Proceedings Start Against Portland State University Professor Whose Carefully Crafted Fiction Helped Expose the Rot Within Some Sectors of Modern Academia 631
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, led a trio of scholars last year who submitted to leading publications what they called "intentionally broken" papers on gender, race and sexuality. Several of those absurd pieces were published. Portland State University has now started disciplinary proceedings against Boghossian. From a report: The Oregon university's institutional review board concluded that Boghossian's participation in the elaborate hoax had violated Portland State's ethical guidelines, according to documents Boghossian posted online. The university is considering a further charge that he had falsified data, the documents indicate. Last month Portland State's vice president for research and graduate studies, Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved. In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Insightful)
...The absurdities of Academia.
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
I found an edge case where something didn't work correctly. Clearly this invalidates the entire discipline.
Re: Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:4, Informative)
This is a bit more than an edge case, and this is far from the only warning sign. Students asking for trigger warnings, the biology professor who didn't leave campus for being white was forced out of the university, and various incidents where far left people essentially harass anyone with the wrong opinion. This is well documented in mainstream media, and some left leaning media.
GameboyRMH: bigot, homophobic, misogynist (Score:3, Informative)
Milo Yiannopolulos [time.com] speech shouted down by liberals at Berkley.
Condoleezza Rice [nytimes.com] cancels speech at Rutgers.
Ann Coulter [nytimes.com] cancels speech at Berkley due to protests.
So, since there is no issue of speech being limited in schools, I have to assume the above cases are ones of censorship you approve of.
So are you:
Homophobic?
A Racist?
Or Misogynist?
I will have to assume all three since you don't seem to have an issue with a gay man, a black woman, or a white woman being prevented from speaking at a college. To the poi
Re: (Score:3)
While I don't condone your ad hominem attack, you forgot to mention that Charles Murray was shouted down [indystar.com] and physically attacked (based on an interview about the incident) at Middlebury College. If I recall, the professor who was escorting Murray was hurt by a student. It went beyond protesting, disinviting, or boycotting.
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First it was the religious right. Now it's the progressive leftists. They babble on about race and sex, wanting to make policy based on it, all in the name of preventing just such systemic discrimination. It was also leftists who shut down the speech of those they disagree with. These proceedings are a perfect example of this. It's a perfect imitation of a soviet style kangaroo court.
Re: Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Stories of the far left's violence, antisemitism, and intolerance are a lie" - Says the Far Left.
Re: Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Informative)
An analysis of data from Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project by the project’s director, Sanford Ungar, published on Medium. Given that there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (the bulk of which are four-year institutions), dozens of incidents is ... not a lot. When you limit it to just conservative targets, the number becomes even smaller. Now, some might consider a few dozen incidents a year in a country of 4,583 higher education institutions a national crisis; I would consider it perhaps unfortunate, but not a crisis.
Basically, it looks like some guy makes this online tool to look at free speech, that appears to focus mostly on (Administrative) Actions, repeatedly says its not comprehensive and then analyzes a subset of this dataset. The Vox author takes this and somehow comes to the conclusion that this disproves the entire phenomenon that colleges are biased against conservatives. That...is pretty much the crux of the entire article. So...is this the best you can do? Lol....
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Nice paper tiger you got there. Censorship is not limited by any stretch of the imagination to lectures being shouted down amid lots of publicity. If that's all censorship is, then your percentage would be valid. Most censorship is a lot more than than spectacular outrages like that. It happens to a lot of people all at once when attitudes are put forth of "you'd better not say XYZ", "don't offend that group", or "this point of view is unacceptable". It happens when a professor is doing a class to pont
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How convenient, when the numbers brutally squash the idea of censorship run amok, of course it's really a huge unquantifiable phenomenon which you assert is still bigger than whatever the numbers say.
By the way, when was the last time a leftist professor or lecturer was threatened and given a massive shoutdown of the sort that Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos routinely are subjected to?
