... researcher and I see a lot of highly political, not-well-argued, empirically under-supported work in a LOT of fields (again, medicine - including 'top' institutions like the CDC - and psychology, are the fields I know best, within which I have sub-areas of expertise) ...
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... so, the fact that these Sokal-style hoaxes tend to be more or less easy to pull off ON 'critical studies' type journals by smart people from totally unrelated fields, whereas, I'm not aware of cases (and suspect it would be harder) to pull off a hoax in the opposite direction
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... may be evidence of asymmetry in something like 'average' epistemological rigor. But there seems a relatively narrow ideological motivation to the authors' hoax in picking out critical studies for condemnation (without charitably engaging w/ what is good in its approaches)
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... all of that said, I reiterate, I *do* see a lot of sloppy theorizing that is highly ideologically motivated and not interested in generating falsifiable theories in the types of journals the hoax authors thought to target, and I *do* agree that the cause of social justice ...
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... is threatened and undermined when orthodoxies form and you aren't allowed to question them (as I argue here: https://quillette.com/2016/07/02/in-praise-of-ambivalence-young-feminism-gender-identity-and-free-speech/ …); the hoax authors are right that to fight true injustice you need the BEST ideas, theories, data, etc., and that requires getting outside ...
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... your bubble where you just talk to other social justice researchers: if the goal is to help the marginalized and oppressed etc., they will NOT be helped in the long run by dogmas protected by blasphemy laws saying you can't critique them. But I think the hoax authors, too,
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... could do a better job of approaching those fields/journals in a more charitable way trying to see what is right/good/valuable/productive about them, in the spirit of improving them AND learning from them, rather than the "burn it down" kind of "gotcha" approach they took ...
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... Such bomb-throwing tactics to critiquing other fields may, in the long run, turn out to work/be valuable in causing improvement in the general level of rigor/quality (like those 'methodological terrorists' in psychology!); but might also create animus & further divisions ...
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... I guess we will see!
@NAChristakis predicts that all will come of this is greater effort on part of journals to verify author identities, rather than any kind of soul-searching and improvement. I would like to just see some soul-searching and expanded perspective taking & ...Show this thread -
... charitable/productive engagement happening all around; even when we really disagree w/ someone, there is often something valuable/right in their approach we can learn from (as Michael Hauskeller & I argue here https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/18491/Binocularity%20in%20Bioethics.pdf?sequence=1 … reviewing Erik Parens on "binocularity").
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... Just some initial thoughts & fodder for conversation here ... I am genuinely curious what folks think!
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End of conversation
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I bet they could, if they fabricated data as the hoax authors did. Also, the hoax authors’ home fields aren’t *that* far from the journals they published in - so (like nearly everything in their piece) it is an exaggeration to say that they learned it from scratch in a year.
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