I’m seeing a lot of traffic about three academic fraudsters – another Sokal hoax about ‘breastarants’ and dog rape – in the news and online. This hoax uses bad-faith, fake scholarship to discredit the field of cultural studies. (If you don’t know what the Sokal hoax is, seriously look it up. It is fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
This latest Sokal hoax has even been shared by some people I respect and admire. Like all fake news, material such as this Sokal hoax can be too tempting for some of us spread, amplify and propagate.
This hoax is sort of hilarious, highly simplistic, and thus, very easy to understand. Often fake news holds, at its core, a kernel of outrage, derision and anger, all stuff that might feel right to some of us. The laugh-and-point impulse makes up some the worst aspects of our culture – online and in real life.
In this age of fake news and bad actors on and offline, we must be careful what we are sharing. We need to be even more careful that these falsities and hoaxes are not the foundations upon which we base sweeping and specious conclusions.
The causal fallacy. The slippery slope. The ad hominem attack. When you see these things, please allow your skepticism to kick into overdrive.
This newest hoax in the news has logical fallacies aplenty.
Here are some facts (unfashionable though facts might be these days): Three people – a PhD in Mathematics, a Masters in Medieval Studies and a Doctorate in Education – spent 10 months writing 21 journal articles laden with fake results, and making dramatic, ridiculous claims.
Two-thirds were screened out, rejected during the peer review process. Only seven were accepted. These seven pieces targeted a mix of poetry, cultural studies and gender studies journals.
The fraudsters described their sneering agenda for their project clearly in their article – which I won’t link to – because I won’t be a vector for fake news.
This agenda is most succinctly described by the authors themselves, Lindsay, and Boghossian: “We suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.”
This latest failed project wasn’t the first time they pulled a similar stunt. Their first effort was “accepted” by a pay-to-publish, predatory journal, meaning they had to pony up some cash to get their fake research into print.
This time, they cast their net a little wider, targeting often under-staffed, under-funded women’s and gender studies, feminist studies, race studies, sexuality studies, fat studies, queer studies, and cultural studies and sociology.
The authors dismiss these journals as a product of a field they call derisively call “grievance studies.” The fraudsters whine that these journals and the academics who study systemic inequalities in our society (inequalities based on gender, race, ableism, Western standards of beauty and others) often result in what the authors describe as “divisive, demeaning, and hurtful treatments we’d all do better without.”
One article – exactly one – was commended as an excellent submission. It was a piece about the prevalence of dog rape by other dogs in dog parks which claimed to be a quantitative analysis based on 1,000 hours of observation.
As a colleague who I greatly admire noted that it is pretty easy to be ground-breaking (or appear groundbreaking) when your results are faked. Having been in academia for the last few years, I know the excruciatingly hard work one has to do to make any conclusions with certainty.
As a person who has tried to live her life as an atheist, radical skeptic, and one who is congenitally afraid of any orthodoxy, I know that sweeping conclusions of any kind are impossible to make with any degree of absolute certainty.
Apparently, these authors are also self-proclaimed “secularist humanists”, freethinkers and skeptics. I am here to call BS on their purported skepticism as evidenced by this hoax.
I live by a few operating principles based on the massive preponderance of empirical support.
One operating principle I have decided upon is that inequality absolutely, decidedly exists. Inequality is the settled science and firm ground upon which I journey through my life and research.
Systemic inequality pervades our every waking moment. It determines how our social structures are created, how technologies are invented and how we interact with one another on a day-to-day basis. It is the ideological air we breathe. Inequality exists.
At the heart of this latest Sokal hoax is white male grievance. The orthodoxy of the advantaged as victim. It is a piece of Trumpian performance art.
As academics, we enter into a contract to do the careful, stepwise work of uncovering truth. Like the world’s slowest detectives, we jump from lily pad to lily pad of established works and research. Therein lies our issue. There’s a certain amount of good faith required in our system. Frankly, in any human system. The social contract is upended once again in this hoax (and again and again in this age).
When a platoon of PhDs approach you, with one thousand hours of quantitative research, using all of the customary trappings of academic discourse, and what’s a peer review journal to do?
These articles were a little like a pint of Australian strawberries filled with pins, given to you by a (literal) doctor.
How do we defend ourselves from bad actors offering (dick)wolf lies dressed in academic sheep’s clothing?
The one thing that this hoax conclusively proves is there are bad actors out there. Even among those who have gone through the gauntlet of the academy where one (hopefully) learns the importance of rigour and research and a seeking for truth. We must, now more than ever, be vigilant and skeptical.