When's the last time a leftist professor dabbled in racism/ethno-nationalism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia etc? No conservative is getting censored because they called for small government or loose gun laws. These people engage in specific forms of bigotry which are considered hate speech in many countries. I f
Re: Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Interesting)
"a guy was making up data for papers and submitting them to journals" to show how horribly wrong the peer review / vetting process of these journals has gotten. He is now being retaliated against for showing the flaws in the system.
This is not about punishing a wrongdoer, this is about punishing a whistleblower.
That's a bad thing.
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How does that work if the flaw being exposed is that they wouldn't know fake data if you hung a big orange sign on it?
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I disagree. He fed a process controlled/flagged data in order to study the output. This is done quite often.
If they disagree with the methods, they should criticize those methods openly. Together, they could work to fix any problems with their process or his. Instead, they're going after him like disciplinarians who just had their hypocrisy exposed. Not really surprised.. Ideologues don't like being exposed.
Re:Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, it's hardly an "edge case". That's like saying official corruption is isolated. This kind of stuff is systemic. The boss's arrogance has deep roots. Don't you dare challenge their authority and esteem!
Re:Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
I found an edge case where something didn't work correctly. Clearly this invalidates the entire discipline.
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
- Albert Einstein
Edge cases have a way of doing that. Think, for example, of Black Body Radiation.
Re: Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Funny)
Pee review is urology I believe
Re:Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:5, Insightful)
I found an edge case where something didn't work correctly. Clearly this invalidates the entire discipline.
"Broken" != "useless."
Our university system is clearly broken, as on the whole free speech and free debate of challenging ideas should be welcomed, instead of being explicitly forbidden. That doesn't mean everything is broken, but it does mean that a very important thing is broken: the spirit of free inquiry.
The existence of auto-ethnology degrees and related BS is not itself a problem, or a broken system, as people understand the value of such degrees. It is a problem if you go to a physics class, and get a lecture from a women's studies class instead, but that seems to be a problem with a few schools at this point, not an endemic problem. Still, worth paying serious attention to if choosing a university for yourself or your kid.
Re:Thou Shalt not Expose... (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that in order to take the physics course you will be required to take the "liberal arts" classes, because they claim to want "well rounded" students....
Yes. That happens on a regular basis and as a matter of course.
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Nearly any institution of size, has some absurdities, what makes them worse, is if they have a reputation of being for the greater good. Academic, Religions, Youth Groups, Not for Profit, health care, sports teams, political parties... All have a dark underside, that people will ignore or disbelieve because they only see the outward good that they do. The reason why the Catholic Church and The Boy Scouts of America, was able to cover up generations of sexual abuse, is because of their general reputation o
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They made up data for studies that were completely ridiculous. That was there point. The studies should have been rejected, because they were stupid on their face.
Shoot the messenger (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, of course; shoot the messenger. Time honored "head in sand" technique.
That'll solve the credibility problem!
No, hang the heretic (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly, the lack of credibility is not the problem. Writing bullshit articles is what everyone does. Only rarely does anyone get exposed.
Threatening the status quo is the problem. He should've just taken the credit and write more bunkum articles. Instead, he had to go and tell outsider people that being a fraud pays. He exposed himself, so now he's gotta hang twice. On the outside, for faking the science. But on the inside, for the exposing, threatening the livelihood of thousands of not-so-honest social "sciences" "researchers".
Social "sciences" has no scientific content left. They have professors that publicly admit to being "post-fact", IOW entirely unscientific. It's all ideology, perhaps even religion, with professors as high priests, and so on. This brings us to: Heretics aren't dangerous because they're wrong. They're dangerous because they might be right. And here's a heretic with proof he's right. Hanging AND burning is not good enough for such a horrible person. Or at least, that's what the university bureaucracy thinks of the whole affair. They really don't want to have to find and then admit they're hosting entire departments full of frauds, even though they really have to know by now. They like their cozy jobs.
Re:No, hang the heretic (Score:5, Insightful)
Heretics aren't dangerous because they're wrong. They're dangerous because they might be right. And here's a heretic with proof he's right. Hanging AND burning is not good enough for such a horrible person.
