Slashdot Mirror
Proceedings Start Against Portland State University Professor Whose Carefully Crafted Fiction Helped Expose the Rot Within Some Sectors of Modern Academia
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon, led a trio of scholars last year who submitted to leading publications what they called "intentionally broken" papers on gender, race and sexuality. Several of those absurd pieces were published. Portland State University has now started disciplinary proceedings against Boghossian. From a report: The Oregon university's institutional review board concluded that Boghossian's participation in the elaborate hoax had violated Portland State's ethical guidelines, according to documents Boghossian posted online. The university is considering a further charge that he had falsified data, the documents indicate. Last month Portland State's vice president for research and graduate studies, Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved. In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern."
Fraud in academia is rampant. China raised the bar on phony academic papers and now the west feels the need to keep up with the Joneses.
For years the left accused Corporations and Law Enforcement as being unable to police themselves.
It also appears that the darling institutions of the left (media and academia) are also wholly incapable of policing themselves as well.
Doing a find/replace on Mein Kampf to change the target of hate and getting it accepted by an accredited journal is quite a bit more than a "shoddy paper slipping through".
It beats working for a living. These "studies" are a low effort way to stay in academia.
Addemdum: In this case they haven't threatened his tenure (though I seem to recall that some of those behind previous shenanigans like this did have their academic futures threatened). But they are making him attend a re-education session. I.e., being "returned for regrooving" so he'll "fit in". Maybe the University administration was worried that Elsevier wouldn't allow them access to their publications for pointing out the shoddiness of the reviewers.
No word on whether the people in charge of reviewing the intentionally bogus scholarly papers and dropped the ball in a major way will require a similar re-education.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Clearly, the lack of credibility is not the problem. Writing bullshit articles is what everyone does. Only rarely does anyone get exposed.
Threatening the status quo is the problem. He should've just taken the credit and write more bunkum articles. Instead, he had to go and tell outsider people that being a fraud pays. He exposed himself, so now he's gotta hang twice. On the outside, for faking the science. But on the inside, for the exposing, threatening the livelihood of thousands of not-so-honest social "sciences" "researchers".
Social "sciences" has no scientific content left. They have professors that publicly admit to being "post-fact", IOW entirely unscientific. It's all ideology, perhaps even religion, with professors as high priests, and so on. This brings us to: Heretics aren't dangerous because they're wrong. They're dangerous because they might be right. And here's a heretic with proof he's right. Hanging AND burning is not good enough for such a horrible person. Or at least, that's what the university bureaucracy thinks of the whole affair. They really don't want to have to find and then admit they're hosting entire departments full of frauds, even though they really have to know by now. They like their cozy jobs.
I seriously argue that his behavior was ethical, because he knowingly published false papers and deliberately misled people in order to expose that those people (who were professional thinkers) were not thinking or even making a half-assed attempt to do their job.
Lying isn't always bad, and it's especially not-bad if it's done merely to troll someone and then you follow up by telling everyone that you lied.
He tested them, and testing them was the only thing he was doing. He wasn't doing it for personal enrichment, he wasn't doing it to justify some bullshit policy, and he wasn't doing it to mislead anyone about scientific observations or conclusions.
You hire a guy to watch your widgets for ten minutes. "I'll be back in ten minutes, no sooner." You noisily walk off in big, heavy boots, then out-of-view, you take them off, circle around, and tip-toe in your socks back to where the widgets and guard are. He's asleep!! You yell, "Hey, I hired you to guard my widgets!" and he wakes up and replies "you lied about when you would be back!" I think you did nothing unethical in this situation, and I think it's basically the same as this other dude's situation.
I would like to add that they were caught by New Real Peer Review, another famous watchdog that catches outrageous Greviance Studies "research".
The "absurdity" of social sciences is not really the issue. Scientific Journals have been caught publishing AI generated nonsense as computer science papers, publishing pharmaceutical company marketing as medical papers, publishing a request to be removed from their mailing list as a paper and accepting a made-up researcher with no credentials as an editor.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Only that his point was exactly that: His arguments were in bad faith and easily debunked - only they weren't. Instead we got reviewers gushing over copypasta Mein Kampf with the subject of the vitriol simply was changed from "Jews" changed to "men".
