10 ms·

We absolutely need to change the way we do social sciences. My favourite pet peeve in social sciences is idea laundering. "It’s analogous to money laundering.

We absolutely need to change the way we do social sciences. My favourite pet peeve in social sciences is idea laundering. "It’s analogous to money laundering. Here’s how it works: First, various academics have strong moral impulses about something. For example, they perceive negative attitudes about obesity in society, and they want to stop people from making the obese feel bad about their condition. In other words, they convince themselves that the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false—in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge. Second, academics who share these sentiments start a peer-reviewed periodical such as Fat Studies—an actual academic journal. They organize Fat Studies like every other academic journal, with a board of directors, a codified submission process, special editions with guest editors, a pool of credentialed “experts” to vet submissions, and so on. The journal’s founders, allies and collaborators then publish articles in Fat Studies and “grow” their journal. Soon, other academics with similar beliefs submit papers, which are accepted or rejected. Ideas and moral impulses go in, knowledge comes out. Voilà! Eventually, after activist scholars petition university libraries to carry the journal, making it financially viable for a large publisher like Taylor & Francis, Fat Studies becomes established. Before long, there’s an extensive canon of academic work—ideas, prejudice, opinion and moral impulses—that has been laundered into “knowledge.” (source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492 https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-115...) I was one of the extreme "trust the science" people, until I joined a startup that worked with academia. The amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen surpassed even the most hardcore of startups.

