Post Modernist journals punked again

[ArrozConLeche]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/

Over the past 12 months, three scholars--James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian--wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies (emphasis mine -- Arroz). Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

[TJS]

Don't worry there's nothing to see here because:

- Other disciplines sometimes publish blatant crap too.
- The hoaxers methodology wasn't properly academic
- No one reads these journals anyway.
- The article's were probably only published to provoke debate (despite the fact that no one reads them).
- The real problem was just that the hoaxers made up data (presumably canine rape culture is a legitimate field of enquiry)
- What about the shit Jordan Peterson published about gender and lobsters, hey?  What about that?

I think that covers most of the head-in-the-sandism, I've seen so far in response to this.

[jhkim]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/

I'd be interested in seeing the details of this. I completely agree that there is a ton of bullshit published in academia with little oversight. In the interest of accuracy, though, this part stood out to me -

Next, Sokal sent off this jabber to Social Text, a peer-reviewed academic journal that was, at the time, a leading intellectual forum for famous scholars including Edward Said, Oskar Negt, Nancy Fraser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière. It was published.

At the time of the hoax, Social Text was not peer reviewed. The article went out without any external review, which is a scandal - but different than the one implied. That the article includes a basic factual error makes me question some of the rest. That said, acceptance of the Gender, Place and Culture article sounds particularly biting, and I think the conclusion seems reasonable - though I'd like to see more details. From the linked article -

Many conservatives who are deeply hostile to the science of climate change, and who dismiss out of hand the studies that attest to deep injustices in our society, are using Sokol Squared to smear all academics as biased culture warriors. The Federalist, a right-wing news and commentary site, went so far as to spread the apparent ideological bias of a few journals in one particular corner of academia to most professors, the mainstream media, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

These attacks are empirically incorrect and intellectually dishonest. There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense. While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race, gender, and identity, they have not penetrated the leading journals of more traditional disciplines. As a number of academics pointed out on Twitter, for example, all of the papers submitted to sociology journals were rejected. For now, it remains unlikely that the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review would have fallen for anything resembling "Our Struggle Is My Struggle," a paper modeled on the infamous book with a similar title.

By the same token, many leftists are willing to grasp at straws to defend journals and fields of inquiry that they regard as morally righteous. Some have dismissed Sokal Squared by pointing out that many disciplines, from economics to psychology, have in the past years also faced crises of confidence. Others have simply cited the conservative instrumentalization of Sokal Squared as a reason to ignore it. "Academics," Alison Phipps wrote on Twitter, "please stand by colleagues in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas targeted by this journal article hoax. This is a coordinated attack from the right."

That too is intellectually dishonest. For one, Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian describe themselves as left-leaning liberals. For another, it is nonsensical to insist that nonsense scholarship doesn't matter because you don't like the motives of the people who exposed it, or because some other forms of scholarship may also contain nonsense. If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating, they become deeply suspect. And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon, they are worsening the problems they purport to address.

[TJS]

I'd be interested in seeing the details of this. I completely agree that there is a ton of bullshit published in academia with little oversight. In the interest of accuracy, though, this part stood out to me -

The areo article has a link to a Google Drive which contains all the articles plus reviewers comments.  It's interesting reading.

[Spinachcat]

The culture of "publish or perish" in the academic world caused this explosion of nonsense articles and the explosion of material means its harder to get anything peer reviewed so the journals then go for clickbait, aka what can they publish that will draw attention. The metric of success of an academic journal is being quoted, particularly in anything resembling the mainstream. Hey donors, keep funding this boring crapass journal cuz we got mentioned on 60 minutes!

Also, is this surprising anyone? Universities are SJW propaganda centers and bullshit degree mills.

BTW, I was in a medical consult this summer and two specialist surgeons told me they are highly suspect of modern medical journals because of the politicizing and corporatizing of science. One of them won't pay attention to anything that hasn't gone through multiple clinical trials. He said there's too much journal writing "for effect", whether it be politics, venture capital funding, or partisanship to factions within the discipline. I was totally bummed out because I'd brought several case studies and articles to the meeting only to learn the idiot poison you see in Bullshit Studies departments has wormed its way to serious journalism. Both surgeons said outright their world has fake news too.