Comment by feurio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feurio | Hacker News Reader

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OK. So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!

This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.

I think that it's common knowledge that there is a bit of a crisis with peer review and reproducibility in science in general, and humanities/social science in particular. If sure that the follow-up studies which were properly conducted and controlled will confirm your suspicions. There are properly conducted follow-up studies, right? Right?

I shouldn't be churlish though; let's put prank papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs, on the board for now. Lord know's it the only thing we have so far.

If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob which stormed the seat of goverment in an insurrection and called for the hanging of the vice-president, then maybe have a rethink.

It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.

The whole thing just smacks of McCarthayism, or the satanic child-abuse hysteria of the 80s.

No doubt that there is a kook somewhere demanding paid hibernation leave for Furries, or some such nonsense, but if you claim that a weird outlier is actually representative of reality will have you finding reds under the bed everwhere and grotesque caricatures of "woke" in every wallpaper pattern you see. It is hysteria.

You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"?

So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!

> So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!

This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.

You asked for a concrete example where "woke" causes some damage, I provided one and asked "is this example sufficient for you?" You responded with a novel about unrelated things without answering my question. Let me ask again: is this example sufficient for you? Do you accept that this is an example that demonstrates that - in addition to whatever positive things woke causes in society - woke also causes some negative things in society?

> Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.

I agree a control group submitting nonsense papers of right-wing propaganda would have been necessary to prove that these woke-activism nonsense papers were published because of political activism (as opposed to not reading papers). That said, I strongly suspect that the papers were read, because these are not predatory journals that publish anything you submit. Furthermore, when you look at the papers which ARE being published, it's obvious that they tow the party line with regards to political messaging.

> papers about, eg., <checks notes> butt-plugs ... If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob ...

This is another bit of misdirection from you. You're pretending as if I'm bothered by the existence of prank papers. No, as you perfectly well know, the prank papers are not what "keeps me up at night", it's the underlying phenomena the prank papers exposed: that certain fields of science have been entirely subverted by woke political activists. The problem is - as you well know - that these fields are no longer producing science, they are producing political propaganda camouflaged as science. This is what the Grievance studies affairs demonstrated.

Also note that you are doing a whataboutism defense here as well, when you start talking about entirely unrelated things like Trump and January 6th. You're not scoring any points here.

> It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.

It's not hard to find these examples. If you actually were interested, you could find these examples yourselves in a few minutes of Googling. But you're merely pretending to be interested. Here's one case where I provided an example of a fields of science being subverted for woke political activism, and you dismiss it as "pretty weak sauce". Why would I go out of my way to provide more examples for you? You're just going to dismiss every other example just like this. You're not interested in any facts that are counter to your world view. You're merely pretending to be interested.

> You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"? So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!

I'm not interested in attemps to redefine a political movement in a dictionary sense. A movement can have a perfectly nice-sounding dictionary definition while at the same time it can cause harm in society. That doesn't imply any kind of logical contradiction.

> This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Oh, it's realy not - you presented an experiment (Grievance studies affair) as an example of "how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda".

But what you cite is a terrible, deeply flawed experiment which proves no such thing.

So in answer to your question if it wasn't obvious; no, it's not sufficient.

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