board approval is required: > McLellan asked Boghossian to reveal any evidence that he had received approval from the university’s institutional review board for research involving both human and animal behavior. > The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal editors and reviewers. Any research involving human subjects (even duped journal editors, apparently) needs IRB approval first, according to university policy. So from now on, writing a CS paper on a new sorting algorithm will require ethical board approval.

XMPPwocky 8y ago
If I write a paper on a fake sorting algorithm and submit it to a real journal to see if it gets approved, it's not really a stretch to call that human subjects research.
- taneq 8y ago
  But if you call it "bogosort" and make the algorithm blatantly terrible, then any journal that takes it seriously is showing its lack of expertise.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    Maybe it could work by sorting things based on political ideology and strength of coalition support plus willingness to shout down the opposition. I'm sure you can imagine how that applies to a list of integers. They probably sort themselves into intersectional groups recursively. So the algorithm starts off and the first pass sorts loosely into odd vs even. Then a next pass sorts the partitions further into positive and negative. Then the next pass sorts by prime factorization and so on until they are maximally sorted by all the ways in which they can be grouped intersectionally. Of course the result of the sorting is useless, but that's the moral of the story.
    - taneq 8y ago

twblalock 8y ago

Apparently the university is accusing Boghossian of unethical research involving human subjects, and those human subjects are the journal editors who published the nonsense articles he submitted. It's one of the most transparent excuses for a witch hunt and rigged trial I've ever seen.

danieltillett 8y ago
You haven't looked much into the grievance studies area much then. The whole field is a gangrenous foot that will kill academia if something is not done about it.
- gumby 8y ago
  How will it kill academia? Will it suck up all the funding, starving other fields? If not, what damage can it do, any more than, say, topology could kill classics? This is a serious question, not a sarcastic one. Is this study area somehow affecting other academic disciplines? I'm long out of academia so this is all invisible to me.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person. If that were to happen, nobody would want to send their kids, tax money, or endowment fund donations to any universities, and the whole system would go away.
    - analog31 8y ago
      I actually don't think this is a new phenomenon, but an old one with evolving names and players. When I was a student 3+ decades ago, we called them "fluff courses." And my parents remember taking fluff courses too. We may have rolled our eyes, but in reality we were in on the game and had a vested interest in it, because the fluff courses were known to be an easy A. For one thing, a course that everybody in the college had to take, everybody had to pass. For another, teachers with a strong ideological agenda tended to be easy graders, because they wanted to be liked. So we sucked it up in those courses and were thankful for the boost to our GPA's. If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.

adamnemecek 8y ago

How can we provide support?

camdenlock 8y ago

It's coming to a head, finally. These academic dogmatists are being dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected. As usual, Steven Pinker sums it up best: > "Criticism and open debate are the lifeblood of academia; they are what differentiate universities from organs of dogma and propaganda," Pinker wrote. "If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them to try to punish and silence him."

vkou 8y ago
There's a lot of people who need to be dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected. The people that I imagine belong in that category almost certainly don't intersect much with the people who you imagine belong in that category. This sword cuts both ways.

dTal 8y ago

>Such behavior, they wrote, hurts the reputations of the university as well as honest scholars who work there. "Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued." I'm afraid this particular objection paints a rather damning picture - any critique of the field may be criticized under similar grounds. One who would make such a complaint has left the path of science. (Interestingly, the concession that it is damaging to reputations actually lends support to the thesis)

daodedickinson 8y ago
>it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued." Hahahaha Could you imagine how different schools would be if they put that motivation over money? At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.
- twblalock 8y ago
  > At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence. This is why we have such stringent interview processes in the software industry. Credentials don't mean anything when a large percentage of graduates aren't qualified to do the work.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

kristianc 8y ago

The grievance studies community very quickly pivoted to the 'but it was unethical!' line in the wake of the hoax - it's a shame but not at all surprising that they aren't interested in attacking the root cause.

foobar1962 8y ago

This is the person that wrote "A Manual for Creating Atheists" which contains a questioning technique that has been called "Street Epistemology". Could the hoax investigation be a punishment for the Manual?

