Hacker News Reader

Comment by RenThraysk | Hacker News Reader

It did prove that the only people capable of pointing out there were problems with the hoax papers are people generally critical of the social sciences. That alone demonstrates a problem.

That's why the experiment ended early.

PZ Meyers is a doxing buffoon.

View on HN

How is that true when a good proportion of their papers were rejected, and they kept trying in other journals until they were accepted? What about the fact that several reviewers wrote critical responses and suggestions for improvement? Why can't what you said also be said about hoaxes in the "hard sciences" like this[0]? HN user voidhorse has a good comment about their tactics[1] (quote):

> 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.

[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18899529

All papers get critical responses and suggestions for improvement. That proves nothing other than the submitted papers were considered to have some merit, and still possible inclusion in the various issues.

The problem is people (a journalist and RealPeerReview on twitter initially) identified quite a few of the hoax papers. And that does suggest there is a bubble within the field that has departed from usefulness and reality.

There is a problem within social sciences. Whatever is happening in hard science journals doesn't change that fact.

My claim was never that social science is immune to the replication crisis or that it could be more accepting of outside criticism; my claim was that singling out "grievance studies" (what the authors take to be sub-branches of critical theory) using poor research methods to make a name for oneself, childish tactics, not getting IRB approval isn't the right way to go about solving such a problem, and that using this as an example doesn't stand up to the large number of hoaxes/stings in hard sciences (see the first couple of links in my original comment). What suggests that the way to go about addressing this bubble (which can and does exist to at least some degree) is to publish more junk papers?

For a critical review of the papers' content, there's reason to believe that the hoax articles' premises may not be totally without merit[0].

"When Boghossian et al. describe their papers to us, the public, they do not explain what their bad arguments are, they only describe the “absurd” conclusions of the papers. So if the hoax is all about peer reviewers accepting bad arguments, then Boghossian et al. are failing to present the proper evidence, and propagating confusion about their own hoax."

[0] https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squa...

I think you are arguing from bad faith. Social Sciences has problems and it seems unwilling to do better.

You had to be shamed publicly and widely. People have a right to know social sciences are this broken.

Perhaps, then, the authors should have published a critical review of existing social science literature and discussed flaws in methodology. That would be academically and ethically honest, and probably prompt a discussion and response from inside the field itself. Instead, they ran with their article to online news sites. Why would they do that first rather than trying to engage the academia themselves? Why did the researchers need to be shamed? See the quote I provided in my original comment by one of the reviewers who was fooled. She was personally embarrassed and thought the paper had come from a new entrant in the field, so she was charitable. Why is it acceptable that making people feel that way is the first course of action? It is not at all in the scientific spirit.

People have a right to know, of course - but so do researchers. Researchers in these fields have a right to know exactly what Boghossian and friends thought was wrong with their methodologies and research topics. Boghossian decided that was beneath him.

Because the Medknow journals are notorious scam journals that will publish absolutely anything at all, without even a semblance of peer review?

There's a difference between non-prestige journal and vanity press.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com