6 ms·

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 i

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.
- jdminhbg 8y ago
  I’m sorry, but if the barrier to entry for publishing is a few weeks of revising made-up papers, that’s still a gigantic problem. The hoax succeeded.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    Look past the false dichotomy - there can still be a gigantic problem even though this particular hoax didn't do a good job of exposing it. I mean, the social science journals targeted by this hoax could be awful, I have no idea. But the hoax started with the thesis "if we submit an awful paper it will get accepted" and that thesis turned out to be false. This implies that the journals are not as bad as the hoax authors originally expected, right? They could still be bad, but the hoax doesn't establish that. The fact that the authors later got other papers accepted, I don't think we can say much about. If an experimenter's methodology is "keep iterating until X happens", then obviously the fact that X eventually happened can't prove anything about their thesis.
    - jdminhbg 8y ago
      There is a LOT of motivated reasoning in here. What method of experimentation are you proposing where if the first attempt at validating a hypothesis fails, you simply quit instead of tweaking the hypothesis and trying again? The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to become a published author in these journals. I do not expect that these authors could, without any training or expertise, revise-and-submit a half dozen papers to be published in physics or chemistry. That's significant, whether you like it or not.
      - fenomas 8y ago
        > motivated reasoning You have things backwards. I agree with the hoaxers' motivation, and I assume that what they were trying to prove is presumably true. But their experiment didn't actually support those conclusions. > What method of experimentation are you proposing .. Lots of methodologies are valid, but if the whole thing is presented as science then the conclusions need to be consistent with the methodology used! In the hoaxers' writeup, they said they submitted a bunch of absurd papers, but they all got rejected, so they gradually toned things down bit by bit until some of them got accepted. That's fine, insofar as it goes, but you cannot then turn around and claim to have proved that the journals will will publish absurd papers, which is what the authors did. You can't call a result significant if your methodology is to gradually lower the bar for "significant" until you get the result you wanted! What the hoax actually proved was that the authors could publish a paper that they considered absurd, but which the journal considered fine. Which is neat - but isn't that already true of the regular papers these journals normally publish? Then what in the world did the hoax accomplish? > The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to become a published author in these journals I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not the times or credentials involved.

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.

jdminhbg 8y ago
I’m sorry, but if the barrier to entry for publishing is a few weeks of revising made-up papers, that’s still a gigantic problem. The hoax succeeded.
- fenomas 8y ago
  Look past the false dichotomy - there can still be a gigantic problem even though this particular hoax didn't do a good job of exposing it. I mean, the social science journals targeted by this hoax could be awful, I have no idea. But the hoax started with the thesis "if we submit an awful paper it will get accepted" and that thesis turned out to be false. This implies that the journals are not as bad as the hoax authors originally expected, right? They could still be bad, but the hoax doesn't establish that. The fact that the authors later got other papers accepted, I don't think we can say much about. If an experimenter's methodology is "keep iterating until X happens", then obviously the fact that X eventually happened can't prove anything about their thesis.
  - jdminhbg 8y ago
    There is a LOT of motivated reasoning in here. What method of experimentation are you proposing where if the first attempt at validating a hypothesis fails, you simply quit instead of tweaking the hypothesis and trying again? The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to become a published author in these journals. I do not expect that these authors could, without any training or expertise, revise-and-submit a half dozen papers to be published in physics or chemistry. That's significant, whether you like it or not.
    - fenomas 8y ago
      > motivated reasoning You have things backwards. I agree with the hoaxers' motivation, and I assume that what they were trying to prove is presumably true. But their experiment didn't actually support those conclusions. > What method of experimentation are you proposing .. Lots of methodologies are valid, but if the whole thing is presented as science then the conclusions need to be consistent with the methodology used! In the hoaxers' writeup, they said they submitted a bunch of absurd papers, but they all got rejected, so they gradually toned things down bit by bit until some of them got accepted. That's fine, insofar as it goes, but you cannot then turn around and claim to have proved that the journals will will publish absurd papers, which is what the authors did. You can't call a result significant if your methodology is to gradually lower the bar for "significant" until you get the result you wanted! What the hoax actually proved was that the authors could publish a paper that they considered absurd, but which the journal considered fine. Which is neat - but isn't that already true of the regular papers these journals normally publish? Then what in the world did the hoax accomplish? > The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to become a published author in these journals I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not the times or credentials involved.