m0zg 8y ago

I hope they fail to suppress Boghossian. As far as I'm concerned, he's done academia a great favor by shining a light on the inane horseshit people "review" and publish, especially outside the hard sciences where it can't be reliably verified. Instead of systematically addressing the problem, these people are choosing to claim that the emperor's clothes are just fine as they are. I very much hope this backfires, and I also hope this is made as public as possible.

wgerard 8y ago

This took me a minute and a second read, for anyone else who was similarly confused: > The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal editors and reviewers The university's basically saying that the project itself is the problem, not the individual articles themselves. As the author stated, the goal was to: > "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research" which is a behavioral research meta-study involving humans (in this case, journal reviewers and editors). Of course, behavioral research involving humans almost always requires IRB approval. I realize on a third reading this is stated pretty clearly ("the hoax project met.."), but took me a minute nonetheless.

tomlock 8y ago
> which is corrupting academic research Considering this paper was presumably hoping to bring about better standards in academia, how is this claim supported by the hoax AKA experiment?
- naasking 8y ago
  They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass review in other fields, to see if any of the reviewers or editors would catch the obvious bullshit. They did not, across 7 published papers thus far IIRC. In fact, the hoax authors even told the publishers they couldn't provide the raw data because it had been printed out on paper that had then been recycled. Publisher's response: sure, no problem, we'll publish anyway. In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression. As such, they remain wilfully ignorant of these biases and proper statistical methods. All told, would you consider this a corruption of academic research?
  - tomlock 8y ago

buboard 8y ago

when you bite the hand that feeds you it will choke you

mensetmanusman 8y ago

Replication crisis + reputation crisis = lawyers

daodedickinson 8y ago

Hope he enjoys his struggle session.

high_derivative 8y ago

As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it. I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics. To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this. However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.

ml3v 8y ago
Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism plays a similar role. A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards. The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.
- carbocation 8y ago
  A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
  - ml3v 8y ago
    Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.

letitgo12345 8y ago

The guy fabricated data to fool the editors. Academia relies on researchers being honest and not doing so -- there simply aren't any resources for journals to do independent replication of all received papers before accepting them for publication. That's precisely why data fabrication is taken so seriously and the consequences of doing so are basically career ending -- it's the deterrent to incentivize people to be honest. Edit: Also can we not lump all of academia into the same basket? The standards in computer science/math/physics are very different from that in biology/medicine which in turn are very different from those in humanities

microcolonel 8y ago
But the problem with actual data fabrication is that it is intended to permanently deceive, in this case the whole point was to publish the fact that these data were not correct. This is a case where an initial false disclosure (which you seem to think should be taken exactly the same as deliberate, permanent misreporting) is used as a means to bring more verified facts into the world, and zero permanent misinformation; it is no more like false disclosure than pennies are like Moscow Mule mugs.
- letitgo12345 8y ago
  I don't think this is the same as fabrication with intent to commit actual fraud. But if you're trying to show that the editors are making biased decisions because of preconceived notions, submitting data that supports their notions is not evidence of them making biased decisions. A better study would be the following -- you submit one version of the paper supporting viewpoint X and another supporting viewpoint not X (where X is some issue on which there isn't much research been done so there isn't any sort of consensus on the issue) and fabricate data for both cases. But what they did, all that seems to show to me is that if you fabricate data, you can get a paper accepted. Which is not surprising. Edit: For the record, I do think academia, especially in some areas of humanities, is very biased but this study is just not well done imo.
  - microcolonel 8y ago

tomlock 8y ago

> Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars’ worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable. This hoax didn't demonstrate anything non-trivial about these fields. As we know from the replication crisis, it is relatively easy to get a paper accepted in academic journals. This hoax and the hoaxers were as guilty of the political bias and ethical malafice they were trying to accuse "grievance studies" of. The fields they target have all been shrinking since 2008, a clear sign they lack a vice-like grip on universities.

lainga 8y ago

"The three authors, who describe themselves as leftists..." Is that relevant to the case or just an aside from the story?

abalone 8y ago
Because one line of attack on the authors is that their exposure of flaws in the often left-leaning humanities is politically motivated. Stating their politics helps shut that down and support the idea that they are just champions of integrity.

