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[unpopularblargh]

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There’s a multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting ringing out across my Twitter feed at the moment. The outpouring of joy stems from an article published in Skeptic Magazine. Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay managed to submit a hoax article to a gender studies journal, and are hailing this as a profound, thermonuclear indictment on the entirety of gender studies, social science and the “academic left”. They wrote that:

“We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal”

Their article was initially rejected by a journal, “NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies”. But they were referred to a smaller outlet, ‘Cogent Social Sciences’, that offers publication where you ‘pay what you like’ (apparently, they didn’t pay anything).

On the face of it, this might seem like a clever take-down of predatory publishing practices. Sadly, that’s not the case. It’s presented by Boghossian and Lindsay, people sharing the article online, and by people responding, as a comprehensive demolition of gender studies, post-modernism, “social justice warriors” (SJWs, in alt-right parlance) and social science.

Most people, whether they’re part of the skeptic community or not, can recognise that a single instance isn’t sufficient evidence to conclude that an entire field of research is crippled by religious man-hating fervour, and that anyone pushing that line is probably weirdly compromised.

Beyond that basic morsel of logic, academic hoaxes happen in the hard sciences, too:

Andrew Wakefield, a British anti-vaccination campaigner, managed to publish a fraudulent paper in the Lancet in 1998.
A US nuclear physics conference accepted a paper written entirely in autocomplete.
A trio of MIT grad students created an algorithm that creates fake scientific papers – in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing found 120 published papers had been generated by the program.
A paper entitled “Get me off your fucking mailing list” was accepted for publication by computer science journal.
A 2013 hoax saw a scientific paper about fictional lichen published in several hundred journals.

TL;DR: Two rationalists purposefully submitted a "hoax" paper to two academic journals and were accepted by the lesser known of the two (that is also pay to publish). Now you have well known "rational" atheists trumpeting the "hoax" acceptance as SJWs gone awry and gender studies being a sham.

Here is a good Twitter thread rebuttal:

Between promoting the Bell Curve as a sort of "forbidden knowledge" and now this, when did bad science/logic become the go-to for the loudest voices representing atheism online?

 

[NoblesseOblige]

From my experience those who claim to be 'rationalists' or 'logical' tend to fail when that claim is put under any scrutiny.

 

[jabuseika]

Sure got em...

 

[Brianimaniac]

Academics sure do love labeling things.

 

[makingmusic476]

From my experience those who claim to be 'rationalists' or 'logical' tend to fail when that claim is put under any scrutiny.

A proper skeptic would distrust themselves enough to not label themselves properly rational or logical, I think.

 

[devilhawk]

Does the OP even know the basics of paying to publish in open access journals? I'm not sure the OP does.

TL;DR: Two rationalists purposefully submitted a "hoax" paper to two academic journals and were accepted by the lesser known of the two (that is also pay to publish).

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Does the OP even know the basics of paying to publish in open access journals? I'm not sure the OP does.

Explain it then.

 

[devilhawk]

Explain it then.

There are two models for publishing. Pay to access or pay to publish. Pay to access has been the historical model but more and more journals are switching or starting open access journals of their own. (Cell Reports, Elife, Nature Comm, PLOS).

So attempting to dismiss the fact that a fake article was accepted by a peer reviewed journal (and indirectly by the first journal as well) by connecting with the fact that they paid a fee for it to go to said open access journal is stupid.

 

[jellies_two]

This gotcha environment is toxic. In a normal world getting a hoax article to be published by a magazine that charges to publish would be of zero interest to anyone except maybe the editors of that particular mag.

The twitter co-founder said today he regrets misundersranding the internet, he says it encourages extremes and gives an example of everyone slowing to look at a car accident. The internet sees this (well, the Algorithms see it) and so they promptly provide more car accidents. This is an example.

 

[Dusk Golem]

From my experience those who claim to be 'rationalists' or 'logical' tend to fail when that claim is put under any scrutiny.

Generally true, usually it's just a mechanism to protect their viewpoints.

