Academic Drivel Report: Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax
prospect.org
prospect.org
For a good laugh, take a look at the copy freely available here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORM...
I wrote a serious analysis of that hoax (including motivation) and published it in a proper journal. Unfortenately, it is behind a paywall, but that is what sci-hub.io is for: http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0...
As much as we like to talk about rewarding academics for actually making breakthroughs that have positive effects in the lives of most others, that is all just talk. Want we really want is to collect academics like they are elusive Pokemon cards ... the more obscure their abilities, the better, as long as they can be plausibly connected to whatever cause, regime, or attitude is favored in the in-group where that academic's works wield influence.
My own academia experiences were in machine learning and image processing, and even there it was a heavy competition for demo ware. All ideas were basically vetted for their plausibility of leading to a TED talk or a conference keynote demo. If you proposed something or showed passion for something, but it wasn't clear that you could talk it about it while wearing a black turtleneck, then it got rejected pretty quickly. Little if any time was ever given to whether the fundamental questions were good ones or whether their answers constituted value-adding directions for humanity to move in. And don't even get me started on teaching. I once got yelled at by an adviser because I spent the time to write up my recitation notes for my probability students in TeX, instead of just scanning my unreadable hand-written notes. Good luck convincing them that investing time into how to teach something is worthwhile.
The process of moving past qualifying exams did include some objective hurdles of study (sort of quality control for the university's or department's brand) but it largely consisted of convincing certain key status figures that you were On Their Team and would be a good spokesperson for the sorts of positions and ideas they most wanted to affiliate with.
It will surely vary by discipline, geography, political climate, etc. But I think this is the dominant reason why we have academics at all. I do not think that the well-worn stories about funding fundamental research for society's benefit are even remotely true.
Your response is rational, however, in its critique of many fields and forums. I'd like you not, however, to denigrate the incredible sacrifices being made by researchers in all fields of study. Of course, the snake-oil rules the day at the moment, but those are just the most vocal and observable of workers, and they cast the rest in an unfortunate and undeserved light. The startup world, in many ways, shares a large responsibility for this perniciousness, as institutions all vie with press releases for investment and donation money more now than ever before with the goal of reaping short-term profits in the marketplace.
The point is not what is the maximum media exposure of a given field. The point is that in any field, there is a small elite class who mostly controls (as cultural gatekeepers) the ability for lower-status and aspiring researchers to advance, much like party politics. They form networks of editorial boards, committees for awarding tenure, and have nebulous connections through upper management of academia, corporate boards, endowments, politics, and celebrities. Yes it can vary by field, but you see the same pattern either at a big scale or a smaller scale.
I certainly believe many researchers enter the research profession with pure motives. But it is the ones who quickly learn to sublimate their desire for intellectually rigorous research and social betterment in favor of political skills who naturally rise to the gatekeeper positions.
Sadly, the pure and highly impressive research labor of a lot of these lower-status academics is just pure waste. I don't mean to denigrate the academics for this -- their motives are pure; they are just operating in a rigged system where the only means to significant success is to "wise up" and realize that the best "product" you can provide is to sort of auction off the ability to affiliate with you by sublimating yourself to someone's coalition in exchange for resources and notoriety provided by that coalition.
Nevermind just academia. Sadly, what you've just described neatly sums up modern work life in most organizations (companies, non-profits, open source, etc.) that I've been a part of.
Startups may sometimes be an exception to this rule, but they often come with their own set of problems (frat house atmosphere, ageism, zero diversity, expectations of 80+ hour weeks, etc.).
Your observations of academic politics mirror my own, but I don't think your conclusion follows. In general, academics don't have nearly enough ROI as political sockpuppets, documentary hosts, or sources of cocktail-party quips to justify the level of funding they receive. If those were the only outputs of the scientific process that society valued, society would have switched to more efficient sources of them long ago. Instead, there is a consistent perception among those who finance science (taxpayers and, to a much lesser extent, wealthy patrons) that it fills a valuable niche of human progress that isn't served by other institutions.