rdiddly 8y ago

"Your efforts to conduct human-subjects research at PSU without a submitted nor approved protocol is [sic] a clear violation of the policies of your employer," McLellan wrote [ungrammatically] in an email to Boghossian. Maybe his efforts is a violation, maybe they isn't, but hey at least get the grammar right, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at a University.

tptacek 8y ago

I don't think HN's take on this story is especially sophisticated or well informed. Some things I think people could stand to know about this: The "Hoax" writeup in Aero is deceptive: Most of the papers these "researchers" came up with were rejected; almost all the papers submitted to high-status journals in the field were rejected; on the occasion (I think just once?) a high-status journal accepted one of their papers, their writeup gave the impression that it was a luridly insane paper about "white males not being allowed to speak in class", when in fact that paper was rejected and what had been accepted was a different, more banal paper about the nature of hoaxes. Here's the quote from their writeup: We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. Does this sound like "Progressive Stack" was rejected? Of course not: "the answer was 'yes'" is used in the same paragraph to indicate an acceptance, and, by "surprisingly warm to it", the authors simply meant they received suggestions for improvement from the journal review board. Whatever you think about the politics of this "experiment", you shouldn't be OK with being lied to. Also, how skeezy is it to attack reviewers for trying to help improve a paper? Meanwhile, look at the impact factors for the journals they actually got stuff accepted at. The researchers fabricated data for some of their submissions: This blurs (I think deliberately) the line between article review and replication, which is not the job of a review board, but rather constitutes an entire research project of its own. Nobody claimed to have replicated any of these papers, but the authors of the report are counting on laypersons not to understand how academic journal review works, and the extent to which it absolutely relies on good faith. Or, as Stefan Savage (can't help it, hero of mine) put it on Twitter last night: "This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result matters then the error is eventually detected." "But the I think the bigger issue is that Boghossian et al's work doesn't seem motivated by anything productive. So they ridicule niche area X for not being sufficiently scientific. Given that they don't even work in the area, this accomplishes what exactly?" "I think people get in trouble when they think academic publication has value in itself. Ideas become valuable when people care about them. Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn’t make your ideas matter." They didn't generate any real results: All the researchers have discovered is that social science fields --- just like STEM fields --- include a mix of low- and high-quality journals, and if they can't get something accepted in a high quality venue, a paper author can shop until they find a journal that will accept. And, that journal review is an eminently fallible process. Neither of these conclusions should surprise anybody. I have no idea what I think of the IRB process at play here; I don't know any of what the IRB involved knows. But these people wasted a lot of reviewer time, wrote a deceptive report, and and did it in the service of pointless, banal conclusions. They're not heroes.

gumby 8y ago

I am really torn on this. On one hand, there is an immense amount of vacuity in the social sciences, which is a tragedy; not only is it a waste of money and effort but it obscures and even crowds out actual, valuable work (yes, there is very good, useful, meaningful work in deconstructionism, not to mention often-impugned fields like women's studies...but it could be 1%). Pointing at the emperor is quite important. I liked Sokal's paper at the time too. Yet at the same time I do agree that setups like this are exploitative.

apocalypstyx 8y ago
The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. We can say a proposal looks stupid (and it might actually be) but huge swathes of current scientific consensus would look ridiculous at any point directly prior to its establishment, which might be considered the whole basis behind the Max Planck quote: "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's not really that many people are ever bowled over by something, so much as the next generation just grows up with a general idea in the atmosphere, so it's a little less alien. At it's heart, isn't the basic conflict between the two views of science as expressed by Drumlin and Arroway in Contact?
- gumby 8y ago
  > The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow, modern fleshed-out work. Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and did take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment. So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an intellectual tradition. The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat) it's worthless. So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be absurd, you throw out something very important. My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors were unwitting human subjects...

ml3v 8y ago

I don't really buy the sympathy for this guy. Imagine if authors of the SCIgen papers conclusion was that all of computer science was fake. This is even more intellectually dishonest It's a performative criticism that contains an implicit political argument. The talking point of the Jordan Peterson types, that the whole field of 'humanities' is a political arm of leftist politics. How dare you complain about the lynchings of gays or blacks, you have no right to complain about conversion therapy or the bathroom bill. Go make your bed.