 

[Skinpop]

gender studies is home to some of the worst "research" in all of academia, and I say that as a feminist. not really surprising. this goes back decades, it's nothing new.

 

[TatteredHat]

Is this the academic equivalent of that "joke's on them I was only pretending" meme?

 

[JohnDoe]

gender studies is home to some of the worst "research" in all of academia, and I say that as a feminist. not really surprising. this goes back decades, it's nothing new.

So you are a TERF, huh?

Spoiler

jk

 

[kyser73]

Reminds me of the Sokal Hoax, only not as well done.

 

[Dryk]

There are shitty journals willing to publish your shitty paper in every field. That's not a new discovery

 

[unpopularblargh]

Does the OP even know the basics of paying to publish in open access journals? I'm not sure the OP does.

Explain it then.

There are two models for publishing. Pay to access or pay to publish. Pay to access has been the historical model but more and more journals are switching or starting open access journals of their own. (Cell Reports, Elife, Nature Comm, PLOS).

So attempting to dismiss the fact that a fake article was accepted by a peer reviewed journal (and indirectly by the first journal as well) by connecting with the fact that they paid a fee for it to go to said open access journal is stupid.

Actually the authors did that themselves. From the OP article:

The authors do dedicate some of their post to discussing the problem of predatory publishing. They write that “in the short term, pay-to-publish may be a significant problem because of the inherent tendencies toward conflicts of interest (profits trump academic quality, that is, the profit motive is dangerous because ethics are expensive)”.

From the Skeptic article itself:

There is no way around the fact that the publication of this paper in such a journal must point to some problem with the current state of academic publishing. The components of the problem are, it seems, reducible to just two: academic misfeasance arising from pay-to-publish, open-access financial decision-making; and unconscionable pseudo-academic inbreeding contaminating, if not defining, the postmodernist theory-based social sciences.

Also I'll admit academia is not my field of expertise but I have heard of smaller, lesser known academic open-access journals having questionable publishing standards.

 

[AMUSIX]

Did they say who was on the list of peers they submitted with the journal? Would be interested if they chose people who were already 'in on it' to review their work, or if the work actually passed the scrutiny of random leaders in the field of study.

 

[akira28]

lol its the Trump effect, or rather the thing that he is another symptom of. A whipcrack of conservative/neo/libertarian intellectual strike backs.

its more acting out than activism, but public attacks against institutions to discredit them at a time when the controversy could have the most effect. but I don't think the "liberalism and the humanities are poisoning our higher education" campaign is going quite as planned.

 

[Ucchedavāda]

Did they say who was on the list of peers they submitted with the journal? Would be interested if they chose people who were already 'in on it' to review their work, or if the work actually passed the scrutiny of random leaders in the field of study.

There's a pretty low chance that any leaders in the field ever reviewed that paper, considering that it was published in a lesser journal.
Most likely it was some PhD student or a post.doc that got asked to do it.

 

[AMUSIX]

There's a pretty low chance that any leaders in the field ever reviewed that paper, considering that it was published in a lesser journal.
Most likely it was some PhD student or a post.doc that got asked to do it.

Well, they would have submitted a list, right? (not sure if the field works any differently, but in psychology, we're expected to submit a list of notables that we feel should handle the review...it's not a guarantee or anything, but generally you put big enough names that there should be no debate)

 

[MCN]

Aren't hoax articles like this pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the peer review process?

 

[Dude Abides]

Yep. This seems like the kind of thing that would impress pretend scientist Sam Harris and world's dumbest man Dave Rubin.

 

[Ucchedavāda]

Well, they would have submitted a list, right? (not sure if the field works any differently, but in psychology, we're expected to submit a list of notables that we feel should handle the review...it's not a guarantee or anything, but generally you put big enough names that there should be no debate)

That depends on the journal, so it is possible.
However, that would make it a case of outright fraud by the authors, not an exposé, so I doubt that they tried to get people who were in on the joke to review their paper.

The real question is if any leaders in the field would consent to do the review, if they were even asked by the editors. And I doubt that, given the nature of the journal.

 

[boiled goose]

I don't see the issue.