I think the parent post containing this quote hits the nail on the head. The individual in question has shown rampant foolishness exists in the educational system, and the system is reacting to defend itself. The same thing happens to some individuals who expose glaring IT security holes (and correctly notify the owners rather than sell off knowledge of the vulnerabilities) - instead of being thanked and the holes patched up, the individuals are excoriated as bad actors and the holes are retained.
If the educational institution in question was honestly bent on continual improvement, they would be focused on how to better the environment so that blatant horseshit wouldn't be put on a pedestal (published) rather than being filtered out. Sure, the individual intentionally created the material to be horseshit, but isn't even worse when material that is also certainly horseshit even though it wasn't meant to be such is published? The peer review process is supposed to filter out horseshit, and testing the system to see whether it works seems like a good idea to me. Shooting the person who found a fault in the system isn't going to encourage the elimination of faults in the future.
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Nonsense. Anytime someone sets them up as the "gatekeepers" to information, they deserve to be challenged. Continually and repeatedly.
This action suggests that the university holds these journals up as some impeachable resource. Dangerous ground, for precisely the reason these folks showed.
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is it really in this professor's scope of work to troll them?
The simple fact that we are talking about it, suggests that yes it is in the scope of their work. Analyzing and criticizing the research published on a topic is a long standing method in academia. Many papers include this in their intros and entire papers are on this topic alone. Doing their research through deception is the only way to honestly study the filters of peer review. Pointing out flaws in the peer review process is the only way to make it better. So yes, this is really in the scope of a pro
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You're making a giant leap that doesn't seem supported by what's reported so far. This doesn't seem to be about analyzing and criticizing in any meaningful way. That seems to be the crux of the problem.
This wasn't pointing out flaws in the peer review process, since a large percentage of the journals weren't even peer reviewed! One was a total sham of a "pay $650 and we'll publish whatever!"
If what you are describing was what happened here, I don't think there'd be a story. The story is what you're describi
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Reminds me of a TV reporter in the Los Angeles area who did a segment on how easy it was to commit voting fraud. He went to a bunch of polling stations on election day, signed up using the "register to vote at the ballot" option which was available at the time, and voted. He didn't mark anything on each ballot, and tore them in half before dropping it in the ballot box to assure it wasn't counted. After his TV segment was aired, rather than address the potential for voting fraud he exposed, the government promptly charged him with voting fraud. Served half a year in prison if I recall.
Even if he cast those ballots they probably wouldn't have been counted. Those are provisional ballots. They are often not counted unless there is a very close election and in those cases there are many filters for the ballot to pass for it to be counted. Some of those filters are reasonable and some not so much (like iffy signature matching done by an untrained human). Its a bit of uninformed gotcha style journalism. So the irresponsibility of his reporting (assuming your description is accurate) is pr
So it seems it's... (Score:5, Insightful)
... not a good idea to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes after all. The Emperor's minions will come after you with sharpened knives... and actions to revoke your tenure.
Re:So it seems it's... (Score:5, Interesting)
Addemdum: In this case they haven't threatened his tenure (though I seem to recall that some of those behind previous shenanigans like this did have their academic futures threatened). But they are making him attend a re-education session. I.e., being "returned for regrooving" so he'll "fit in". Maybe the University administration was worried that Elsevier wouldn't allow them access to their publications for pointing out the shoddiness of the reviewers.
No word on whether the people in charge of reviewing the intentionally bogus scholarly papers and dropped the ball in a major way will require a similar re-education.
Re:So it seems it's... (Score:4, Informative)
They can't. University of Oregon, Oregon State University, and Oregon Health Sciences University are all really important research institutions.
Elsevier is not going to stab themselves in the face just to feel like they attacked this guy. The whole idea of it is laughable. And the administration dealing with this Professor is just the administration at one school.
Administrators at the school don't even make their own budget; they submit their proposed budget to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, who bundles all the higher education budgets for the State together, ensuring the common goals and standards are met. Then that gets presented to the Legislature. You can't be a company that receives some of this money, and go to war with one of the schools, and not lose funding from the rest. We have standards of equality between the institutions, and things like library access are managed at the State level.