motohagiography 8y ago

The process described is not an inquiry, it's a show trial. If the article is accurate and complete, by what standard is this institution not considered irrevocably compromised? If the powers of an institution can be wielded in such a petty political way, they are courting popular revolt. The broader risk is that in a stack of applicants, if the only thing someone knows about Portland State University is its hyperpoliticized environment, one could see how a CV might not make the first cut of phone screens. These show trial people are disadvantaging their students.

claudiawerner 8y ago

There's a good critical overview of the various papers here[0]. [0] https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squared/ https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squa...

timkam 8y ago

While I don't think Boghossian is a fraudster, his hoaxes are certainly poor science. He should have conducted a rigorous empirical study instead. Of course, he must have known that fabricating data can cost him his career. But punishing him sends the wrong sign to academic whistle-blowers. IMHO, the best thing Portland State can do is to establish rules for ethical and scientifically valuable hoaxes as a lesson learned from this.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

jancsika 8y ago

> The hoax was dubbed "Sokal Squared," after a similar stunt pulled in 1996 by Alan Sokal, then a physicist at New York University. This has as much to do with Sokal's hoax as those battery fire-hazards with wheels have to do with "hoverboards". A 'Sokal Squared' hoax should mean something like multiple journal articles getting published-- none of which contain any data to back up their claims-- all claiming to replicate an original journal article which also contains no data to substantiate its claim. The twist that makes Sokal's original hoax clever is there isn't any research being put forward. There is simply an assertion, non-sequiturs, and a repetition of the assertion as the conclusion. He completely left out the "research" part of his journal article. The reason his hoax was so embarrassing for that journal is that no university ever imagined they'd need to make a basic rule that researchers must actually include research in their research papers. That means that Sokal didn't directly break any rules with his hoax, and much of the spotlight remained on the journal for failing to do the trivial job of rejecting submissions that fail to contain content. I'd be willing to bet there was a dean or two and some administrators who met to figure out if Sokal actually broke any of the school's guidelines. I'd also bet they came up with some way they could apply a vaguely worded research guideline to discipline him but decided against it for fear of pushback within the wider research community. Still, it's a reasonable concern when a professor publicly states that they submitted an article to a journal in bad faith, even as a hoax. tldr; it's a nuanced situation that IMO requires lots of reflection. On a completely different topic-- some knuckleheads apparently falsified some data for reasons, and a university is going to discipline them for falsifying data. I don't understand what ethical conundrum I'm supposed to care about here.

winchling 8y ago

>2) No, he should not be fired. In fact, the punishment should be very mild (e.g. a warning, attending a tutorial on research ethics). Is attending a tutorial a form of punishment? What about an exam? If yes then what does this imply about the nature of the university education?

twic 8y ago

> lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable Did they send any papers to string theory journals?

nomdeguerre 8y ago

Sometimes, you gotta take one for the team. This prosecution will help the case far more than it will hurt.

currymj 8y ago

It seems like some people are actually pleased the hoax worked. If this is you, try to honestly imagine how you would feel if it had failed -- if the journals immediately called BS and refused to publish. Would you be happy or unhappy about that? If unhappy, are you really so sure you're on the side of truth, or are you just a member of one tribe pleased that the other tribe has been embarrassed? The world where the hoax failed would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity.

twic 8y ago
> The world where the hoax failed would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity. Yes, it would. But that's not the world we live in. That's the problem.
lsd5you 8y ago
It wasn't some test of the unknown. He knew the emperor had no clothes and set out to prove it. The people who are pleased also know the emperor had no clothes and of course would have been disappointed if the fields were some how impervious. .
buboard 8y ago
AFAIK there is not so much enmity from people in more exact sciences, rather than indifference. At least in neuroscience i rarely see any interactions and whenever discourse occurs, it is parallel orthogonal monologues that have been shaped meticulously in the past few decades to avoid each other.
samatman 8y ago
In scientific endeavors we should be equally pleased whether the hypothesis or the null is confirmed. Both add to the body of knowledge and this should be celebrated. Of course this is often not true, but it is the ideal.
fenomas 8y ago
As far as I can tell the hoax did fail. As I recall from the authors' writeup, the initial round of hoax papers they sent out all got rejected. By any reasonable standard they could/should have stopped right there and published a paper called "social science journals aren't as gullible as we thought". Instead they iterated on the papers, and kept iterating until they got something published. What's bizarre is that the authors don't seem to realize that this changed the whole nature of their study, and they were now testing a completely different thesis than the one they set out to test.