geraldwhen 4y ago
I struggle to see what part of social science is morales or quasi religious beliefs mascarading as science. There is no cure.
- poszlem 4y ago
  At the very least we need to start demanding two things: falsifiability and reproducibility. We should stop calling "science" things that are unfalsifiable.
  - apocalypstyx 4y ago
    In order to even do science we must first make certain non-falsifiable assumptions, fundamentally. This is a basic point of metaphysics and epistemology.
    - Kamq 4y ago
      Sure, but that's why metaphysics and epistemology aren't considered sciences. You wall off the non-falsifiable stuff in a box labeled "not science" and focus on the stuff that is falsifiable.
      - apocalypstyx 4y ago
        To do so is to take on metaphysical and epistemological positions inherently. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It's something that human consciousness seemingly has to do.
        Kamq 4y ago
        Yes, but that's a limitation of humans. Science doesn't care about which ones you pick. You can be doing science with any set of initial non-falsifiable assumptions that humans are capable of holding.
    - porknubbins 4y ago
      Nevertheless we can easily point to the useful practical inventions of physics, chemistry, biology etc. So whether they are based on non-falsifiable assumptions is kind of an abstract philosophical point. And that is an interesting discussion but it does not follow that in the real world that hard sciences and social sciences are on equal footing.
miketery 4y ago
Grievance studies is where I first learned about this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
- tptacek 4y ago
  The fraudulent "study" where the authors pretended to get super lurid papers accepted into high-impact journals but actually got much more boring papers into coin-operated journals? What's so weird about this is, you can look at some of the higher-impact journals they submitted to and see ridiculous-seeming papers. I don't know if they are ridiculous, any more than I know how to read a high-end economics paper, but they sure seem that way. Like, their original premise that journals will accept silly-seeming papers seems obvious. But then they had to go lie about it? How weak is that?
  - pstuart 4y ago
    > How weak is that? Ironic, even.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    One might be forgiven for thinking that 'coin-operated journals' was already a pretty damning indictment.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      There are coin-op journals in every field of academia. The grievance hoaxers are counting on their audience not to know that. The only people they have more contempt for than social scientists is their audience.
      - Natsu 4y ago
        I mean, I agree that coin-op journals are a problem in their own right, but most of those coin-op journals aren't considered leading journals of their field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture "leading international journal in feminist geography" That's the one that published the study claiming that dog parks in Oregon engage in rape culture that won an award from the journal. Inasmuch as the leading journal of the field is a coin-op journal that awarded a hoax paper, I think that is going to reflect poorly on the field.
code_biologist 4y ago
This has been one of one of the tragedies of the Covid pandemic, the way “defense of science” has identified science to the public as the institutions currently involved in science and then browbeaten anyone that doesn’t agree with their pronouncements. Science is not an institution, but a process and method of knowledge production that no institution holds monopoly on.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Slight offshoot. Fear was made into a virtue. Really think about that. The fear wasn’t rational for an extreme majority of people, but it was required - and that’s true for different reasons depending who you ask. So, of course it was an immediate appeal to authority. You were a good person to be afraid, what an easy excuse that you didn’t need to question or understand anything that because “The Science” had spoken. So I agree with you, but I think the reason it all happened was something other than a normal appeal to authority.
narrator 4y ago
James Lindsay has a lot to say on this. The guy is probably the most intellectual commentator in conservatism. Here's the first part of his three part series on the death of the university. https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-p... He says that the decline of universities was all started by Herbert Marcuse in the 60s. James reads all of Marcuse's old books and deconstructs them and shows how all the crazy stuff going on today in universities and soft sciences makes perfect sense from the perspective of these leftist theoreticians and their goals. Their goals are not to improve scientific understanding, but to turn absolutely everything in higher education into a political weapon to transform society.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  The first page of the referenced UNESCO document refers to the 'red thread', with the link you provided linking that to Communism. Now, whoever at UNESCO actually wrote that may well have been a communist and may well be pushing communist ideology, but googling the phrase brings up a traditional Chinese myth which would give a different sense to the phrase - that of an inevitable and inherently compatible match. I'm a bit unclear on whether or not this is the right interpretation, but it seems a bit more likely than obliquely referencing Communism when it comes to sustainability, and the link you provided seems to simply be implying the link to Communism rather than stating why this phrase is unambiguously linked to it (other than the colour red). To me this might be like seeing the phrase 'red letter day' and implying a link to Communism. Any clarity possible?
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
  - narrator 4y ago
    The thing about James is he reads all these old books cover to cover line by line and explains the context and ideas around it. Nobody reads academic leftists because they are eye-wateringly dull and they redefine many words. The people who wrote this Wikipedia article are trying to do a gigantic gaslight about 60+ years of academic left literature not really being serious or not existing or nobody actually taking it seriously. That and thousands and thousands of academics have been trained in this stuff and written doctoral thesis on it and the guy who wrote this article thinks it's all just a conspiracy theory that it had any effect on anyone. Yeah right. James takes apart all their old works and cross-references to earlier works and explains how all their stuff ties together. The guy is an academic mathematician so he's precise and his reasoning is refreshingly clear. He even jokes about how most leftists today haven't even read any leftists to even know where their ideas even came from. In these old works they describe how the dumbed down activist techniques work and how to teach them, but people are ignorant of all this stuff or gaslight that it doesn't exist as if it's some organic will of the people rising up all by itself.