In fact, as a non-student who has a membership at a local Public Library in Oregon, even my access to resources at any University library in the State is managed centrally by the State. And because of my participation in that program I also know that current student access and alumni access are managed together; they not only can't control access on a per-institution basis, they can't even limit access separately for alumni and current students.
Ethical Concern (Score:5, Insightful)
-- "In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern.""
The ethical concern being that Boghossian displayed some ethics?
Re:Ethical Concern (Score:5, Informative)
does not excuse his behavior.
Yes, it does. This is how you expose fraud in the system. You have a better way?
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does not excuse his behavior.
Yes, it does. This is how you expose fraud in the system. You have a better way?
fraud != bias.
One set of participants in this story definitely committed fraud. The other may or may not be guilty of bias.
It's specious to claim fraud is widespread just because a small group managed to get away with it.
Re:Ethical Concern (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people. That he did so to reveal a major problem in the industry is beneficial to us, but does not excuse his behavior.
He did so with the explicit intent to show the problems in a trusted system. Seriously, we are on a technology website. This process is security research. Every patch, every security advisory, every exposed exploit, the whole industry is based on the premise that proving the emperor has no clothes is a good thing.
Without the proof, nobody listens and the issues in trusted systems continue.
Intent matters. Testing trust isn't unethical. If you haven't got it by now, time to retire bucko.
Re: (Score:2)
does not excuse his behavior.
Had he done all of this without the explicit intent to document and expose his own actions, then yes, you might be able to argue that, however, that isn't the case. Less shocking attempts at demonstrating the absurdity of these journals and the reporting on the studies within them have been tried with very little effect. This was one of the only avenues left for, hopefully, making some progress on this problem.
Re:Ethical Concern (Score:5, Interesting)
I seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, because he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people in order to expose that those people (who were professional thinkers) were not thinking or even making a half-assed attempt to do their job.
Lying isn't always bad, and it's especially not-bad if it's done merely to troll someone and then you follow up by telling everyone that you lied.
He tested them, and testing them was the only thing he was doing. He wasn't doing it for personal enrichment, he wasn't doing it to justify some bullshit policy, and he wasn't doing it to mislead anyone about scientific observations or conclusions.
You hire a guy to watch your widgets for ten minutes. "I'll be back in ten minutes, no sooner." You noisily walk off in big, heavy boots, then out-of-view, you take them off, circle around, and tip-toe in your socks back to where the widgets and guard are. He's asleep!! You yell, "Hey, I hired you to guard my widgets!" and he wakes up and replies "you lied about when you would be back!" I think you did nothing unethical in this situation, and I think it's basically the same as this other dude's situation.
Re:Ethical Concern (Score:5, Insightful)
His behavior was perfectly ehtical. Publishing false papers with the intent of permanent deception is unethical (and probably the case with most published papers in several fields). That wasn't the case here: they revealed the deception quickly.
Also, let's be clear here: their attempts would have failed if there wasn't a problem to expose. Any harm you imagine they did is being done routinely by people with entirely unethical motives in those fields and journals.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people. That he did so to reveal a major problem in the industry is beneficial to us, but does not excuse his behavior.
That is the the whole greater good argument - did his actions, which if taken by themselves be unethical, perform a greater good by exposing problems with publishing in the academic community. It would be interesting to see more information and facts surrounding the case, not just the WaTimes' article,; especially since the WaTimes has its own bias which may cloud its reporting.
This doesn't really say that much about the overall veracity of published articles or inherent bias, as it is just one data point.
Re:Ethical Concern (Score:4, Informative)
Proves nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
For this really to be carefully crafted, they'd have to have a control group, where they craft equally (im)plausible scientific papers to a large variety of fields and show that particular fields are especially prone to publishing shoddy papers.
As it is, we all know shoddy papers can slip through to publication, publishing a few more proves nothing. Intentionally trying to slip shoddy papers through does seem like something a scholar should not be doing, and disciplinary action is appropriate.
