Given that we are in the Humanities, and this seems to be attacking some of the scholarship there.
I will say this, on one level, I agree with one point that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian are making, and that is that there is a lot of crap scholarship out there.
I’ve read many pieces that were written in a deliberately confusing way.
For instance, I once read a (in my humble opinion) a poorly written piece on colonialism. When I brought up my issues with the article in class, I was told that I “fetishize clarity.”
This set off my crap detector.
I understand that complicated ideas require complex discussions, but I think there’s a difference between complex and convoluted. Convoluted arguments are built to confuse the reader.
Having said that, I don’t think that Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian really showed us all that much, and their whole concept of “grievance studies” is openly dismissive of the real struggles faced by women and minorities in society.
They way they describe gender studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, etc. as creating or encouraging a cult of victimization is wrongheaded to me. From what I have read in these studies, most of them are calling out the issues in our culture, and proposing change. They aren’t just whining “”Woe is me!” as Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian imply.
Fully agree.
Another criticism I’ve been seeing on Twitter is that this was an egregious waste of time and labor from the editors and peer reviewers who spent effort on these articles, whether the article was accepted or rejected. Exploiting a flawed system in bad faith in not inherently corrective.
On further refection and continued following of discussion around this, my opinion is shifting. I don’t like the end result optics for the fields targeted, but it is problematic that some of those studies passed review.
One good counterpoint to the wasted labor argument is that faked content has been an important tool in studies that revealed rampant discrimination against women and/or minorities in areas such as hiring practices or ability to access services such as Airbnb or front desk assistance at a hotel. Such studies have not been met with pushback from the academic community bemoaning the “wasted labor” of HR resume reviewers, Airbnb hosts, or hotel workers.
@Tascha_Mounk wonders if this aspect of the current backlash is based less on principle than the fact that spending time on a fake review hits a little closer to home for academics.
I think this is an excellent opportunity for some thoughtful reflection in the academic community about using hoax content in studies that involve labor and other resources from people who didn’t consent to be part of a study. Doing so has been greatly helpful in discrimination studies, where it’s been largely uncontroversial, but as the current reactions to ‘Sokal Squared’ reveal, there are ethical considerations. The academic community should develop a balanced POV on this, in which consideration for the use of unknowing parties’ labor in reviewing hoax material is treated consistently in all circumstances, rather than it only being seen as a problem when academic labor is involved.
There’s been a ton of discussion about this on Twitter and elsewhere! It does seem timely as we’ve just been discussing peer review.
I found a good blog post here: https://genderate.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/grievance-studies/
…a Twitter thread criticizing the study here: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1047647218553958400
…and another Twitter thread defending it from criticism here: https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1047857821461762049
I don’t think this study tells us a lot about these fields, given that they don’t provide a basis for comparison! It doesn’t tell us whether similar hoaxes could get through in any field or whether it’s about the standards in those fields in particular, as the authors seem to claim.
I guess the more interesting question here (to me at least) is whether peer-review is supposed to recognize articles submitted in bad faith. As much as I definitely want peer reviewers to be critical, seek out poor reasoning and bad methodology, etc, I don’t think I want the peer-review system to be predicated on the notion that authors are possibly trying to put one over on the journal.
Thanks for the link to the Yascha’s twitter thread, Nancy! That’s the one I was referencing, but had a typo in his first name.
No one, I assume, wants a paranoid peer review process where everyone is worried that they’re being hoaxed. People researching provocative topics shouldn’t be afraid that journals will think they’re hoaxers. However, is there much difference in the end result between allowing a bad-faith paper to be published and allowing a good-faith badly researched paper to be published? Shouldn’t a rigorous peer review process flag both? And if it doesn’t… I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there’s been a breakdown somewhere in the peer review process.