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There's a lot of hack pseudo-scholarship going on in universities, almost all on the political left. Just yesterday there was this article on HN: https://fanta

There's a lot of hack pseudo-scholarship going on in universities, almost all on the political left. Just yesterday there was this article on HN: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/#There-Are-No-Journals-With-Strict-Quality-Standards https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... And that doesn't include the various grievance studies, nor, epidemiology, which turns out to be absolutely full of hack papers that cherry pick their sources, abuse citations, make absurd assumptions and then bury them in appendices, etc etc. If Dr Fauci has been replaced (didn't know that) then that's certainly just fine given the overall level of intellectual rigour and integrity in the field. You could use a bunch of laymen and get more trustworthy output. The problem you're decrying is the proliferation of pseudo-science in general, it's not a political problem.

jacobolus 6y ago
Your argument is: using a university’s reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit written by career GOP political operatives in return for large donations from billionaires is okay, because grad students at universities often publish piles of methodologically unsound studies in their hurry to get their credentials and get out the door, especially in fields like evolutionary psychology, marketing, management, and criminology. Seems like a complete non sequitur to me. We were talking about poorly researched and argued advocacy/opinion, not nominally peer-reviewed scholarly papers. Your link specifically points out that political activism is not directly related to the problems of studies that won’t replicate: “Limited Political Hackery: Some of the most highly publicized social science controversies of the last decade happened at the intersection between political activism and low scientific standards: the implicit association test, stereotype threat, racial resentment, etc. I thought these were representative of a wider phenomenon, but in reality they are exceptions. The vast majority of work is done in good faith.” But I won’t disagree that there are many problems with academic publishing and the for-profit journal industry; the publish-or-perish career system; the exploitation of grad students, postdocs, and untenured teachers; people throughout academia using statistical tools who lack basic training/competence in data analysis and statistical inference; etc.
- thu2111 6y ago
  It's pretty much the same. I'm sure the Hoover Institution uses some level of peer review for their papers, except those peers probably get paid to review it whereas academics don't. Peer review doesn't do much, it's very much getting you to first base quality wise, often not even that. It can be effective if peers are able and willing to really go deep, burn bridges and object to the core thesis of a paper. Clearly not going to be true at the Hoover Institution but equally untrue within most academic fields. Many bad papers are bad because they're actually political papers dressed up to look like science, thus (ab)using a university's reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit. I know that link claims most of them aren't. I think that's good news. But note, that's because many of the papers that replicate, only replicate because they're making vacuous observations. Of the papers that get attention because they make surprising claims, many of them are politically or ideologically motivated. Partly this depends on how widely you define politically motivated. For instance it's common for supposedly scientific papers to run a model, and then advocate for certain government policies based on the output predictions. This is political activity. It's also often not scientific because the models haven't been validated, and in fact if/when the political recommendations are acted upon it renders their predictions unfalsifiable, which a disinterested scientist should not want. This problem is much larger than grad students. Bad papers are routinely being written by career academics, professors, large groups of them.

jacobolus 6y ago

Your argument is: using a university’s reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit written by career GOP political operatives in return for large donations from billionaires is okay, because grad students at universities often publish piles of methodologically unsound studies in their hurry to get their credentials and get out the door, especially in fields like evolutionary psychology, marketing, management, and criminology. Seems like a complete non sequitur to me. We were talking about poorly researched and argued advocacy/opinion, not nominally peer-reviewed scholarly papers. Your link specifically points out that political activism is not directly related to the problems of studies that won’t replicate: “Limited Political Hackery: Some of the most highly publicized social science controversies of the last decade happened at the intersection between political activism and low scientific standards: the implicit association test, stereotype threat, racial resentment, etc. I thought these were representative of a wider phenomenon, but in reality they are exceptions. The vast majority of work is done in good faith.” But I won’t disagree that there are many problems with academic publishing and the for-profit journal industry; the publish-or-perish career system; the exploitation of grad students, postdocs, and untenured teachers; people throughout academia using statistical tools who lack basic training/competence in data analysis and statistical inference; etc.

thu2111 6y ago
It's pretty much the same. I'm sure the Hoover Institution uses some level of peer review for their papers, except those peers probably get paid to review it whereas academics don't. Peer review doesn't do much, it's very much getting you to first base quality wise, often not even that. It can be effective if peers are able and willing to really go deep, burn bridges and object to the core thesis of a paper. Clearly not going to be true at the Hoover Institution but equally untrue within most academic fields. Many bad papers are bad because they're actually political papers dressed up to look like science, thus (ab)using a university's reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit. I know that link claims most of them aren't. I think that's good news. But note, that's because many of the papers that replicate, only replicate because they're making vacuous observations. Of the papers that get attention because they make surprising claims, many of them are politically or ideologically motivated. Partly this depends on how widely you define politically motivated. For instance it's common for supposedly scientific papers to run a model, and then advocate for certain government policies based on the output predictions. This is political activity. It's also often not scientific because the models haven't been validated, and in fact if/when the political recommendations are acted upon it renders their predictions unfalsifiable, which a disinterested scientist should not want. This problem is much larger than grad students. Bad papers are routinely being written by career academics, professors, large groups of them.