The Grievance Studies

There is a disturbing tolerance for trash research in a lot of journals, and I've seen some criticism that this hoax doesn't really show much about grievance studies (as opposed to anything else):

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-not-academic-scandal.html

That the problems are not specific to grievance studies makes them all the more worrying! I feel like my youthful respect for academia has led to a deep disdain for the system now.
 
Esther12 said:
There is a disturbing tolerance for trash research in a lot of journals, and I've seen some criticism that this hoax doesn't really show much about grievance studies (as opposed to anything else):

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-not-academic-scandal.html

That the problems are not specific to grievance studies makes them all the more worrying! I feel like my youthful respect for academia has led to a deep disdain for the system now.
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It is not clear initially, but if you click on "comment" you can see comments on this article.
The article involves some ad hominem arguments.
 
Dolphin said:
The article involves some ad hominem arguments.
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There seem to be ad-homs and overly-generalised statements on both sides. I felt that some people were over-hyping the importance of the hoax, and some people were being overly dismissive of it and its perpetrators. I don't feel supportive of either side, both of whom seem to downplay how damaging and widespread the problems in academia are.

Also, I'm doubtful these hoaxes are a good use of effort compared to the work of actually picking apart a widely cited and influential paper that is junk, but was intended to be serious. Maybe that's because I already start from the assumption that there's loads of trash in the peer-reviewed literature though, and for those who aren't PACE obsessives these sorts of hoaxes are a useful reminder?
 
Daisybell said:


I hadn’t come across these academics before today...
I was laughing on the one hand and horrified on the other.
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I came across Boghossian a couple of weeks ago. The parallel course to my presentations course at a local university is Cultural Studies, which I actually foolishly assumed was the study of different cultures. I've recently discovered that it's a marxist post-structuralist post-modernist blah blah ideological indoctrination program in which students lose points in their exam for transgressing the bounds of cultural relativism, thinking independently (sorry, "analysing outside the discipline") or having a personal opinion. When I tried to discuss this with my colleague who teaches the course, she said that universities are ideological battlegrounds, that for her, unlike me, marxism is far from a dirty word, and that as we were operating from different assumptions she didn't have time to explain it to me.

Fortunately all of this is way over the heads of the students anyway - this week I asked how many of them could tell me what "hegemony" means (10 weeks into their 14-week indoctrination), and none of them could (I was pleased to discover). But it's been quite an eye opener, and I don't much care for it, I can tell you.
 
It's good that cultural hegemony doesn't exist or we would have been struggling against a philosophy of our illness and things like MUS that are the dominant and accepted common sense of the powerful. In no way have these social constructs been imposed, and there has been no narrative that we are dangerous radicals posing a threat to the established order of things.

As it doesn't exist, there have been no attempts at counter-hegemony, and the view that we are mentally ill is now accepted as the natural order of things.
 
I see that there was no control group for the experiment. Such science!

They say it discredits Sociology despite all the journals rejecting their papers? They could only get the papers published in low impact journals. They faked quanitative data in order to get papers published? 75% of their papers were rejected? They use evidence from the rejected papers to argue for the journal being bad? Innovative. Nobody reads the journals, yet at the same time they are painfully influential. Interesting logic.

They are popular in online magazines edited by eugenicists? Cool.

One of authors said that #MeToo was "what happens when definitions are too expansive and victimhood narratives are socially rewarded". Oh you stupid hysterical victimhood claiming women. You're just overreacting.

Seems like a nice bunch of scientific and non-biased people here. Glad they're keeping academics honest. I was worried about reactionary scientific bigotry there for a moment.
 
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, was among the high-profile scholars who defended him. "Criticism and open debate are the lifeblood of academia; they are what differentiate universities from organs of dogma and propaganda," Pinker wrote. "If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them to try to punish and silence him."

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, author, and professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, had this to say: "If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression, they should come out honestly and say so. But to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive."
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Steven Pinker also thinks that women penetrated without their consent are not victims of sexual assault, so I don't really care for his ethical views.

Somebody should tell Richard that they can't claim it is serious scientific work, while at the same time it is satire of a 'creative expression'. They still made up data, and complained about fields that didn't even fall for their 'hoax'.

Source for my Pinker claim:

(content warning of discussion of rape and sexual assualt)
 
I thought that the hoax project itself was over-hyped and not particularly illuminating, but at the same time I think it's important the academia stay open to self-criticism (even when not particularly well done) and I'm concerned by disciplinary proceedings being started against these researchers.

Although... at the same time I do think that there are problems with some of what they did, and we've seen the problems that can be caused when institutions avoid following their own rules. I guess there is a problem with creating a system which incentivises academics to waste their time and others on hoaxes that don't reveal much but let themselves generate media hype for themselves.

To make an informed judgement on this would probably require more work than I'm willing to do (which is how so many institutions are able to get away with a misuse of their disciplinary proceedings).
 
I agree Steven Pinker isn't someone worth reading.

Luther Blissett said:
Somebody should tell Richard that they can't claim it is serious scientific work
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I'm unaware that they have ever claimed it was a serious scientific work, I thought they were the first to admit that it was complete rubbish. It was the journal Gender, Place, and Culture who recognised their paper about canine rape culture in dog parks for excellence, showing that they couldn't tell the difference between their version of science (which is really political ideology) and complete rubbish, which was the point of the exercise.

You have responded to a lot of points which nobody actually made or argued.

It's good that cultural hegemony doesn't exist
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Who said that?

Not everything is a social construct, hegemony has existed for thousands of years, long before marxism, capitalism, or the Birmingham school of cultural studies. It is not the only way to view everything, and it personally pisses me off that my students who just want to be English teachers are forced to learn this crap and analyse different cultures from a neo-marxist perspective or lose points in the exam. The lecturers aren't even honest about what they are doing or where this stuff comes from, and any view from "outside the discipline" is labelled as personal opinion or being universalist, which is a crime against cultural relativism (which is a fine thing in anthropology where it came from but it doesn't have to be elevated to religious status and become the refuge of human rights violations). Again, this loses points in the exam. So basically students who just want to be teachers are forced by the gatekeepers of their education and qualification to recite this crap before being allowed to pass through.

As an example, if one of my students wanted to talk about this story from the news today:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46806485

(Rahaf al-Qunun: UN 'considers Saudi woman a refugee')

They would lose points for including criticisms from outside Saudi culture. Quite how that squares with a feminist perspective isn't really a problem for neo-marxist post structuralist post modernists because they can just accuse you of being logocentric. They have exempted themselves from logical discourse and rationalism thanks to Derrida and his pals, so they don't actually have to answer questions or engage in debate, just keep saying everything's about hegemony and the patriarchy, which makes it easy for them because they only have one thing to remember, but very annoying for everyone else, including plenty of feminists and others they claim to speak for. I spend every Monday being confronted with this crap.
 
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