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Not long ago I did a post on fake science and its effect on society in general and the scientific method in particular. A significant portion of that piece was devoted to publishing in scientific journals- "publish or perish"- and how even this important part of scientific discovery has been subverted. I want to use this post as a follow-up to show how this phenomenon has come to dominate the social sciences (if such a thing actually exists). The method used in academic publishing is something with which I'm familiar and it seems to have degenerated from it's once rigorous peer review into what can only be described as a joke. In 1993, as a sophomore in college, I wrote a paper on NAFTA- what my research showed the effects would be- and I presented it at three academic conferences, the last being the American Political Science Assn. annual conference in Washington DC where it was critiqued by a panel of experts... to make a long story short, I got it published. Now all you need is the proper political cant and your paper is rubber stamped. For example, anything to do with minority oppression, gender discrimination, etc. is a sure bet to get published. This I believe to be the natural consequence of attempting to apply the scientific method to societies and politics.
Auguste Compte, creator of Logical Positivism and father of the social sciences believed that the scientific method could be applied to society... in fact he dreamed of a world where the social sciences had eclipsed the hard sciences in importance- an impossibility! In a rigorous application of the scientific method, if your theory is correct you get the same result every time. Given that people are all different, whether individually or in groups the result will never be consistent. Like any good con artists, when they didn't get the preferred result, "social scientists" began to make things up... the more obtuse the better. To use another example from personal experience- at an academic conference where I was presenting the paper that would become the basis of The Asshole Quotient, the woman who presented before me had written a paper applying Marxist theory to Botany. Need I say more???
In perusing the Daily Signal I came across an article by journalist John Stossel, someone whose work I've always enjoyed... it was entitled How 3 People Showed the Absurdity of Some Academic Research Journals, something that seemed right up my alley. The first two short paragraphs had me:
If you are an American college professor, the way you get a raise or tenure is by getting papers published in “academic journals.”
The stupidity of these journals says a lot about what’s taught at colleges today.
Remember, a lot of students are accumulating vast amounts of debt to listen to this clap-trap... not to mention hoping to get something marketable out of it for when they're finished with their "education." [I use the word education in its loosest possible connotation] To show how intellectually and morally bankrupt the university system has become...
Recently, three people sent in intentionally ridiculous “research” to prominent journals of women studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, obesity studies, and queer studies.
“The scholarship in these disciplines is utterly corrupted,” says Dr. Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. “They have placed an agenda before the truth.”
To show that, hoaxer and mathematician James Lindsay says, “We rewrote a section of ‘Mein Kampf’ as intersectional feminism” and got it published in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.
The overriding question that occurs to me is- why are these things even disciplines? Why do they need to be studied? Ok that was two questions, but you get my point. The only thing I can think of is that these people know they're doing something unacceptable and are trying to create justifications for it.
For another paper, they claimed to have “closely” examined genitals of 10,000 dogs in dog parks to learn about “rape culture and queer performativity.”
Boghossian had assumed, “There’s no way they’re gonna believe that we did this!”
But the journal Gender, Place & Culture did, calling the paper “excellent scholarship.”
The three behind the hoax decided to come clean and explain why they did it...
“We think studying topics like gender, race, and sexuality is worthwhile and getting it right is extremely important,” says Lindsay.
But researchers of these topics have gotten lazy and political, they say. “A culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed—like those that make whiteness and masculinity problematic,” Lindsay says.
Reach politically “correct” conclusions and you can get most anything published.
“Kind of a last straw happened,” says Lindsay. “There was this paper well-funded by the National Science Foundation that studied ‘feminist glaciology.’ It said glacier science is sexist.”
One paper suggested the solution to sexism in glacier science is “feminist paintings of glaciers and feminist art projects,” says Lindsay. They praised art projects like one where they “hooked up a phone line to a glacier so you could call the glacier on the phone and listen to it.”
You can try to spin it any way you want, but to me bullshit is bullshit. This is the low that academia has sunk to... gone is any pretense of the scientific method and academic rigor. It's been replaced by political correctness and doing incredible damage to students who will in all likelihood never be able to pay off the mountain of debt accumulated while listening to this garbage. This is the new reality... this is the new philosophy. While I was writing this I was reminded of this scene from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I...
How are we as a society supposed to use information that is predicated upon politically engendered rubbish... This is why we fight the Information War!