mancerayder 4y ago
It's like people have muddled the division line between subjective and objective, and if the latter can't really be grasped epistemologically, then it opens the door to activist pressure in the area of knowledge. The argument often heard by the latest generation in academic social science is: there is no escape from ideology / all is influenced by power dynamics / objectivity cannot exist, it's a relic of an old-school set of ideas that, by the way, oppressed people. Even (especially) hard science can't be objective, because it will always 'serve a purpose', in a power dynamic or social context. Maybe less political is just the fact that social science can't be hard science, because it isn't existentially against making claims that can be neither proven nor disproven. That's not its fault, since a lot of fields in social science have value to society (psychology, economics, sociology, etc.). But it's overstepping its bounds, I think is your point. What I don't like is how we're trying to establish some sort of priesthood, where people with (certain) degrees feel righteous in areas that probably they're being a little over-confident. I've had many conversations with people from this background where, they take what I've said and do not address the claim or rebuttal as a logician would, but instead, "Oh, you're wrong because you're misinformed, you didn't read this paper, you are such-and-such and such groups don't understand this fact I am stating, [or some other claim that isn't a rebuttal]." Without really tackling my point or defending their position. If only they could be that self-aware to state it like that...
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
I’ve always wanted a list of all social science concepts that have been laundered into existence by well-meaning academic activists, but that eventually quietly went away, either by falling out of fashion or by being proven to be bunk. Trigger warnings, implicit bias tests, cultural appropriation, lived experience, micro aggressions and a few others come to mind.
- goatlover 4y ago
  > Trigger warnings, implicit bias tests, cultural appropriation, lived experience, micro aggressions and a few others come to mind. All of those are now part of the public discourse, to the point South Park dedicated a season to it with PC Principal. I don't know whether they've been debunked and fallen out of favor in academia, but they sure are commonly used words today.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I don't think any of those have gone away or fallen out of fashion.
throwawayacc3 4y ago
"Idea laundering" is a great term for this. In a nutshell: Adding a thin veneer of academic legitimacy to a concept that's divorced from reality, but politically expedient.
peanutcrisis 4y ago
To better understand this phenomenon, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (both of "sokal-squared" fame) have written a book [0] in scholarly detail to trace its roots. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity_and/dp/1634312023 https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everythi...
runarberg 4y ago
> in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge. No it isn’t. It is asking a critical question on prejudice and other biases that exist among the medical profession and can affect their work. In this case a social scientist looks at population data and asks a question is obesity dangerous because of the lifestyle of the obese person, or is there some societal bias that prevails inside the medical profession which increases the chance of fat people being mis-diegnosed, i.e. a patient really has some underlying illness that can be treated, but a doctor will not see it because of their bias and rather prescribe a lifestyle change to the patient. This is not an idea laundering but an important task of social scientists. > I was one of the extreme "trust the science" people, until I joined a startup that worked with academia. The amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen surpassed even the most hardcore of startups. You need to apply this to medical scientists as well as social scientists, because it is equally applicable. In fact is a job of social scientists describe this dynamic and point out where it can be dangerous. EDIT: Your source is actually one of the anti-woke camp who resigned from Portland State because apparently universities are a “Social Justice factory”. I’m not surprised that he has a problem with people taking a critical look on societal effects of diversity of body types. You should take what he says with a pinch of salt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian
- zozbot234 4y ago
  That's a really nice question! We could address it by looking at places where obesity has significantly increased in recent decades, independently of any widespread access to the medical system or advocacy of "lifestyle changes". And it looks like we can actually see real dangers in such cases from obesity, that can't be easily explained by iatrogenic causes. The lesson is there's a difference between posing a question, and having a bias for answering that question in a prejudiced way (blaming "privileged" doctors for adverse outcomes).
- wizofaus 4y ago
  > i.e. a patient really has some underlying illness that can be treated, but a doctor will not see it because of their bias and rather prescribe a lifestyle change to the patient. Or you have those who won't even see a doctor about potentially serious medical conditions because they assume the doctor will put it down to excess weight and not bother diagnosing them properly. It's easy to be skeptical that's such a big issue if you don't struggle with your weight, but from what I've heard 2nd hand it likely at least partly explains why hospitalisation for particular conditions is more likely among overweight people.
GuB-42 4y ago
XKCD calls it "citogenesis": https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ The slight difference between what you describe and the comic is that "idea laundering" is a deliberate and coordinated effort, while "citogenesis" is driven by carelessness.
onetimeusename 4y ago
>The amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen surpassed even the most hardcore of startups. can you elaborate on this? Is this across every department or is it in specific areas? A lot of people I know say this kind of stuff but I have not really experienced it, at least, not beyond a normal amount of pettiness and vindictiveness. I don't disbelieve you. I am just curious about this problem.