Re:Proves nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Proves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
His papers were much more than that. Some of them came to conclusions that were not only not supported, but actually the opposite of what the included data showed. These should have been rejected flat out by any halfway competent reviewer. They were clearly accepted not for their scientific insight or contribution, but for the narrative they supported.
That should be the real scandal. These papers should be under fire, and those reviewers should be investigated.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology" is a garbage Indian paper mill so morons can claim they've had something "published" for a nominal fee of $150. The journals that were accepting these papers are considered the gold standard of gender and identity studies, and not only were the papers read and peer reviewed, many were sent back with feedback arguing that the ideas presented in the papers were not radical enough, and that they should be revised and be resubmitted.
Re: (Score:2)
A few years back the "International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology" published a paper that was nothing but "get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated over and over again.
That is a pay-to-publish open access journal. You email your paper, pay the fee, and it is published. Since the journal is garbage, nobody subscribes to it, so the papers only appear online, and it costs the publishers almost nothing to run it. But it does give the authors a plausible looking citation to include in their publication history.
The journals in TFA are different. They are some of the leading journals in their fields. Although, to be fair, they did reject 13 out of the 20 papers.
Re: Proves nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Try publishing in JACM, or Journal of Alagorithms, SODA, FOCS, STOC, Stacs, or the other 100 reputable venues. Don't use some money-making scammy CS venue to compare with what Boghossian did... They made it to the top ten journals in Grievance Studies.
Re:Proves nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Proves nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I looked into the Mein Kampf one (Score:4, Informative)
"but these folks spent significant amounts of effort to get their stuff past the journals."
Really? Writing about dog rape in dog parks and dildo training? That is the point: if that crap gets "past the journals", what other crap gets through regularly?
Re:Proves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you manage to get a modified excerpt of Mein Kampf published in a professional journal, you should be given kudos for exposing a serious problem.
I'm curious, what other whistleblowers do you think are deserving of "disciplinary action" for exposing how screwed up something is?
Re: Proves nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to add that they were caught by New Real Peer Review, another famous watchdog that catches outrageous Greviance Studies "research".
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For this really to be carefully crafted, they'd have to have a control group, where they craft equally (im)plausible scientific papers to a large variety of fields
The study is not in a scientific field to a scientific journal --- its in a liberal arts field.
Your standards such as "control groups" and "rigorous statistical analysis" only apply to scientific papers.
Thats how much gender studies studies can be published at all - there's no reliable standard of rigor
like you suggest applied outside
Papers on gender, race and sexuality? (Score:4, Insightful)
why do these even exist? Are there deep mysteries about gender and race that we struggle to understand? Or are we just trying to justify the need for useless paycheck collecting parasites at "academic institutions"?
Re:Papers on gender, race and sexuality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Are there deep mysteries about gender and race that we struggle to understand?
Yes. It turns out like most human interaction on a large scale, it's pretty complicated.
Efforts to declare these fields "simple" are about the same as Flat Earthers. Their model is way simpler than the academics, but it's missing a whole lot of nuance that exists in the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
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No. Gender and race are completely understood subjects, we've pretty much reached the limits of human comprehension.
Re:Papers on gender, race and sexuality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Papers on gender, race and sexuality? (Score:4, Insightful)
why do these even exist? Are there deep mysteries about gender and race that we struggle to understand? Or are we just trying to justify the need for useless paycheck collecting parasites at "academic institutions"?
Honestly yes, I think the subjects merit study. Gender maybe more than race.
What should be refrained from is the political editorial and social interference. Particularly wherein soft sciences are concerned, any knowledge gained should be taken with a grain of salt, and used to inform rather than prescribe.
Re: (Score:2)
This is like why we need to study the cosmos or what is the point of food science now we know pretty much all there is to know about cooking.
Actually I take that back, it's worse. It's basically saying that because you don't know much about these subjects they can't be worth thinking about.
Re: (Score:2)
It ain't science if it's not falsifiable. It also ain't science if its not reproducible.
Most studies in these fields are neither. So they are not real science.
