College Grievance Studies Courses Hoxed and Exposed

[Oddball]

Would be embarrassing, were embarrassment anywhere to be found in the emotional makeup of the committed leftist hacks that infest academe.

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences. “I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,” Mr. Boghossian says. Anyone who questions research on identity, privilege and oppression risks accusations of bigotry.

<snip>

But the trio defended their actions, saying they viewed the deception not as a prank but as a “hoax of exposure,” or a way to do immersive research that couldn’t be conducted any other way. “We understood ourselves to be going in to study it as it is, to try to participate in it,” Ms. Pluckrose says. “The name for this is ethnography. We’re looking at a particular culture.”

Each paper “combined an effort to better understand the field itself with an attempt to get absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research,” Mr. Lindsay wrote in a project summary. Their elaborate submissions cited and quoted dozens of real papers and studies to bolster the hoax arguments

Opinion | Fake News Comes to Academia

 

[night_son]

Would be embarrassing, were embarrassment anywhere to be found in the emotional makeup of the committed leftist hacks that infest academe.

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences. “I think that certain aspects of knowledge production in the United States have been corrupted,” Mr. Boghossian says. Anyone who questions research on identity, privilege and oppression risks accusations of bigotry.

<snip>

But the trio defended their actions, saying they viewed the deception not as a prank but as a “hoax of exposure,” or a way to do immersive research that couldn’t be conducted any other way. “We understood ourselves to be going in to study it as it is, to try to participate in it,” Ms. Pluckrose says. “The name for this is ethnography. We’re looking at a particular culture.”

Each paper “combined an effort to better understand the field itself with an attempt to get absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research,” Mr. Lindsay wrote in a project summary. Their elaborate submissions cited and quoted dozens of real papers and studies to bolster the hoax arguments

Opinion | Fake News Comes to Academia

Radical American Leftist intelligentsia academia (whew!) is playing Rooski Roulette with six rounds in the chamber wheel. Please, somebody, anybody explain to them the rules of the game. One loaded, five empty, emptied bottle of woddka on the table nearby. Sheesh.

 

[well named]

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences.

It's probably worth noting that the hoax articles they got published were all in humanities journals, and not science journals.

I've been reading some interesting reflections on this:

- Yascha Mounk (a political scientist) makes some pretty reasonable points I think, e.g.

"To make a *comparative* claim, you need a control group. So this “experiment” doesn’t show that gender studies has a bigger problem than psychology. But the most important claim here is not comparative. The most important claim is that parts of academia claim to pursue knowledge but can’t distinguish between serious scholarship and fashionable bullshit. They showed this for fields of study they looked at."​

- Tyler Cowen (an economist) asks what sorts of articles we should expect from humanities publications, and points out that there are different failure modes for different fields

'So simply calling for higher standards in the fields you object to begs the question. Instead ask “what are those fields for?” And “might I prefer a different kind of error process in those fields?” And “Might I want those fields to be (partly) bad in a very different way?” You probably have to compare bad against bad, not bad against “my personal sense of what clearly would be better.” After such inquiries, you still will find that too much bogus work is being researched and published in journals. The most rigorous fields in turn tend to have too much irrelevant or overspecialized work — is all of string theory or for that matter game theory so much to be envied?'​

My opinion is that the journals that published the hoaxes really ought to be quite embarrassed, but beyond calling into question the intellectual rigor of various programs in the humanities I think this also reflects some of the problems in academic publishing as an industry. I think the nature of publishing requirements for tenure-track faculty (and for-profit journals, in many cases) incentivizes a lot of publishing of pretty dubiously valuable work, even when journals aren't being intentionally hoaxed.

Also I'm proud that they went 0/7 in sociology journals

 

[Oddball]

The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences.

It's probably worth noting that the hoax articles they got published were all in humanities journals, and not science journals.

I've been reading some interesting reflections on this:

- Yascha Mounk (a political scientist) makes some pretty reasonable points I think, e.g.

"To make a *comparative* claim, you need a control group. So this “experiment” doesn’t show that gender studies has a bigger problem than psychology. But the most important claim here is not comparative. The most important claim is that parts of academia claim to pursue knowledge but can’t distinguish between serious scholarship and fashionable bullshit. They showed this for fields of study they looked at."​

- Tyler Cowen (an economist) asks what sorts of articles we should expect from humanities publications, and points out that there are different failure modes for different fields

'So simply calling for higher standards in the fields you object to begs the question. Instead ask “what are those fields for?” And “might I prefer a different kind of error process in those fields?” And “Might I want those fields to be (partly) bad in a very different way?” You probably have to compare bad against bad, not bad against “my personal sense of what clearly would be better.” After such inquiries, you still will find that too much bogus work is being researched and published in journals. The most rigorous fields in turn tend to have too much irrelevant or overspecialized work — is all of string theory or for that matter game theory so much to be envied?'​

My opinion is that the journals that published the hoaxes really ought to be quite embarrassed, but beyond calling into question the intellectual rigor of various programs in the humanities I think this also reflects some of the problems in academic publishing as an industry. I think the nature of publishing requirements for tenure-track faculty (and for-profit journals, in many cases) incentivizes a lot of publishing of pretty dubiously valuable work, even when journals aren't being intentionally hoaxed.

Also I'm proud that they went 0/7 in sociology journals

It also exposes how, in at least some areas, the peer review (i.e. pal review) process is fraught with politics rather than sound research.