Article was published, but is now discredited from any long term relevance or impact.

It's the academic system at work...

Of course short term issues happen, hoaxes, forgery, mistakes, etc.

Long correcting in the long run is why the system works.

"Peer review" is not the final stage for something to become real science. It's one of the first stages. Work has to be reproduced, validated, expanded, etc.

The fact that the authors think this is some kind of critical failure shows how little they actually Understand science

 

[Air]

I wrote about this long before it was cool on this board!

Joking aside, what a lot of self proclaimed rationalists need to realize is that they're human and are still susceptible to fallacious reasoning like the rest of us. How it shows its head is different and perhaps in some cases even more difficult to root out (it's can be hard to argue with SCIENCE!), so it's really important to to practice the same skepticism they preach about other subjects on their own opinions.

 

[andthebeatgoeson]

Got rejected by the more respectable outlet, was forced to lower their standards and have to pay to get accepted elsewhere. By a known whore who readily accepts payment for publication.

Sounds like my dating strategies in my 20s.

Who is this an indictment of?

 

[boiled goose]

I wrote about this long before it was cool on this board!

Joking aside, what a lot of self proclaimed rationalists need to realize is that they're human and are still susceptible to fallacious reasoning like the rest of us. How it shows its head is different and perhaps in some cases even more difficult to root out (it's can be hard to argue with SCIENCE!), so it's really important to to practice the same skepticism they preach about other subjects on their own opinions.

The important thing to understand is that not all "science" is created equal.

The more established a claim is, the more likely it actually models reality somewhat accurately.

Newly published controversial social sciences paper on mediocre journal by unestablished names requires more skepticism than general relativity or evolution by natural selection.

Science is not just a uniform set of claims.

 

[Amalthea]

Arrogant childish idiots. Those people will be the end of society if they aren't put into place.

 

[robotrock]

I'm going to use "If this was Star Wars, it'd be the equivalent of taking down an SJW Super Star Destroyer" extremely often.

 

[Air]

The important thing to understand is that not all "science" is created equal.

The more established a claim is, the more likely it actually models reality somewhat accurately.

Newly published controversial social sciences paper on mediocre journal by unestablished names requires more skepticism than general relativity or evolution by natural selection.

Science is not just a uniform set of claims.

I mean of course! I've just noticed that those who wear that banner of rationalism can use science in the same one someone uses astrology. I.e. as a means to justify their pre-existing beliefs. The issue is that when you're claiming to be more rational than someone but still fall for the same cognitive pitfalls as the rest of us, it's hard to show someone whose been drinking their own juice that they're being hypocritical.

it's something I've debated with a lot of people on this board about since I've been here, and its kind of an interesting thing to see, over the past few years of people understanding this same concept about scientists like Dawkins, Harris, etc. But I agree with your post, I don't think I'm saying anything to contradict that.

 

[Greddleok]

Pay to publish isn't necessarily a bad thing. People here don't really seem to understand it.

Some highly respected journals are pay-to-publush, but not necessarily predatory. They also provide an important resource - most of the pay-to-publish journals are open access. This means anyone, not just those with subscriptions can read the data published there.

Pay-to-publish isn't the same as predatory.

 

[cackhyena]

Arrogant childish idiots. Those people will be the end of society if they aren't put into place.

What?

 

[hirokazu]

What the hell is going on in the OP? I don't understand who's who. Atheists? Rationalists? I'd describe myself as both and I'm not going around saying gender studies is bunk. Way to overgeneralise and make all of atheists or rationalists out to be bad people?

If they're attacking an entire field of study because of one hoax article, they can't really be real rationalists, can they?

 

[Amalthea]

What?

I mean people who just want to troll or outright harm scientific progress, because they think that it somehow will validate their worldview, are among the worst elements of society IMO.

 

[Slayven]

Some motherfuckers got too much time and hate in their hearts

 

[yongeandcollege]

I don't see the issue.

Article was published, but is now discredited from any long term relevance or impact.

It's the academic system at work...

Of course short term issues happen, hoaxes, forgery, mistakes, etc.

