Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
I don&#x27;t think HN&#x27;s take on this story is especially sophisticated or well informed. Some things I think people could stand to know about this:<p>The &quot;Hoax&quot; writeup in Aero is deceptive:<p>Most of the papers these &quot;researchers&quot; came up with were rejected; almost all the papers submitted to high-status journals in the field were rejected; on the occasion (I think just once?) a high-status journal accepted one of their papers, their writeup gave the impression that it was a luridly insane paper about &quot;white males not being allowed to speak in class&quot;, when in fact that paper was rejected and what had been accepted was a different, more banal paper about the nature of hoaxes. Here&#x27;s the quote from their writeup:<p><i>We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it.</i><p>Does this sound like &quot;Progressive Stack&quot; was rejected? Of course not: &quot;the answer was &#x27;yes&#x27;&quot; is used <i>in the same paragraph</i> to indicate an acceptance, and, by &quot;surprisingly warm to it&quot;, the authors simply meant they received suggestions for improvement from the journal review board. Whatever you think about the politics of this &quot;experiment&quot;, you shouldn&#x27;t be OK with being lied to. Also, how skeezy is it to attack reviewers for trying to help improve a paper?<p>Meanwhile, look at the impact factors for the journals they actually got stuff accepted at.<p>The researchers fabricated data for some of their submissions:<p>This blurs (I think deliberately) the line between article review and <i>replication</i>, which is not the job of a review board, but rather constitutes an entire research project of its own. Nobody claimed to have replicated any of these papers, but the authors of the report are counting on laypersons not to understand how academic journal review works, and the extent to which it absolutely relies on good faith.<p>Or, as Stefan Savage (can&#x27;t help it, hero of mine) put it on Twitter last night:<p><i>&quot;This stuff is overblown on multiple levels.  First, to paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result matters then the error is eventually detected.&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;But the I think the bigger issue is that Boghossian et al&#x27;s work doesn&#x27;t seem motivated by anything productive.  So they ridicule niche area X for not being sufficiently scientific. Given that they don&#x27;t even work in the area, this accomplishes what exactly?&quot;</i><p><i>&quot;I think people get in trouble when they think academic publication has value in itself.  Ideas become valuable when people care about them.  Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn’t make your ideas matter.&quot;</i><p>They didn&#x27;t generate any real results:<p>All the researchers have discovered is that social science fields --- <i>just like STEM fields</i> --- include a mix of low- and high-quality journals, and if they can&#x27;t get something accepted in a high quality venue, a paper author can shop until they find a journal that will accept. And, that journal review is an eminently fallible process. Neither of these conclusions should surprise anybody.<p>I have no idea what I think of the IRB process at play here; I don&#x27;t know any of what the IRB involved knows. But these people wasted a lot of reviewer time, wrote a deceptive report, and and did it in the service of pointless, banal conclusions. They&#x27;re not heroes.