eugyppius

This means that a lot of basic technical and linguistic skills are beyond the abilities of most professors. It is routine to encounter published articles in major journals that are premised on simple linguistic misunderstandings.https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1383861783236988938?s=20 …

In a world where very few people know anything, it's hard to refute mistaken ideas, because literally *nobody knows what's going on*. I once peer reviewed an article for one of the biggest English-language journals, that was just flatly, objectively mistaken.

Its author could obviously hardly read the source he was analysing. This isn't ancient Sumerian, OK? There are high-schoolers who can read this language.

It took a lot of effort, but I finally got the editors to understand it was crap, and they binned it. The piece then appeared one year later in another top journal, under a slightly different name, because the author had in the meantime switched genders.

There's this very old, anonymous text, which many now agree was written by a certain Specific Dude. Why do they agree? Because one of the main guys writing on this stuff misunderstood a (German) footnote, which was actually saying almost the opposite.

He then repeated this in a bunch of publications, and so it became true What is more bizarre, the author of the misunderstood footnote appears fine with this and now also attributes this work to Specific Dude and cites the guy who misunderstood him in support of the attribution

All you need to make anything 'true' is 2 or 3 mutually supporting idiots, & an overwhelmingly uninteresting argument that doesn't challenge any other hair-brained theories.

One of my former American colleagues was on the verge of becoming a celebrity academic when I left the US. The kind of guy who gets interviewed on TV & whose books are reviewed in places like the Times Literary Supplement.