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"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 ro

"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." The journals didn't just accept papers whose conclusions were wrong. It's not like there was a math mistake hidden on page 5. The entire paper was abject nonsense. Imagine you're designing a process to select rigorous papers out of a stack. Surely you'd want the top of your funnel, the first round of filtering, to weed out manufactured nonsense. The accusation isn't that these journals didn't check the math carefully enough, or whether the paper replicated. It's that they straight up couldn't tell they were being trolled. I don't mean you or Savage specifically, but when I read the defenses against this hoax, I feel like I'm watching mental gymnastics of epic proportions. The most prestigious journals didn't fall for it; the paper didn't technically get published; peer review isn't supposed to be perfect. This shouldn't have been remotely possible! All of these papers should've been tossed straight into the bin. If you sent the physics equivalent of a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf to a low-tier physics journal, what are the odds they'd respond with "suggestions for improvement"? "Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn’t make your ideas matter." Finally, it's also weird to hear people now claim that publications don't matter all that much. Why even have peer review then? Would these publications themselves accept a description of themselves as "not having value"?

tptacek 8y ago
I'm sure all the papers are, at bottom, terrible; they're made-up social science papers. But Boghossian and his team are working hard to manipulate you into believing they're "entirely abject nonsense" of the type any reviewer should have been able to detect. Again: they're doing that by: 1. Playing switcheroo with the papers they talk about and the papers they actually got accepted, as they did with their dishonest description of the Hypatia paper. 2. Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia --- and forcing you to rely on their description of the ludicrous meaning of the paper, despite the fact that they deliberately wrote abstruse papers from which you could take many different meanings. For instance, in a separate "Project Fact Sheet" the authors wrote, they describe "HoH2" as a paper that says "social justice activists can make fun of others, but no one is allowed to make fun of social justice." But that's not really what the paper says at all; in fact, if I didn't have the background on Boghossian's dumb project, I'd have called that an uncharitable reading of the paper, which is really just a dense survey of gender studies work on the relation between humor and privilege (yes: I actually read this stupid paper). 3. Hyping up papers they managed to get accepted in bottom-tier journals, as if the existence of those journals was a revelation. Once again: all scientific fields have those journals! They're a consequence of the "publish or perish" management of academia. Boghossian won't tell you how little impact his team's papers have, because that would subvert the narrative they're trying to deliver. Here's a pretty interesting writeup from someone who actually worked out the impact of this whole project. He used R! HN should love this! http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/ http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/ Read this and see if you still feel the same about how important this project was.
- umvi 8y ago
  > Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia I thought they released a google drive containing all the papers in question: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWPGs7Ue_i-tkCw https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWP...
  - tptacek 8y ago
    They did, which is the only place you can find the HoH2 paper, but they don't link to that paper from the writeup --- you have to dig into the Drive folder to get it. That's because the HoH2 paper isn't an overtly absurd paper, unlike the "Progressive Stack" paper, which they deceptively suggest got into Hypatia and which they do link to, despite it being rejected. Their writeup is disingenuous, bordering on overtly dishonest.

tptacek 8y ago

I'm sure all the papers are, at bottom, terrible; they're made-up social science papers. But Boghossian and his team are working hard to manipulate you into believing they're "entirely abject nonsense" of the type any reviewer should have been able to detect. Again: they're doing that by: 1. Playing switcheroo with the papers they talk about and the papers they actually got accepted, as they did with their dishonest description of the Hypatia paper. 2. Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia --- and forcing you to rely on their description of the ludicrous meaning of the paper, despite the fact that they deliberately wrote abstruse papers from which you could take many different meanings. For instance, in a separate "Project Fact Sheet" the authors wrote, they describe "HoH2" as a paper that says "social justice activists can make fun of others, but no one is allowed to make fun of social justice." But that's not really what the paper says at all; in fact, if I didn't have the background on Boghossian's dumb project, I'd have called that an uncharitable reading of the paper, which is really just a dense survey of gender studies work on the relation between humor and privilege (yes: I actually read this stupid paper). 3. Hyping up papers they managed to get accepted in bottom-tier journals, as if the existence of those journals was a revelation. Once again: all scientific fields have those journals! They're a consequence of the "publish or perish" management of academia. Boghossian won't tell you how little impact his team's papers have, because that would subvert the narrative they're trying to deliver. Here's a pretty interesting writeup from someone who actually worked out the impact of this whole project. He used R! HN should love this! http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/ http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/ Read this and see if you still feel the same about how important this project was.

umvi 8y ago
> Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia I thought they released a google drive containing all the papers in question: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWPGs7Ue_i-tkCw https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWP...
- tptacek 8y ago
  They did, which is the only place you can find the HoH2 paper, but they don't link to that paper from the writeup --- you have to dig into the Drive folder to get it. That's because the HoH2 paper isn't an overtly absurd paper, unlike the "Progressive Stack" paper, which they deceptively suggest got into Hypatia and which they do link to, despite it being rejected. Their writeup is disingenuous, bordering on overtly dishonest.