Of course attempts to prove this result in the breaking of many people's rice bowls so anyone trying must be reeducated or destroyed.
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe it can, but we do not understand these problems well enough to solve them, and that is the best reason to study them more.
Wait, wut? (Score:2, Funny)
So he and his cohorts exposed major ethical problems with research publications and now the university is punishing him for ethics violations because of it?
Dat Ain't Right. Killing the messenger, etc etc
no good deed goes unpunished (Score:2)
Punish those who exposed us!
AmiMojo (Score:3, Insightful)
That applies to ANY SJW. You are a disgrace to those who actually fight for equality and social justice and things that matter.
Re: (Score:2)
That applies to ANY SJW.
Wait it applies to you too?
Must discipline. (Score:2, Informative)
He made us look bad because we published nonsense.
Time for a refresher:
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
Ethical violation? (Score:2)
Where's the line between claiming false data is true and fuzzing to test the robustness of a system?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sue for what? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sue for what, exactly?
He is being slandered for exposing fraud in the system. Why are you being so silly?
Poor quality university (Score:5, Insightful)
Under their rules, Sokal's hoax should have been punished.
The reactions of these academics (The ones who try to punish the people who did the hoax) is clumsy because it highlights their own intellectual mediocrity and eventually the poor value of their entire field if this procedure ends up being approved by the profession. They should thank Boghossian for exposing reviewers as frauds and claim they would not have been caught by such a hoax.
But they aren't even smart enough for this. They will pass for people trying to protect a scam at the expense of dumb college "students".
Social studies already have a very poor reputation.
Re: (Score:2)
You beat me to it. (Full disclosure: I'm a high school classmate of Alan Sokal). There've been several precedents for this sort of spoof, including IIRC a bot-generated paper or two that were accepted by one journal or another.
Feel my sack of (Score:3, Informative)
Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved.
What a sack of shit. And willfully clueless on top of it. This is standard journalistic investigative technique, and has been considered fine for centuries.
Someone should try to pass BS in front of this "ethics" guy. Hint: You don't need his permission or knowledge of "human studies techniques" to test if he is a fraud or liar or sack of shit.
Re: (Score:2)
It's very basic.
Any organization that has an "Ethics" department wouldn't recognize ethics if it bit them.
And any nation that has a "Department of Justice" has no justice.
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Well, no, the papers that they submitted were not the results of their research. The papers were their research. Their data points were not at all faked, since the actual data points were "the following journals accepted our bullshit papers..."
I think the question of faked data is not at all clear, and it's therefore not at all clear to me that they broke any rules.
his two accomplices didn't attract attention (Score:3)
Boghossian has two accomplices, and yet the university's ire seems to be directed at him specifically. Someone seems very keen on making this personal. I cannot help but wonder why.
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He's the only one who works at a university, AFAIK, and therefore the only one whom the committees can reach.
Spite is rampant in this country (Score:3)
They can't stand that he made their system look bad so they get him where they can. This is how the weak minded punish those who point out their incompetence. All for spite.
This is academia working correctly (Score:2)
His one big mistake (Score:2)
You're supposed to troll as AC. Seriously, he would have been golden if he had gotten an ID from a homeless guy or something. Just do it a bit away, like in another state. You'd get to smirk when they track the origin of the papers to a tent under a bridge in Dallas, and you wouldn't lose your tenure.
sure it does (Score:2)
Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
Sure it does. Just not the ones that are now being investigated. The ethical behaviour of a lot of other people in the field is now in question, namely those who in the name of science have been producing, publishing and supporting made-up bullshit for decades.
The papers (I've read a few of them when the story went public) are a clear sign that something is very, very wrong with whoever accepted them for publication. The equivalent in hard science would be a reputable physics magazine publishing a paper abo
Why involve the review board? (Score:5, Informative)
The art of thinking (Score:3)
I read carefully all replies so far.
None of the critics has any idea whatsoever what was done, why, how, and most importantly, why.
In order to think about anything you need data.