It's pretty damned obvious to anyone with an even remotely working brain that he's being sanctioned not for "acting in bad faith" or being easily debunkable, but that he exposed and embarrassed a whole bunch of influential people as absolute morons.
You can yammer about "bad faith" and "easily debunked" as much as you want, it's ultimately nothing but deflection; If it's so easily debunked, why did the supposed reviewers fail so badly at it? If it's bad faith, how can anyone in good faith accept fucking Mein Kampf as a legitimate argument against anyone be it men in general, or Jews? Your hypocrisy is unmatched.
Well, as an Oregonian I have to say that most people here support this type of research, but we don't want public money to go to deception; even a useful deception that embarrasses people who deserve it.
So expect a "burn them all" sort of attitude in response to this. Outside of the Oregon higher education system, there is no valid concept of "circling the wagons" because those people aren't even in the same wagon train as the people cracking down on the guy in the story.
Also it is unwise for a person from the Philosophy department to do this, he had to know he was sacrificing his career. There is already skepticism that the field even does "research," considering that everything objective in the field was carved out as the other sciences, leaving philosophy only with the subject, the unproveable. A very useful field, IMO, critically important to objective thought, since we sense the world indirectly. But still, without generally having any solid basis for experiment.
A sociologist could more easily get away with this! A social-psychologist might not even get in trouble.
Do you have any credible dataset that suggests otherwise, or is it just unsupported assertions and cherry-picked incidents that this data has to compete with? So far it seems that all the data available - as incomplete as it is - says that these "free speech" incidents are vanishingly rare and mostly aimed at leftist speakers/professors.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let me clarify your carefully edited summation:
"a guy was making up data for papers and submitting them to journals" to show how horribly wrong the peer review / vetting process of these journals has gotten. He is now being retaliated against for showing the flaws in the system.
This is not about punishing a wrongdoer, this is about punishing a whistleblower.
That's a bad thing.
"Social science" is nothing more than ... attempt to ... explain away ... group differences.
Yep. Chemistry is also an attempt to explain away alchemy, and physics is nothing more than an attempt to explain away God's miraculous creation.
Different demographics have different traits. This is known and pretty widely accepted across social science. However, what's very much not accepted is that the traits are intrinsic and inseparable to the demographic. For example, it isn't a natural law that having dark skin makes someone more likely to be a criminal, but it is a fact that 33% of the "adult male African-American" demographic has a felony conviction. What social sciences try to understand is why. Speaking naively, it could be genetics, or unequal laws, or unequal socioeconomic dynamics, unequal enforcement, or even a bias in the accounting process.
A social scientist, then, would design a study to test for a given factor such as race, controlling other variables. Assemble a cohort of adult Caucasian males, selected so the other factors (legal jurisdiction, wealth, age, etc.) match that of the sampled African-American population. Then survey the test group and the control group, and see if race does actually make a difference.
I'll give away the not-so-surprising ending: Intrinsic differences in groups usually play an extremely small role, to the point where it becomes statistically difficult to figure out exactly how little they matter. The vast majority of social science studies end up finding no difference between any (human) groups once socioeconomic and cultural factors are controlled.
Coincidentally, that's also the bulk of the work done in social science, which is why it gets a reputation for being useless and politicized. However, that in turn is mostly because it's far easier to test a widely-varying characteristic like ethnicity than it is to, for example, ask a city to change its laws for a year "for science".
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Lets have a look ath this.
First case: Spoke but there was protests.(against his political views not against his sexual preference.)
second case: "Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who had been invited to give the commencement address at Rutgers University in New Jersey this month, said on Saturday that she would no longer give the speech. Her announcement came after weeks of protests by some students and faculty members over the university’s decision to invite her."
third case: "Ann Coulter said Wednesday that she is canceling her planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley, because she had lost the backing of conservative groups that had initially sponsored her appearance."
So in no case did the institutions stop och block or cencor the persons. They elected to not speak due to protests. or spoke and there were protests.
Protests against a person s political opinions is part of free speach nd politics.
so you are clearly wrong no speeach is limited, and neither of these cases were dure to homophobia,rassism or misogyny it was politics.