Long correcting in the long run is why the system works.

"Peer review" is not the final stage for something to become real science. It's one of the first stages. Work has to be reproduced, validated, expanded, etc.

The fact that the authors think this is some kind of critical failure shows how little they actually Understand science

This is exactly right. It's an example of two entities, academia and the internet, with huge differences in Buxton indexes, clashing.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html

My third remark introduces you to the Buxton Index, so named after its inventor, Professor John Buxton, at the time at Warwick University. The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2,for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner. The party with the smaller Buxton Index is accused of being superficial and short-sighted, while the party with the larger Buxton Index is accused of neglect of duty, of backing out of its responsibility, of freewheeling, etc.. In addition, each party accuses the other one of being stupid. The great advantage of the Buxton Index is that, as a simple numerical notion, it is morally neutral and lifts the difference above the plane of moral concerns. The Buxton Index is important to bear in mind when considering academic/industrial co-operation

 

[HalterGratis]

Atheists?

 

[Shake Appeal]

These people are embarrassing and apparently don't understand how academic publication works.

 

[Aureon]

So, OP. Let me get this straight.
You're indicting a community due a fringe within it indicted a community due to a fringe within it?

There's some poetry in this.
You cannot indict Gender Studies of male-hating due to a paper being accepted by a journal. Anecdotical evidence isn't data.
You cannot indict Skepticism of relevant confirmation bias due to four guys on twitter. Anecdotical evidence isn't data.

 

[hirokazu]

Well I read the skeptics.org article and the writers set out with an agenda and then jumped to conclusions when they managed to produce a result that apparently supports their agenda. That seems like bad science to me.

They do point out two critical things that I think needs attention and addressing:

- The supposedly robust pre-publishing review process obviously isn't up to snuff at least with that particular journal as the reviewers only checked that the paper had adequate references but never bothered to verify the sources.

- The use of scientific jargon in such papers seem only to function as a means to give the illusion of authority and knowledge when they are ultimately vapid, meaningless and confusing for readers and should probably be discouraged in journals where these terms aren't used correctly.

I don't think you ought to automatically go from that outcome to confirming the original agenda they set out with about post-modern social sciences being bunk though. You're missing quite a lot of steps and further research to get to conclusion.

 

[Trokil]

Well it does not sound that much different the something like this

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/027753959580031J

The scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world. The invention of statistics was a major methodological advance in the descriptive sciences causing a shift from descriptive analysis to mathematical analysis. The new methodological techniques were invented by men who were interested in explaining the inheritance of traits in order to support their political ideology of natural human superiority and inferiority. The statistical techniques transformed the scientific method and resulted in a process that constructs knowledge and establishes ”significant differences" between the dominant group as the norm and the subordinate group as the ”Other." The five steps in the process that integrates domination into the scientific method and results in the scientific construction the Other are: (a) Naming, (b) Quantification, (c) Statistical Analysis, (d) Reification, and (e) Objectification.

Full text:

http://www.academia.edu/3239522/Sig...uction_of_knowledge_objectivity_and_dominance

I like the idea, that the invention of statistics was politically motivated. And the last part in the conclusion about how the inclusion of statistics into the scientific method is only an agent for those with social, political and economic power.

I I don't get it why this should be a topic, there was already a big documentary about 7 years ago about the clash between factual sciences like biology and social sciences like gender studies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4

 

[Dryk]

Did they say who was on the list of peers they submitted with the journal? Would be interested if they chose people who were already 'in on it' to review their work, or if the work actually passed the scrutiny of random leaders in the field of study.

If the review wasn't at least single-blind that's another black mark for the journal

 

[Sinfamy]

Peter Boghossian was one of my professors at Portland State.

 

[Gotchaye]

The OP doesn't really highlight the main reason to think that this was a bad experiment -- there's no reason to think that the journal they submitted the article to is any good. Like, if this article had been accepted to what was understood within the field to be a decent peer-reviewed journal, that would have been pretty strong evidence of major problems with the field. It wouldn't have been like Wakefield in the Lancet; the paper is obvious nonsense, whereas Wakefield's fraud was a type which is a lot harder to detect (iirc he fabricated data).

