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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."
...The absurdities of Academia.
Clearly proof that our Universities are broken.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ah, of course; shoot the messenger. Time honored "head in sand" technique.
That'll solve the credibility problem!
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The idiots were the publications that published the fake, absurd papers on fake, absurd "disciplines" of study.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
... not a good idea to point out that the Emperor wears no clothes after all. The Emperor's minions will come after you with sharpened knives... and actions to revoke your tenure.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
-- "In addition, McLellan said he had referred the matter to the president and provost because Boghossian's behavior "raises ethical issues of concern.""
The ethical concern being that Boghossian displayed some ethics?
I meant academia generally, now circling the wagons.
For this really to be carefully crafted, they'd have to have a control group, where they craft equally (im)plausible scientific papers to a large variety of fields and show that particular fields are especially prone to publishing shoddy papers.
As it is, we all know shoddy papers can slip through to publication, publishing a few more proves nothing. Intentionally trying to slip shoddy papers through does seem like something a scholar should not be doing, and disciplinary action is appropriate.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
why do these even exist? Are there deep mysteries about gender and race that we struggle to understand? Or are we just trying to justify the need for useless paycheck collecting parasites at "academic institutions"?
So he and his cohorts exposed major ethical problems with research publications and now the university is punishing him for ethics violations because of it?
Dat Ain't Right. Killing the messenger, etc etc
AmiMojo should read this quote: "These fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements,” they write. “They corrupt it while trading upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker.”
That applies to ANY SJW. You are a disgrace to those who actually fight for equality and social justice and things that matter.
He made us look bad because we published nonsense.
Time for a refresher:
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
Because he should be able to gut Portland State and wear it like a skin suit because these papers were obvious parodies. IIRC one of them was some sort of "intersectional queer experience in dog parks" paper.
On the activist side, they seriously push ideas like it is racist to warn black people that an old building is not up to modern earthquake codes and might kill them if one hits. Cuz you know, white people only want to scare black folks out so they can gentrify the neighborhood.
And note: this is why the alt-right is gaining ground slowly, but steadily. That siren song "wouldn't it be nice if all of these assholes went away one way or another" starts to sound really fucking appealing after having this sort of bullshit shoved up your ass and backed by amenable authorities.
Under their rules, Sokal's hoax should have been punished.
The reactions of these academics (The ones who try to punish the people who did the hoax) is clumsy because it highlights their own intellectual mediocrity and eventually the poor value of their entire field if this procedure ends up being approved by the profession. They should thank Boghossian for exposing reviewers as frauds and claim they would not have been caught by such a hoax.
But they aren't even smart enough for this. They will pass for people trying to protect a scam at the expense of dumb college "students".
Social studies already have a very poor reputation.
Mark R. McLellan, ordered Boghossian to undergo training on human-subjects research as a condition for getting further studies approved.
What a sack of shit. And willfully clueless on top of it. This is standard journalistic investigative technique, and has been considered fine for centuries.
Someone should try to pass BS in front of this "ethics" guy. Hint: You don't need his permission or knowledge of "human studies techniques" to test if he is a fraud or liar or sack of shit.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Every assault on social science is a good one, once we debunk it as religion-as-pseudoscience, and quarantine it appropriately, the world can finally move on.
The study gets to be fake because it wasn't what was being studied. What was being studied was whether ostensibly scholarly journals did due dilligence in analyzing studies for publication.
Anyone trying to bring up academic charges against them for submitting fake studies, as if they were frauds trying to get away with something, is an utterly profound moron.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Boghossian has two accomplices, and yet the university's ire seems to be directed at him specifically. Someone seems very keen on making this personal. I cannot help but wonder why.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
They can't stand that he made their system look bad so they get him where they can. This is how the weak minded punish those who point out their incompetence. All for spite.
Sue for what, exactly?
He is being slandered for exposing fraud in the system. Why are you being so silly?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Nonsense. Anytime someone sets them up as the "gatekeepers" to information, they deserve to be challenged. Continually and repeatedly.
