Three academics (two are professors, the third is described as a "UK academic") became concerned by the cult-like ideas taking over academia with regards to things like privilege, gender, and the like.
There's a Google Drive directory with the papers and some general information.
Frighteningly, one of them, Peter Boghossian (a philosophy professor at Portland State University) was the target of an anonymous hit piece in the school newspaper:
As a reminder, the Sokal Affair happened in the late 1990s, and involved a CS professor getting a paper published in a postmodern journal that argued that quantum gravity was a social construct.
Their first paper was published in a pay-to-publish journal. After that, the new strategy was to submit a large sample of papers to "higher-ranked" journals, expecting them to be rejected, and then editing based on received feedback and submitting to "lower-ranked" journals, over and over until they finally got something accepted. They found a reasonably "successful" method of "empirically" proving that their existing hatred of gender & race studies is justified-- just with a bunch of deception, falsified data, and absolutely no control (see Odder's point). This is a steaming pile of dogshit. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-not-academic-scandal.html
That article both misses the point and seriously mischaracterizes the bogus papers. It's also illustrative of the problem that these people are trying to demonstrate: that these are fields of study that are taken seriously from a scholarly perspective, but that are in fact ideological echo chambers. It also ignores the very real censorship that is becoming increasingly common on college campuses. But when the Slate piece says that "[t]hese examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results," it is clear that its author hasn't actually read any of them. Take the dog park one, for example. First, the journal didn't even verify who the author was: it was submitted under a false name and false program. A simple Google search would've revealed this to be bogus, but what touts itself as an academic journal failed to even do that basic level of investigation. Meanwhile, the paper itself is obviously bullshit just by reading the introduction. The stated purpose of the paper is to use the fact that people at dog parks don't intervene when their dogs get it on to show that people don't care about sexual assault in other humans. But in the introduction, there's this part: Thus the author flat-out states that their methodology is completely made up, but the journal publishes it anyway. I don't understand how you can then turn around and say that this was somehow not a meaningful criticism.Of course, the following caveat applies. Because of my own situatedness as a human, rather than as a dog, I recognize my limitations in being able to determine when an incidence of dog humping qualifies as rape. In particular, from my own anthropocentric frame, it is difficult if not impossible to ascertain when canine sexual advances are un/wanted, or when they are rapes rather than performances of canine dominance, which introduces considerable unavoidable ambiguity in my interpretations of this variable.
The point remains: despite fairly convincing and easy-to-find evidence that this is probably a problem of academic publishing as a whole, the authors decided to focus on their already-hated field of "grievance studies" (what a fucking pretentious, dismissive misnomer, by the way) and use deception and falsification, alongside the lack of a control group, to produce a remarkably meaningless data point that nonetheless has gained outsize media attention as "proof" that "grievance studies" are [more] "broken" [than the rest of academia]
I've never taken their argument to be about grievance studies relative to other fields, but just to try to show that the field (and I'm not sure what a better term would be, given how many I've heard) is not concerned with intellectual rigor at all. This isn't them saying "people mess up sometimes and this invalidates entire scientific fields," they're instead saying that at least the journals they tested are not rigorous or intellectually consistent enough to be worthy of being taken seriously. Or as Yascha Mounk (a Harvard lecturer on government and self-described lefty) put it: It would, then, be all too easy to draw the wrong inferences from Sokal Squared. The lesson is neither that all fields of academia should be mistrusted nor that the study of race, gender, or sexuality is unimportant. As Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian point out, their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance. But if we are to be serious about remedying discrimination, racism, and sexism, we can’t ignore the uncomfortable truth these hoaxers have revealed: Some academic emperors—the ones who supposedly have the most to say about these crucial topics—have no clothes.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.