geraldwhen 4y ago

I struggle to see what part of social science is morales or quasi religious beliefs mascarading as science. There is no cure.

poszlem 4y ago
At the very least we need to start demanding two things: falsifiability and reproducibility. We should stop calling "science" things that are unfalsifiable.
- apocalypstyx 4y ago
  In order to even do science we must first make certain non-falsifiable assumptions, fundamentally. This is a basic point of metaphysics and epistemology.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    Sure, but that's why metaphysics and epistemology aren't considered sciences. You wall off the non-falsifiable stuff in a box labeled "not science" and focus on the stuff that is falsifiable.
    - apocalypstyx 4y ago
      To do so is to take on metaphysical and epistemological positions inherently. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It's something that human consciousness seemingly has to do.
      - Kamq 4y ago
        Yes, but that's a limitation of humans. Science doesn't care about which ones you pick. You can be doing science with any set of initial non-falsifiable assumptions that humans are capable of holding.
  - porknubbins 4y ago
    Nevertheless we can easily point to the useful practical inventions of physics, chemistry, biology etc. So whether they are based on non-falsifiable assumptions is kind of an abstract philosophical point. And that is an interesting discussion but it does not follow that in the real world that hard sciences and social sciences are on equal footing.

miketery 4y ago

Grievance studies is where I first learned about this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

tptacek 4y ago
The fraudulent "study" where the authors pretended to get super lurid papers accepted into high-impact journals but actually got much more boring papers into coin-operated journals? What's so weird about this is, you can look at some of the higher-impact journals they submitted to and see ridiculous-seeming papers. I don't know if they are ridiculous, any more than I know how to read a high-end economics paper, but they sure seem that way. Like, their original premise that journals will accept silly-seeming papers seems obvious. But then they had to go lie about it? How weak is that?
- pstuart 4y ago
  > How weak is that? Ironic, even.
- Natsu 4y ago
  One might be forgiven for thinking that 'coin-operated journals' was already a pretty damning indictment.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    There are coin-op journals in every field of academia. The grievance hoaxers are counting on their audience not to know that. The only people they have more contempt for than social scientists is their audience.
    - Natsu 4y ago
      I mean, I agree that coin-op journals are a problem in their own right, but most of those coin-op journals aren't considered leading journals of their field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender,_Place_%26_Culture "leading international journal in feminist geography" That's the one that published the study claiming that dog parks in Oregon engage in rape culture that won an award from the journal. Inasmuch as the leading journal of the field is a coin-op journal that awarded a hoax paper, I think that is going to reflect poorly on the field.

code_biologist 4y ago

This has been one of one of the tragedies of the Covid pandemic, the way “defense of science” has identified science to the public as the institutions currently involved in science and then browbeaten anyone that doesn’t agree with their pronouncements. Science is not an institution, but a process and method of knowledge production that no institution holds monopoly on.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Slight offshoot. Fear was made into a virtue. Really think about that. The fear wasn’t rational for an extreme majority of people, but it was required - and that’s true for different reasons depending who you ask. So, of course it was an immediate appeal to authority. You were a good person to be afraid, what an easy excuse that you didn’t need to question or understand anything that because “The Science” had spoken. So I agree with you, but I think the reason it all happened was something other than a normal appeal to authority.

narrator 4y ago

James Lindsay has a lot to say on this. The guy is probably the most intellectual commentator in conservatism. Here's the first part of his three part series on the death of the university. https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-part-1-red-thread/ https://newdiscourses.com/2022/10/strange-death-university-p... He says that the decline of universities was all started by Herbert Marcuse in the 60s. James reads all of Marcuse's old books and deconstructs them and shows how all the crazy stuff going on today in universities and soft sciences makes perfect sense from the perspective of these leftist theoreticians and their goals. Their goals are not to improve scientific understanding, but to turn absolutely everything in higher education into a political weapon to transform society.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
The first page of the referenced UNESCO document refers to the 'red thread', with the link you provided linking that to Communism. Now, whoever at UNESCO actually wrote that may well have been a communist and may well be pushing communist ideology, but googling the phrase brings up a traditional Chinese myth which would give a different sense to the phrase - that of an inevitable and inherently compatible match. I'm a bit unclear on whether or not this is the right interpretation, but it seems a bit more likely than obliquely referencing Communism when it comes to sustainability, and the link you provided seems to simply be implying the link to Communism rather than stating why this phrase is unambiguously linked to it (other than the colour red). To me this might be like seeing the phrase 'red letter day' and implying a link to Communism. Any clarity possible?
apocalypstyx 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
- narrator 4y ago
  The thing about James is he reads all these old books cover to cover line by line and explains the context and ideas around it. Nobody reads academic leftists because they are eye-wateringly dull and they redefine many words. The people who wrote this Wikipedia article are trying to do a gigantic gaslight about 60+ years of academic left literature not really being serious or not existing or nobody actually taking it seriously. That and thousands and thousands of academics have been trained in this stuff and written doctoral thesis on it and the guy who wrote this article thinks it's all just a conspiracy theory that it had any effect on anyone. Yeah right. James takes apart all their old works and cross-references to earlier works and explains how all their stuff ties together. The guy is an academic mathematician so he's precise and his reasoning is refreshingly clear. He even jokes about how most leftists today haven't even read any leftists to even know where their ideas even came from. In these old works they describe how the dumbed down activist techniques work and how to teach them, but people are ignorant of all this stuff or gaslight that it doesn't exist as if it's some organic will of the people rising up all by itself.