And they're right. Yes, society doesn't know how to align scientific incentives with actual scientific value, which means that large amounts of funding are wasted and that actual progress is largely incidental to the games that researchers play on a day-to-day basis. Is that any different from any other part of the economy? Incidental progress is still progress, and the scientific game is better at producing its variety of incidental progress than any other game in town, so the decision to fund it would still be rational even if those outside of academia knew how thoroughly rotten it frequently gets. Not that they would be surprised -- academia does not have a monopoly on bullshit and politics, far from it. That's just how the world works, and most people are not foreign to the notion of sticking with something even if the absolute efficiency is dreadful.
You're reading intent into the incentive landscape that society presents to science, arguing that it rewards X, Y, and Z so therefore X, Y, and Z must be what it really wants. I think ineptitude is a much likelier explanation. Society rewards X, Y, and Z even though it really wants A, B, and X. Promoting human progress isn't a "well-worn story," it's the reason why we bother at all.
EDIT: Also, it's worth keeping in mind that Machine Learning is currently a hot field and therefore attracts opportunists and scumbags in droves. They exist elsewhere too, but they're going to be over-represented in your corner of academia.
In the hard sciences there are a lot of esoteric sub-disciplines that do rigorous work that seems to be of little consequence. I would suggest that one of the costs of maintaining a technological society is maintaining practitioners in many of these sub-disciplines just to keep the thread of knowledge alive.
If it was all left to the private sector, such researchers would be out of a job as soon as they were not longer necessary to the tasks at hand.
So many times in my own research have I needed a particular bit of information, and I search the literature and I find that someone did collect the data 30 years ago, presented in a paper with 5 citations. It would not be tractable for me to collect that data myself.
The problems with current management of scientific productivity is that the management ideas employed are good for running a production line cranking out a B-24 Liberator per hour, which is not really the same thing.
I think people systematically under-estimate the value of all those small seemingly-inconsequential tweaks, variations, and improvements. We all prefer simpler narratives that "person X invented Y for the very first time in year Z and that was good."
Many times when you break down a world-changing invention or innovation, it's actually an older idea that is finally possible due to thousands of incremental improvements being turned to the combined use.
"Or is there something wrong with universities in general?
"On the other hand one could just as well ask: why is it we assume that creative and relevant ideas should be coming out of universities in the first place? The modern university system has existed only a few hundred years and during most of that time, universities were not places that much fostered innovation or the questioning of received knowledge. They were largely places for compiling and redacting received knowledge and teaching students to respect authority. The old-fashioned stereotype of the professor as a greybeard pedant fussing over some obscure interpretation of a Latin epode, unaware of or disdainful of the world around him, was not really that far from the truth. For the most part, universities were dominated by figures who were scholars but in no sense intellectuals.
"[...] From this perspective, what we saw in the ’60s was something rather unusual: a brief moment when the model changed."
(Though regarding the sciences, Graeber mentions a combination of 1970's neoliberalism plus managerialism & bureaucratization of universities.)
It would be interesting to know what the organizers themselves thought of the abstract, because the editors' response to the Sokal article was quite amazing [1, 2].
[1] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf
First, for Dr. Sokal, I am a bit...bemused or surprised I guess I would say...at what seems like a quite childish simplification and overall process. This was not a peer review journal, as is implied in most coverage of the incident. Further, I strongly suspect (as I have seen from my former colleagues when I discuss my new field with them) Sokal showed an enormous amount of hubris (as Robbins and Ross note "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist...On the other hand, we recognize that professional scientists like Sokal do feel that their beliefs and their intellectual integrity are threatened by the diverse work done in the field of science studies"). To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous. It is a bit as if Sokal found himself laughing at the naked emperor, unaware that it was a mirror.