This action suggests that the university holds these journals up as some impeachable resource. Dangerous ground, for precisely the reason these folks showed.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
Institutional review boards get involved when there is Human Subject Research. Human Subject Research is a term defined by law and the review boards are involved to protect the well being or privacy of the subjects of the research.The laws are very reasonable and this case is clearly out of their scope. The purported "subjects" are fictitious and the actual subjects, the journal editors and reviewers, are not subjected to anything that does not fall well within the normal execution of their duties. Editors have no expectation of privacy and the privacy of the reviewers is not an issue as they are completely anonymous. There is nothing to affect their well being either, except for some deservedly blemished pride. Applying the rules for human subject research in this case would defy the purpose of the study as they require informed consent and reasonable rational for how the research will benefit the subjects. Imagine the authors going to the editor and asking: "Sir can I send you a fake article to show how bogus your review process is"?. The review board should conclude that this is not human subject research and wave it off. If anything, they should investigate the ethics of people who published "real" research in those journals. All this is probably done to help his colleagues in the humanities department who publish in those journals to save face or get some sort of vindication.
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.
Well, no, the papers that they submitted were not the results of their research. The papers were their research. Their data points were not at all faked, since the actual data points were "the following journals accepted our bullshit papers..."
I think the question of faked data is not at all clear, and it's therefore not at all clear to me that they broke any rules.
Why do you keep repeating the lie that they "got caught in peer review"? They didn't. 7 out of 20 of the papers were published and they were all "peer reviewed". The only reason they got "caught" is because they told everyone they did it!
"but these folks spent significant amounts of effort to get their stuff past the journals."
Really? Writing about dog rape in dog parks and dildo training? That is the point: if that crap gets "past the journals", what other crap gets through regularly?
Well that is completely dumb. Peer review is a "trust based system"? As in "trust me, my data, my premise and conclusions are correct"? Wow. Why bother having review at all then? To check for spelling errors? The fact that these papers were not flagged immediately is very concerning. They were obviously satirical if you read them. Even the basic premise of them was ridiculous. If you can't tell bad actors from good, and publish everything, what is the point? How much of academic research is fake, or false, or untrue? Everyone always treats academic research papers as authoritative. This exposes that fraud.
Milo Yiannopolulos speech shouted down by liberals at Berkley.
Condoleezza Rice cancels speech at Rutgers.
Ann Coulter cancels speech at Berkley due to protests.
So, since there is no issue of speech being limited in schools, I have to assume the above cases are ones of censorship you approve of.
So are you:
Homophobic?
A Racist?
Or Misogynist?
I will have to assume all three since you don't seem to have an issue with a gay man, a black woman, or a white woman being prevented from speaking at a college. To the point that you make the claim it doesn't even happen.
You liberals are the most disgusting people in existence, and you got caught lying again.
I read carefully all replies so far.
None of the critics has any idea whatsoever what was done, why, how, and most importantly, why.
In order to think about anything you need data.
So why don't you start with listening to those two
https://youtu.be/FG6HbWw2RF4
https://youtu.be/AZZNvT1vaJg
The second is an interview with the very people who did it. Just hear how the reviewers were encouraging them to make the papers even more radical (untruthful). And how the most ridiculous paper actually won an award.
All of you here who criticize those brave and insightful people are useful idiots with tiny balls and even tinier brains.
You are also nasty and dangerous.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
is it really in this professor's scope of work to troll them?
The simple fact that we are talking about it, suggests that yes it is in the scope of their work. Analyzing and criticizing the research published on a topic is a long standing method in academia. Many papers include this in their intros and entire papers are on this topic alone. Doing their research through deception is the only way to honestly study the filters of peer review. Pointing out flaws in the peer review process is the only way to make it better. So yes, this is really in the scope of a professor's work.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
First it was the religious right. Now it's the progressive leftists. They babble on about race and sex, wanting to make policy based on it, all in the name of preventing just such systemic discrimination. It was also leftists who shut down the speech of those they disagree with. These proceedings are a perfect example of this. It's a perfect imitation of a soviet style kangaroo court.
"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.
You're making a giant leap that doesn't seem supported by what's reported so far. This doesn't seem to be about analyzing and criticizing in any meaningful way. That seems to be the crux of the problem.
This wasn't pointing out flaws in the peer review process, since a large percentage of the journals weren't even peer reviewed! One was a total sham of a "pay $650 and we'll publish whatever!"
If what you are describing was what happened here, I don't think there'd be a story. The story is what you're describing didn't happen, and the university basically said, "WTF dude?"
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes, there definitely some good social science out there. Unfortunately it gets lost in a sea of crap. That's the value of these hoax papers; they show just how easy it is to get nonsense published as long as you're hitting all the right jargon. Hopefully it will embarrass some of the legitimate academics in the field enough to bring in some actual standards and start purging the SJWs from their ranks.