So, OP. Let me get this straight.
You're indicting a community due a fringe within it indicted a community due to a fringe within it?

There's some poetry in this.
You cannot indict Gender Studies of male-hating due to a paper being accepted by a journal. Anecdotical evidence isn't data.
You cannot indict Skepticism of relevant confirmation bias due to four guys on twitter. Anecdotical evidence isn't data.

I mean, it's not crazy to take Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as mainstream "rationalist" figures. Almost everyone I've ever heard identify themselves that way thinks highly of those two. Sam Harris types are easily the most prominent people associated with "rationalism". I'd say that "skeptic" is a more common identifier that isn't as closely tied to particular political views. But I don't read anything here or in the OP's article as characterizing skeptics as a whole in a certain way. It's clearly just true that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are big deals in "the skeptical community", though there are many that don't like them too.

 

[Billy_Pilgrim]

Gender Studies is a particularly flimsy science to begin with, there was no need for such nonsense hoaxing behaviour.

 

[Timedog]

People that build their entire identity around "skepticism", "atheism", "gaming", "being a nerdy frustrated white male" etc are very grating to me.

 

[close to the edge]

This is not limited to gender studies. A computer science paper that was software-generated (meaning, it was complete nonsense but looked and sort of sounded legitimate) was accepted to a conference as a non-reviewed paper (that was in 2005). See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen#Prominent_results Trying to discredit a whole area of studies based on one paper being accepted into a journal that probably accepts all sorts of junk doesn't seem very rational to me.

 

[Kinitari]

Uhm, so they got their study into a pay to publish journal of poor repute and are saying it's some sort of victory? If they were trying to highlight the problem with journals like that, sure - but that's not something specific to gender studies. Like, at all.

 

[ModernBoxes]

People that build their entire identity around "skepticism", "atheism", "gaming", "being a nerdy frustrated white male" etc are very grating to me.

You're describing teenagers and some twenty year old introverts. Congrats.

TL;DR: Two rationalists purposefully submitted a "hoax" paper to two academic journals and were accepted by the lesser known of the two (that is also pay to publish). Now you have well known "rational" atheists trumpeting the "hoax" acceptance as SJWs gone awry and gender studies being a sham.

My least favorite threads on here are a presentation of some facts and then telling me what I should think about it. You can see in the comments people tend to gut react with terrible quality posts.

I don't think this is a massive deal, but it is a victory. If you want to add trumpets to that description to exaggerate this, you can. If you want to bring atheism into this then your message is confusing here.


Edit: SoCoRoBo in with the great post

 

[SoCoRoBo]

Between promoting the Bell Curve as a sort of "forbidden knowledge" and now this, when did bad science/logic become the go-to for online atheism?

Regarding this specifically, I don't think many of the people I've seen have been trumpeting the Bell Curve as forbidden knowledge as much as they've been arguing against the complete misrepresentation of his views and arguments.

The recent Vox piece, based on the podcast that Murray had with Sam Harris, is a good example: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/20...murray-race-iq-sam-harris-science-free-speech

The Vox piece, which is representative of the anti-Murray literature, is staggering in how inaccurate it is. You'd suspect the authors haven't even listened to the podcast and if you actually analyse the arguments as put forth, they're broadly in agreement with a lot of what Murray says.

There's a good rebuttal piece here: https://medium.com/@houstoneuler/th...e-in-voxs-charles-murray-article-bd534a9c4476

I don't really agree with the thrust of your post as well. Every group has their shibboleths, but I don't think you're doing any favours by broadly generalising 'so-called rationalists' as being irrational. Sure, there'll be thousands of 'ha, SJWs destroyed' comments on Twitter but there's a miasma of idiots orbiting around any sensible opinion on part of the political spectrum. It's basically true that a lot of critical theory stuff in the academy is genuine bunk that throws up a wall of obscurities to disguise its shoddy argumentation. I'm certain there are problems with other academic disciplines which are unique to them, but this is a clear and well recognised problem with critical theory generally.