Second, I have always wondered what about what this incident, and its references, says about other disciplines understanding and approach to social sciences and fields like philosophy and psychology. We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed? Engineering colleagues I have look at the fact that things are rethought, changed, dismissed, in conflict, can't be confirmed, etc. is seen as a flaw whereas I see it a reality. Much of the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain. True social experiments are difficult or legally/ethically untennable. When they are conducted, they are often conducted in ways that try to minimize outside variables...but reality isn't that simple. Human beings don't share a universal 'ground state' from which decisions or behaviors emminate.
See the links here:
This is one of the most common academic tactics: to claim that those who are outside the field are ignorant of it and therefore cannot pass judgment. As someone who claims to be a scientist, you should know that this is an appeal to authority and that a scientist would welcome criticism from anyone regardless of training or background provided their argument was well-argued and supported by evidence.
Edit to add: Sokal's entire proposition (based in frankly an attempt to embarrass a field) exposes the lie underneath the straw man being built to support him.
My favorite:
>The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
1. Politicising what ought to be science: "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist".
2. Claiming that people outside the field are unable to understand that it's drivel: "To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous".
3. Pulling up the smoke screen that truth is subjective: "We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed?"
4. Using scientific terms in a nonsensical way: "the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain"
Postmodernism is a blight upon the human intellect that is not only destroying the social sciences but increasingly also politics.
> 4. Using scientific terms in a nonsensical way: "the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain"
I think that a big part of the problem is trying to make Quantum Mechanics more layman friendly with nice stories without math. Quantum mechanics is unintuitive but the math is very clear, so "anyone" can get the same correct result for an experiment. When you remove the math, you keep only the unintuitive part.
Claiming that people outside a field don't understand is a symptom of academics, and of most groups of humans, but it is not something in any way unique to postmodernism.
The claim that people outside of the field have a hard time understanding it has the advantage of being correct when applied to science and mathematics. This is why Sokal's book only analyses the use of physics and mathematics in postmodernist literature. Since he is physicist and mathematician the claim that he just doesn't understand what he is talking about in his criticism falls flat.
I know I'm being harsh, but ridicule and contempt is the only way to get rid of this before it further infects campuses and, after the current generation of students grows up, politics.
But hey lets go a little further because, its the internet why not there's no page charge here...
Heisenberg postulates a very specific mathematical formulation for a core quantum phenomenon. While there is no exact equivalence in social science research, phenomenon like WEIRD are reasonably close parallels in terms of the attempts to control for one phenomenon having impacts in unintitive or counterproductive ways that impact the search for truth.
Further, I, as someone who works in technical education (and who is also an engineer), find conceptions of truth such as the one you imply deeply problematic. I see them as a concern for the future of technical fields and technical personnel. Look at the impact of design and design thinking on many fields. The search there is less interested in truth and more in meaning. I suspect that your misconception is related to fundamental questions about the difference between truth and meaning. Post modernism doesn't try to make truth subjective, it fundamentally rejects truth (largely in favor of meaning). Post modernism began as a rejection of the modernist ideals that we could find with absolute certainty. This is not the realm of 'scientific' (i.e., convergent closed form solution). The questions, and therefore many of the answers, are not tractable in a mathematics sense and work is typically on finding a tractable form that serves as a reasonable approximation rather than a tractable, single, answer.
The difference is one of abductive vs. deductive/inductive schools of formal logic. This is where a lot of technical education fails students, as well as why ideas like constructionism and poststructuralism are important in seemingly clean/refined fields like engineering. An entrepreneur seeking to understand customer value (and their products proposition thereof) does not seek truth but meaning (what you might call a subjective truth or others a personal truth). Choosing to reject as 'nonsense' that thinking is really at the heart of our innovation problem more so than a lack of technical ability in the population. Market formation processes, Schumpeter's creative destruction, and Knightian uncertainty...find the truth in these explanations for real situations. They are abductive in nature and best treated through a non-positivist, non-modern point of view. But that is what we are talking about at the core, point of view.