mancerayder 4y ago

It's like people have muddled the division line between subjective and objective, and if the latter can't really be grasped epistemologically, then it opens the door to activist pressure in the area of knowledge. The argument often heard by the latest generation in academic social science is: there is no escape from ideology / all is influenced by power dynamics / objectivity cannot exist, it's a relic of an old-school set of ideas that, by the way, oppressed people. Even (especially) hard science can't be objective, because it will always 'serve a purpose', in a power dynamic or social context. Maybe less political is just the fact that social science can't be hard science, because it isn't existentially against making claims that can be neither proven nor disproven. That's not its fault, since a lot of fields in social science have value to society (psychology, economics, sociology, etc.). But it's overstepping its bounds, I think is your point. What I don't like is how we're trying to establish some sort of priesthood, where people with (certain) degrees feel righteous in areas that probably they're being a little over-confident. I've had many conversations with people from this background where, they take what I've said and do not address the claim or rebuttal as a logician would, but instead, "Oh, you're wrong because you're misinformed, you didn't read this paper, you are such-and-such and such groups don't understand this fact I am stating, [or some other claim that isn't a rebuttal]." Without really tackling my point or defending their position. If only they could be that self-aware to state it like that...

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

I’ve always wanted a list of all social science concepts that have been laundered into existence by well-meaning academic activists, but that eventually quietly went away, either by falling out of fashion or by being proven to be bunk. Trigger warnings, implicit bias tests, cultural appropriation, lived experience, micro aggressions and a few others come to mind.

goatlover 4y ago
> Trigger warnings, implicit bias tests, cultural appropriation, lived experience, micro aggressions and a few others come to mind. All of those are now part of the public discourse, to the point South Park dedicated a season to it with PC Principal. I don't know whether they've been debunked and fallen out of favor in academia, but they sure are commonly used words today.
robertlagrant 4y ago
I don't think any of those have gone away or fallen out of fashion.

throwawayacc3 4y ago

"Idea laundering" is a great term for this. In a nutshell: Adding a thin veneer of academic legitimacy to a concept that's divorced from reality, but politically expedient.

peanutcrisis 4y ago

To better understand this phenomenon, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (both of "sokal-squared" fame) have written a book [0] in scholarly detail to trace its roots. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity_and/dp/1634312023 https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everythi...

runarberg 4y ago

> in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge. No it isn’t. It is asking a critical question on prejudice and other biases that exist among the medical profession and can affect their work. In this case a social scientist looks at population data and asks a question is obesity dangerous because of the lifestyle of the obese person, or is there some societal bias that prevails inside the medical profession which increases the chance of fat people being mis-diegnosed, i.e. a patient really has some underlying illness that can be treated, but a doctor will not see it because of their bias and rather prescribe a lifestyle change to the patient. This is not an idea laundering but an important task of social scientists. > I was one of the extreme "trust the science" people, until I joined a startup that worked with academia. The amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen surpassed even the most hardcore of startups. You need to apply this to medical scientists as well as social scientists, because it is equally applicable. In fact is a job of social scientists describe this dynamic and point out where it can be dangerous. EDIT: Your source is actually one of the anti-woke camp who resigned from Portland State because apparently universities are a “Social Justice factory”. I’m not surprised that he has a problem with people taking a critical look on societal effects of diversity of body types. You should take what he says with a pinch of salt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian

zozbot234 4y ago
That's a really nice question! We could address it by looking at places where obesity has significantly increased in recent decades, independently of any widespread access to the medical system or advocacy of "lifestyle changes". And it looks like we can actually see real dangers in such cases from obesity, that can't be easily explained by iatrogenic causes. The lesson is there's a difference between posing a question, and having a bias for answering that question in a prejudiced way (blaming "privileged" doctors for adverse outcomes).
wizofaus 4y ago
> i.e. a patient really has some underlying illness that can be treated, but a doctor will not see it because of their bias and rather prescribe a lifestyle change to the patient. Or you have those who won't even see a doctor about potentially serious medical conditions because they assume the doctor will put it down to excess weight and not bother diagnosing them properly. It's easy to be skeptical that's such a big issue if you don't struggle with your weight, but from what I've heard 2nd hand it likely at least partly explains why hospitalisation for particular conditions is more likely among overweight people.

GuB-42 4y ago

XKCD calls it "citogenesis": https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ The slight difference between what you describe and the comic is that "idea laundering" is a deliberate and coordinated effort, while "citogenesis" is driven by carelessness.

onetimeusename 4y ago

>The amount of pettiness, vindictiveness, cutthroat power games I have seen surpassed even the most hardcore of startups. can you elaborate on this? Is this across every department or is it in specific areas? A lot of people I know say this kind of stuff but I have not really experienced it, at least, not beyond a normal amount of pettiness and vindictiveness. I don't disbelieve you. I am just curious about this problem.