voidhorse 8y ago

Sure, the criticism this hoax is trying to demonstrate may be legitimate, but the methodology is one designed to highlight the cleverness of its executors and diminish the credibility of a discipline, rather than point out constructive areas for improvement. Basically, it is a methodology that does not treat its targets as intellectual equals and is quite indecorous—you get the sense that a major point of this operation is to discredit the field and make its practitioners feel some kind of public humiliation or shame. A childish tactic. In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices. Sokal's big hoax did a good lot for Sokal (whom everyone is now familiar with—but it's funny: is the public acquainted with Sokal because of the contributions he made to his field? Arguably, no. Who's supposed to be the sham academic again?) and caused a lot of drama—but was it an effective means of enacting the sort of change in academic practice it claimed to be striving for? Well, we simply need to ask ourselves why there's even a need for such a thing as "Sokal squared" to answer that question. This is a conniving way to go about improving academic practice—doesn't the very practice sort of eschew the principles of open collaboration, transparency, collective growth, and honest dissemination of thought/knowledge academia should, in the ideal world, foster? This is largely just an attempt to incite drama and gain notoriety on the part of the authors, and it further drives wedges between already highly disparate, specialized fields that may as well talk past each other. Of course there are things to criticize about grievance studies, just as there were things to criticize about the lingo and methods popular in the humanities when Sokal devised his original hoax—but stooping to underhanded publicity stunts instead of open intellectual conversation likely won't solve the problem. Please don't give in to this sort of nonsense and stroke the pleading egos of the 'academics' that pull these sorts of stunts. Boghossian is not a hero.

twic 8y ago
> In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices So what is? Specifically, what is, given that the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not?
- voidhorse 8y ago
  I think a mechanism that, first of all, promotes some kind of interaction between fields and helps counterbalance the hyper-specialization our academies currently promote. It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not". More likely is that people from hyper-specialized fields use different criterion for the validity and veridicality of statements and that their incredibly hermetic jargon and deep reliance on interlocking field-specific concepts prevents them from communicating with other academics from other disciplines in meaningful ways—thus resulting in a great sense of misunderstanding and misjudgment between members of the fields. In some sense, our pursuits are so hyper-specialized at this point that they are incommensurable—there's an incredible lack of 'generalists' able to act as liaisons and to produce the appropriate meta-criticisms for each field of study. That, I think, is a much more reasonable assumption than one that assumes a cohort of people who "don't have interest in the truth" have somehow slipped their way into academia and are using it as nothing more than a vehicle for their political motives—that's a rather conspiratorial hypothesis and would need much more evidence to support it than the publication of a couple of papers in a couple of journals. If we were to solve the hyper-specialization problem to a degree, I think it would promote greater academic health and collaboration overall.

bencoder 8y ago

Original article and comments discussing the work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811

kristianc 8y ago

The irony of this whole thing is that had the researchers reached a different conclusion, there would be no investigation in the first place. The entire Sokal Squared hoax was designed to prove motivated reasoning within the social sciences, and the backlash and subsequent investigation is just further evidence of that.

sullyj3 8y ago

It's true that there's a fair amount of bullshit in humanities. However, thinking in terms of fuzzy categories like "grievance studies" is lossy and imprecise. It's not really a term which carves reality at the joints, so much as a general purpose tribal rallying cry for STEM people against a hated and feared outgroup. This kind of interdisciplinary tribal politics isn't constructive. Rounding off everyone in "grievance studies" to the same stereotype is the fastest way to irrational hatred and unnecessary conflict. Also, this article is pretty good: https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-the-pomoid-cluster/ https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-th...