Learn to spot logical fallacies – personal attacks, sweeping generalizations, straw men arguments, causal leaps. Don’t just believe something because it ‘feels’ right.
The hoax is nothing more than a hackneyed effort on the part of the entire backlash machinery. This backlash, this clawback to the nostalgic ‘good old days’ when things were simpler, is merely an attempt to undermine all of the gains we have made as a society over recent decades.
These authors are wittingly or unwittingly being used by as evangelists of an orthodoxy of the backlash. They are high priests and handmaidens to the religion of white male supremacy.
This fraudulent research, unfortunately and predictably, will be as a used a battering ram to tear down academic research, will further discredit the hard work our colleagues and I do every day.
The hoax will provide the further aid and comfort the alt-right needs to rend asunder all of the stutter-step progress we have made in inching painfully toward equity for women, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and LGBTQ2A communities.
The research is, in fact, fake – that’s entire point of the authors’ project. Ergo fake information …or news.
The other layer of this fake news cake is the sweeping generalization (causal leap) that because bad-faith, poorly constructed research articles make it into a few journals … this is somehow proof that the field of cultural studies is itself now falsified and to be dismissed out of hand as merely ‘grievance studies.’
That a bad journal article made it into print is hardly revelatory – this is a significant problem I am finding with most of the reporting and chatter online.
The venerable Lancet prints retractions all of time. It isn’t the only example. Check out Retraction Watch for examples all across scientific and academic fields http://retractionwatch.com
That the Lancet printed the wholly false and dangerous journal article linking autism to MMR vaccines does not mean that the field of medical research is based entirely on incorrect assumptions and therefore, should be discounted. Again we play, spot the logical fallacy…
Some have raised really good questions about the rigour of some journals. One interrogator referenced the “fact” that this would never happen in STEM journals. I encourage you, gentle reader, to check out this story about 3 MIT students used AI (language parsing) to generate a number of fake stories using a tool called SCIgen.
“The team’s antics spurred the world’s largest organization of technical professionals, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), to pull its sponsorship of WMSCI; in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing removed *more than 120 papers* from their sites after a French researcher’s analysis determined that they were generated via SCIgen.” (MIT News, Retrieved from http://news.mit.edu/…/how-three-mit-students-fooled…)
120 > 7.
This doesn’t invalidate computer science any more than it does cultural studies.
That academic journals sometimes get it *fully* wrong might be news to a layperson but that is sort of the (wonderful) point of peer review in academia and in science. Make a poorly supported or speciously reasoned argument and expect to have the field of very smart, well-informed people come forward to correct you.
That process of stepwise, self-correcting and relentless, good-faith questioning, stumbling and falling flat on one’s face, having the record corrected … helps to create knowledge. Again, the vast majority of academics approach this process in good faith. In fact, more sectors might adopt these mechanisms of rigour and peer review.
Other colleagues I greatly admire have pointed out that these specific under-funded journals often rely on well-meaning, hard-working peer reviewers who (most) often work for free. Journals will often work with authors for months (even years) to help colleagues get something into publication – again for absolutely no money based on a social contract of collegiality and good faith.
Setting that aside, let’s again look to the agenda here. Of course, let’s not pick on the journals who are pay to play and will report corporate-funded, self-dealing research studies that can profoundly impact human life. For this we need look no further than early journal research on sugar and cigarettes.
These specific authors instead target marginalized, under-resourced journals with a gender, queer or fat studies focus. We must ask ourselves why?
Our answer: this is a collection of alt-right, dark web raconteurs known well to the academic community …now trafficking in fake research under assumed names for nefarious and hate-tinged agendas.
Just like the old expression, you are what you eat …what we post on these channels (unfortunately) becomes how we appear/present to the rest of the world. So again I say, be skeptical and cautious out there. Don’t be the vector.
It is a sad day for research and evidence once again in this post-truth era. I implore you all, be careful what you share, and the information upon which we base our simplistic, generalizations about literally anything.
They are high priests and handmaidens to the religion of white male supremacy.
This fraudulent research, unfortunately and predictably, will be as a used a battering ram to tear down academic research, will further discredit the hard work our colleagues and I do every day.
The hoax will provide the further aid and comfort the alt-right needs to rend asunder all of the stutter-step progress we have made in inching painfully toward equity for women, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) and LGBTQ2A communities.
It is, once again, a sad day for research and evidence once again in this post-truth era. I implore you all, be careful what you share, and the information upon which we base our simplistic, generalizations about literally anything.
In the end, I suspect these latest high priests and handmaidens of fake news and aggrieved, toxic masculinity simply want to watch the world burn.