By Professor Doom
Advanced
mathematics is not for the uninitiated. Even with years of training, it’s easy
enough to go to a research seminar and have at best merely a basic idea of what
the latest findings are about. Experts in the field usually understand
completely of course, but even if what’s being said seems incomprehensible to
the layman there’s no way you can “fake it” well enough to fool an expert. In
short: while both an expert mathematician and a lunatic can spew what looks
like mathematical gibberish, only the former can do it in a way that’s still comprehensible
to mathematicians. You just can’t fake it well enough to fool an expert.
I’ve looked at
research in other fields, with the belief that I’d only understand only the
basics. Thus, I was surprised to find “advanced topics” in Education and
Administration are incredibly basic and accessible to anyone, even if other
fields (hi Physics!) definitely made me feel quite limited in my understanding
of advanced topics.
I know full well
if I tried to imitate writing and research in advanced physics, an expert would
casually shred my gibberish. And I’ve
demonstrate that with no effort I can emulate “advanced” Education and
Administration writing.
Gender studies
and gender related studies are big on campus anymore. Casual inspection on my
part led me to believe it was meaningless at best, and ideological
indoctrination at worst. I’m hardly the only scholar to make such conjectures,
but scholars know that “conjecture” is just a fancy way to say “guess.” A
couple of scholars decided to prove this stuff is just plain ol’ crap:
-- Sokal1 refers to a previous hoax played on these guys,
years ago.
The two “researchers” made a point of
generating a 3,000 word paper packed with jargon and devoid of any meaning. A
sample paragraph will give the gist of it:
Destructive,
unsustainable hegemonically male approaches to pressing environmental policy
and action are the predictable results of a raping of nature by a
male-dominated mindset. This mindset is best captured by recognizing the role
of [sic] the conceptual penis holds over masculine psychology. When it is
applied to our natural environment, especially virgin environments that can be
cheaply despoiled for their material resources and left dilapidated and
diminished when our patriarchal approaches to economic gain have stolen their
inherent worth, the extrapolation of the rape culture inherent in the
conceptual penis becomes clear….
The whole paper of
fake research is much like the above, with the key conclusion:
The conceptual penis
presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity
within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised
communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source
of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the
universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much
of climate change.
The entire above paragraph is actually just one sentence, but the reader
could be forgiven for not reading it through. Allow me to edit it down to at
least a minimal level of comprehensibility (keeping in mind the authors were
deliberately trying not to be understood):
The conceptual
penis…is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
The paper is pure
gibberish, little different than simply stringing along a bunch of mathematical
symbols and believing it to mean something. The researchers even used a
well-known (in the right circles) piece of software to generate the “research.”
Yes, this field is so ridiculous (despite the regularly growing departments on
campus) that somebody actually wrote a research paper generator for it:
Some references cite
the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an
algorithm…that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page
is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmodern Generator liberally;
Keep that in
mind: not only did they use a gibberish generator for the paper, they used it
as a reference, not that anyone noticed—the experts in this field do not even
know when they are being mocked! Other references in the paper were likewise
questionable (to be generous):
Not only is the text ridiculous, so are the references. Most
of our references are quotations from papers and figures in the field that
barely make sense in the context of the text. Others were obtained by searching
keywords and grabbing papers that sounded plausibly connected to words we
cited. We read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by intention, as part of
the hoax.
Of course, the
researchers wrote it all under pseudonyms. They then sent it out to peer
reviewed journals for publication. I really want to emphasize this: peer review
is considered the gold standard of publication, even though time and again it’s
been revealed as flawed at best and highly corrupt at worst. Mostly the
corruption is by coordinating
with the reviewers but in this case the researchers decided to have
legitimate experts in the field legitimately review the paper. Why did they
even hope that their hoax would possibly work?
That is, we assumed we could publish outright nonsense
provided it looked the part and portrayed a moralizing attitude that comported
with the editors’ moral convictions. Like any impostor, ours had to dress the
part, though we made our disguise as ridiculous and caricatured as possible...
Identity politics
and political correctness is destroying our campuses (and some would say, the
country). The researchers are quite justified in wondering if these things are
also destroying what we now inaccurately call “science.”
So, they wrote a
gibberish paper with bogus references. That’s the easy part. Next, they sent
their paper to journals, and did receive rejections—none of the rejections
noted that the paper was pure hokum. But one journal suggested another which
might be amenable:
We
feel that your manuscript would be well-suited to our Cogent
Series, a
multidisciplinary, open journal platform for the rapid dissemination of
peer-reviewed research across all disciplines.
Cogent sent it to
reviewers:
We
took them up on the transfer, and Cogent
Social Sciences eventually accepted “The Conceptual Penis
as a Social Construct.” The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us
very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our
thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of
hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we
take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and
nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper,
“outstanding” in
every applicable category.
So, a paper that
is unarguably complete gibberish can pass the peer review process in this
field. Granted the reviewers did have a few issues even with a paper they
loved:
They
didn’t accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social
Sciences’
Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.”
We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more
nonsense about “manspreading” (which we alleged to be a cause of climate
change) and “dick-measuring contests.”
Now,
the gentle reader might well believe that the journal is just a sham. Not true!
Journals have their own accreditation system:
First, Cogent
Social Sciences operates with the legitimizing imprimatur of Taylor and
Francis, with which it is clearly closely partnered. Second, it’s held out as a
high-quality open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals
(DOAJ), which is intended to be a reliable list of such journals. In fact, it
carries several more affiliations with similar credentialing organizations...
Much as higher education has serious,
grave problems with a bogus accreditation system, so too do journals,
apparently. The researchers’ conclusion regarding the field of gender studies
is valid:
”…there are significant reasons to believe that much of the problem lies
within the very concept of any journal being a “rigorous academic journal in
gender studies.”
I
have two conclusions based on this wildly successful hoax:
1)
I often have global warming believers tell me of the
hundreds of peer reviewed studies supporting the notion that Earth will boil
over any minute now because of humanity’s technology. I have my doubts, and
knowing that a complete hoax article supporting such ideas can easily be peer
reviewed and published only increases my doubts further. This paper comes as
close as possible to literally saying man is responsible for global warming…and
is rubbish.
2)
When I was at a community college, I often encountered
faculty and administrators who, after even a brief conversation, I simply could
not fathom how they made it through a graduate level program. I gave them the
benefit of the doubt, but after longer conversations, the question kept reverberating
in my mind: how? They got their degrees and positions through writing papers
much like this hoax paper, and it’s clear we have a whole industry of hoax
“science” publishing, doing much to explain the surplus of advanced degrees in
these strange fields.
The two authors
set out to create a hoax paper, and succeeded brilliantly. Yes, it was done
before nearly 20 years ago by Sokal, but that only serves to demonstrate
nothing has changed. At this point, as I’ve told many friends, when it comes to
“the latest scientific research,” you may as well flip a coin when it comes to
deciding whether it’s true or not.
1) In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at NYU, published the bogus paper,
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity,” in the preeminent cultural studies journal Social Text which is in turn published by Duke
University Press. The publication of this nonsense paper, in a prestigious
journal with a strong postmodernist orientation, delivered a devastating blow
to postmodernism’s intellectual legitimacy.