Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Sure, the criticism this hoax is trying to demonstrate may be legitimate, but the methodology is one designed to highlight the cleverness of its executors and diminish the credibility of a discipline, rather than point out constructive areas for improvement. Basically, it is a methodology that does not treat its targets as intellectual equals and is quite indecorous—you get the sense that a major point of this operation is to discredit the field and make its practitioners feel some kind of public humiliation or shame. A childish tactic.

In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices. Sokal's big hoax did a good lot for Sokal (whom everyone is now familiar with—but it's funny: is the public acquainted with Sokal because of the contributions he made to his field? Arguably, no. Who's supposed to be the sham academic again?) and caused a lot of drama—but was it an effective means of enacting the sort of change in academic practice it claimed to be striving for? Well, we simply need to ask ourselves why there's even a need for such a thing as "Sokal squared" to answer that question.

This is a conniving way to go about improving academic practice—doesn't the very practice sort of eschew the principles of open collaboration, transparency, collective growth, and honest dissemination of thought/knowledge academia should, in the ideal world, foster?

This is largely just an attempt to incite drama and gain notoriety on the part of the authors, and it further drives wedges between already highly disparate, specialized fields that may as well talk past each other.

Of course there are things to criticize about grievance studies, just as there were things to criticize about the lingo and methods popular in the humanities when Sokal devised his original hoax—but stooping to underhanded publicity stunts instead of open intellectual conversation likely won't solve the problem. Please don't give in to this sort of nonsense and stroke the pleading egos of the 'academics' that pull these sorts of stunts. Boghossian is not a hero.

> In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices

So what is? Specifically, what is, given that the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not?

I think a mechanism that, first of all, promotes some kind of interaction between fields and helps counterbalance the hyper-specialization our academies currently promote.

It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not". More likely is that people from hyper-specialized fields use different criterion for the validity and veridicality of statements and that their incredibly hermetic jargon and deep reliance on interlocking field-specific concepts prevents them from communicating with other academics from other disciplines in meaningful ways—thus resulting in a great sense of misunderstanding and misjudgment between members of the fields. In some sense, our pursuits are so hyper-specialized at this point that they are incommensurable—there's an incredible lack of 'generalists' able to act as liaisons and to produce the appropriate meta-criticisms for each field of study.

That, I think, is a much more reasonable assumption than one that assumes a cohort of people who "don't have interest in the truth" have somehow slipped their way into academia and are using it as nothing more than a vehicle for their political motives—that's a rather conspiratorial hypothesis and would need much more evidence to support it than the publication of a couple of papers in a couple of journals.

If we were to solve the hyper-specialization problem to a degree, I think it would promote greater academic health and collaboration overall.

> It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not".

Er, they are actually quite open about this.

For example:

Founded in 1974, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University has put research into action by inspiring innovative solutions that advance gender equality.

The goal/purpose is "advancing gender equality", not "truth finding".

Most of these fields don't just not believe in truth as a concept, they actually actively oppose and dismiss the search for truth or requirements for evidence as being expressions of and mechanisms for maintaining illegitimate power hierarchies.

Now hyper-specialisation is also a problem, but it's not this problem.

but stooping to underhanded publicity stunts instead of open intellectual conversation

Attempts to have an open intellectual conversation, specially in these fields, gets you deplatformed after SJW attacks, or draw people screeching when you attempt to debate at the Uni, to the point debates have to be cancelled by limp wristed admins.

The only way left if to use sarcasm , or these kind of maneuvers. What's the point of exposing the insane and unethical academia establishment if you have to tell them, in advance, they're being exposed?

I'll grant that for sure. There are indeed plenty of politically motivated scholars (importantly, usually students! not professors!) that fail to meet challenges and intellectual/social hurdles gracefully, but much of the disdain for SJWs is predicated on a presumed moral high-ground—"we're better than them because we care about truth, and facts while they don't" (just as the so-called "SJW" types often feel their political motives are morally superior to those who are opposed to them).

But if the opposition to the so-called "SJWs" has resorted to hoaxes and other fraudulent tactics, aren't they just as bad as the people they're fighting? Haven't they regressed to a similar tactic of "deplatforming" and effectively similarly nullifying the chance of an open debate?

Both "sides" (and there really shouldn't be 'sides' in this—as in most cases the binary division line in this conflict is a gross oversimplification of the issues at stake) are guilty of poor decorum in the academic arena. Pots and kettles, really.

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