Additionally, it is why diversity is so important...because that thing you call 'truth' is really a very personal rather than absolute thing except in the rare frames where it can be explicitly measured without affecting the result (and what does that sound like). Having the differing perspectives, points of view, and personal truths helps link customers and companies far better. [1]
[1] http://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf Crewe, E. (1997). The silent traditions of developing cooks. Discourses of development: anthropological perspectives, Oxford: Berg, 62-77.
The CS people are really polite, the only people who will ask them hard questions are the refugees from the physics department. Even though we are not speaking terms anymore sometimes I team up with the meanest physicist in the world to methodically disassemble such a speaker like two crabs on a starfish.
Your story shares a lot with the "imposter syndrome" in that you are failing to internalize the achievement because it is fake, you are a fake, etc.
L Ron Hubbard wrote some crazy books and managed to wreck the lives of millions. Donald Trump could be president. There are far worse scandals than anything here
>"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Edit: turns out this is by Judith Butler. I just read the piece it's from and it makes at least a little bit more sense in context. Basically she seems to be saying that older ("structuralist") Marxists saw their theories as timeless whereas more recent ones have focused on how state power and the influence of capital is dependent on historical specificities. It seems given the timing (1997) that this is pretty clearly a response to the fall of the USSR and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" stuff. But yes, it's an absolutely terrible sentence.
Despite your knowledge, you still have no clear idea of what it says.
In this case it seems intended to obscure the literal meaning of the words. If you knew what they were saying, you could just disagree.
For all you know, this could be an expanision of "Intimacies of Rock" http://csc.sagepub.com/content/16/1/75
Many publications of the social sciences are indistinguishable, by experts, from parody. This is legitimate cause for alarm.
Social structures tend to be pretty stable: the same people and forces stay in power for a while. How should we think about that stability?
One way is to imagine that society is like a building: a solid structure that preserves those people and forces in power. It's stable because it's rigid, and time doesn't affect it much.
But there's a second option. Think of a standing wave in a river, like the kind that whitewater kayakers like to surf on: it's not rigid at all, but it's still "stable," welling up continually at the same spot.
So is our society structured like a building, or like a standing wave?
If we go with the standing wave idea, that brings up a lot of new questions. We start wondering about dynamics, flow and motion. We also start wondering about the river bottom: is there a big rock under there causing the wave, or does it just happen to emerge from the otherwise random arrangement of smaller rocks?
I even allowed myself to ponder the possibility
that all of them were absentthe idea is to build a marketplace for peer review around an open publication, alike arxiv.org, that confers reputation and encourages multiple reviews
if a person hires a peer reviewer to review their work or someone else's, but you are skeptical of the review, you can hire a reviewer that you respect to do an independent review, one which could uphold or dispute the original review, or even illuminate some further clarification
such a community would address the issue of these 'hoax' and convoluted papers directly
While Sokal's hoax exposed inadequacies in Social Text (and similar journals), his book is far more damning. In it he exposes numerous French philosophers/'intellectuals' for the misuse and abuse of scientific and mathematic concepts and terms to obscure the meaning of their texts. The examples he presents range from plausibly the consequence of well-meaning ignorance, to inexcusable outright quackery. Some of his examples may seem like pedantic nitpicking of flowery poetic language, but much of it is truly damning.
Excerpt from the introduction:
> Some readers will no doubt think that we are taking these texts too seriously. That is true, in some sense. But since these texts are taken seriously by many people, we think that they deserve to be analyzed with the greatest rigor. In some cases we have quoted rather long passages, at the risk of boring the reader, in order to show that we have not misrepresented the meaning of the text by pulling sentences out of context.
He really should have added "...within my sociology department." He has a high opinion of himself if he thinks he can speak for academia in its entirety. Also, obviously this guy takes his academic reputation, job and profession not seriously at all:
"<<Most>> of their attacks are off-base, but there is a <<grain of truth>> in their claims. Academics who believe in the mission of higher education—teaching, research, and public service—need to defend academic freedom, but <<some>> of our colleagues have to clean up their acts, because it is difficult to defend the indefensible."