So why don't you start with listening to those two
https://youtu.be/FG6HbWw2RF4 [youtu.be]
https://youtu.be/AZZNvT1vaJg [youtu.be]
The second is an interview with the very people who did it. Just hear how the reviewers were encouraging them to make the papers even more radical (untruthful). And how the most ridiculous paper actually won an award.
All of you here who criticize those brave and insightful people are useful idiots with tiny balls and even tinier brains.
You are also nasty and dangerous.
Re:Awwww (Score:5, Informative)
The idiots were the publications that published the fake, absurd papers on fake, absurd "disciplines" of study.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Roger...go it.
Re:Awwww (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, as an Oregonian I have to say that most people here support this type of research, but we don't want public money to go to deception; even a useful deception that embarrasses people who deserve it.
So expect a "burn them all" sort of attitude in response to this. Outside of the Oregon higher education system, there is no valid concept of "circling the wagons" because those people aren't even in the same wagon train as the people cracking down on the guy in the story.
Also it is unwise for a person from the Philosophy department to do this, he had to know he was sacrificing his career. There is already skepticism that the field even does "research," considering that everything objective in the field was carved out as the other sciences, leaving philosophy only with the subject, the unproveable. A very useful field, IMO, critically important to objective thought, since we sense the world indirectly. But still, without generally having any solid basis for experiment.
A sociologist could more easily get away with this! A social-psychologist might not even get in trouble.
No disciplines are immune (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No disciplines are immune (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but if I'm not mistaken, all of the hard-science papers you cite were published in "predatory journals"-- journals that claim to be peer reviewed but actually have no peer-review process whatsoever, and will publish any random string of characters as long as you pay the hefty publication fee.
What was significant about the Lindsay/Boghossian hoax is that they deliberately sent their "fake papers" to high-impact-factor journals with a strong reputation. The hoaxsters themselves said that there wouldn't be any point in sending their papers to predatory journals, since we already know those journals publish anything.
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to high-impact-factor journals with a strong reputation.
Imagine what would happen if someone published fake data about a link between autism and vaccines to a high-impact-factor journal with a strong reputation. Why, they'd never publish it, right?
Oh wait.....
Pre-publish review is essentially a spelling, grammar and math check. There is no effort to validate that your data is accurate, just that it adds up vaguely like you say it does. Then the paper gets published, and the rest of the world gets to look at it. And at that point some will make efforts to val
Re:skewl (Score:5, Insightful)
Every assault on social science is a good one, once we debunk it as religion-as-pseudoscience, and quarantine it appropriately, the world can finally move on.
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"Social science" is nothing more than ... attempt to ... explain away ... group differences.
Yep. Chemistry is also an attempt to explain away alchemy, and physics is nothing more than an attempt to explain away God's miraculous creation.
Different demographics have different traits. This is known and pretty widely accepted across social science. However, what's very much not accepted is that the traits are intrinsic and inseparable to the demographic. For example, it isn't a natural law that having dark skin makes someone more likely to be a criminal, but it is a fact that 33% of the "adult male Af
Re: skewl (Score:3)
Yes, there definitely some good social science out there. Unfortunately it gets lost in a sea of crap. That's the value of these hoax papers; they show just how easy it is to get nonsense published as long as you're hitting all the right jargon. Hopefully it will embarrass some of the legitimate academics in the field enough to bring in some actual standards and start purging the SJWs from their ranks.
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The study gets to be fake because it wasn't what was being studied. What was being studied was whether ostensibly scholarly journals did due dilligence in analyzing studies for publication.
Anyone trying to bring up academic charges against them for submitting fake studies, as if they were frauds trying to get away with something, is an utterly profound moron.
Meh, If you're gonna do a protest (Score:2, Insightful)
But I'm not even buying that. Like I said, there were plenty of ways to effective research the Social Justice Warrior movement and discuss the backlash to it. There was no need or reason to write phony papers with made up research. If you have a point to make, make it legitimately.
Not that it really matters. To be blunt You'd have better luck defending pedophiles than SJWs. The amount of hatred directed at that group is astonishing, es
Exactly (Score:2)
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