Have you read the full text of the Damore memo? Have you read the full text of Boghossian et. al's work? Listened to their explanations of their methodology and the feedback they received from academics in positions of authority? I am a full and complete advocate for the development and advancement of 'soft' sciences. Anthropology made me completely reconsider the way that I approach healthcare, medicine and research. Part of the maturation of the field is the critical analysis of the methods by which research is conducted, reviewed and published. The fact that Boghossian and company were able to pull this off, regardless of either their ideological slant or the slant of the people they were submitting papers to, is an indictment of the whole process by which these things get approved and published. I'm not anti-social justice. I'm not against the study of the many different factors that delineate human diversity. I am firmly against the idea that ideology should be put above the honest collection and analysis of data. I am firmly against censorship. A thing or idea is not good or valuable just because it is status quo. Improvements can always be made. And these things have real world consequence because lawmakers and administrators are taking the conclusions of this branch of academia seriously. If that is the case then it behooves us to make sure that those conclusions are driven by the way the world actually is, not the way a few radicals decide it should be. Pizza isn't a vegetable no matter how many times the government says it is. But sure, dismiss this massively important moment of possible growth and change as bigoted. Let's keep things going exactly the way that they are, seems to be working well so far.
it is theoretically possible to read the same thing, consider + analysis it based on the best of your knowledge, weigh whether its supporting evidence is strong/weak, and come to different conclusions this is because different people have different perspectives in life and thus have varying levels of knowledge / attitudes about different topics every day judgements are made that are contrary to the ones you made, and these judgements can also be valid i know mr. bl00 doesn't like it when people just say the names of logical fallacies instead of actually arguing, but i do think that it's worth pointing this out as a strawman - i don't think galen thinks that "things" are perfect now / should keep on going how they are, he just doesn't think that sokal affair 2 electric boogaloo is enough to dismiss "the whole process by which these things get approved and published" in my own personal very humble opinion i think that getting some of these papers published is embarrassing for these journals, but not an indictment of... what this is supposed to be an indictment of - it feels like another gotcha moment for those crazy academics and i don't think it's useful / productive in establishing more rigor in publishing (more useful as a shell in the internet culture war bombardment) going further afield into my extremely unqualified and very subjective opinion, you preach far more than you practice vis-a-vis legitimately entertaining other points of view and it's disappointing to see so many intelligent people suckered into being the militia for the kind of conservatism they claim to oppose thought daddies are the new god, rise up sheepleBad think is bad
But sure, dismiss this massively important moment of possible growth and change as bigoted. Let's keep things going exactly the way that they are, seems to be working well so far.
Your comment is exactly the problem that they're trying to point out, though. "They're bad people because they had positive things to say about this other guy" is nonsense. But because the orthodoxy has decided that James Damore is a heretic, guilt by association is automatic. (The James Damore case is a perfect example of this. If you actually read his memo, it's far different from how it was portrayed: at no point does he argue that women are less capable of being engineers than men. It's also not bad science.)
You are denying our friend Odder a remarkable amount of intellectual agency here. Which is more likely: 1. Odder informed themself about the James Damore case, found Damore's reasoning and behavior repugnant, and therefore thinks less of those who seek to defend him 2. Odder heard that "the orthodoxy" rejected Damore and decided, purely on the basis of groupthink, that everyone remotely associated with him is worthless. Actually, no, fuck that. This isn't even about likelihood. Which one of those options should be your assumption coming into an argument, devoid of supporting data? I think the answers pretty clear.
Says the person defending someone else who is entirely capable of speaking for themselves.You are denying our friend Odder a remarkable amount of intellectual agency here.
Please show me where I said you didn't know who he was.
Are you going to address my point or just double down on the hypocrisy?
I'd address your point if you had one. My original comment had nothing to do with defending Odder, I was criticizing you. I saw you making an assumption that I didn't think was justified, so I pointed that out and explained myself. I'm not here trying to white knight it up.
That's certainly how it came across. I mean, I don't see how it's unreasonable to say that it's hypocritical for you to criticize me for denying someone intellectual agency while doing the exact same thing.
assuming that somebody is ignorant of the details of a situation and is too biased to give it a fair shake =/= assuming good faith you're "no u"ing galen and it looks silly
Please show me where I said that Odder didn't know who he was.
One of them has written defending Not All Men and calling male feminism "sexist" against women
That's the point, though: there's an entire field of social science research that lacks any semblance of scientific rigor.