This was what a few academics hypothesized and set out to prove in what is now known as the Grievance Studies Affair [1]. Not only did they get multiple hoax papers published, they got recognized for “excellent scholarship” [2].
1. The hoax authors didn't submit gibberish or anything, like with Sokal - they submitted coherent papers that they considered absurd, but which they expected the journals to find reasonable. As such, they only thing they can even pretend to have proven is that they and the journals disagree about what's reasonable.
2. IIRC, every one of the initial hoax papers was flat-out rejected! If the authors had any backbone they could have stopped right there, and published a paper called "These grievance journals aren't as bad as we expected." :D But they didn't - they set out to iterate on each paper until a journal accepted it. And if your experimental methodology is "keep trying different things until X happens", you can hardly pretend to have proved something when X happens.
I mean, I agree with the premise the hoax authors were trying to prove. But their "experiment" was silly, and I think it's dishonest of them to pretend it proved something. Meh. Meh!
Peter Thiel in this recent talk argues by inference that this problem is likely deeper and more pervasive in hard sciences than in the humanities. https://youtu.be/lO0KH-TgvbM?t=22m20s
The time Thiel pines for is simply the time when the US government spent more money funding science, so that there was less competition to get funding. https://ssti.org/blog/changing-nature-us-basic-research-tren...
Actually if you dig up the authors' initial article about it, IIRC at the end there's a line like "so what does any of this actually prove? Well, we'll leave that for you to decide." If the authors can't say what their experiment proved, I think it's reasonable to conclude it didn't prove anything :D
Isn't this a pretty good example of how crude the hoax was? Of course some things that Hitler said won't be awful if you literally change the key words in the sentences. Imagine if I played this trick the other way round. I take something innocuous that a politician has said and replace random words or phrases with 'National Socialism' and 'Jews'. Suddenly what they're saying seems really controversial! And this shows...what?
I’ve never heard anyone describe Mein Kampf as coherent. The ramblings of an asshole clearly abusing stimulants would be closer to the usual.
>Of course some things that Hitler said won't be awful if you literally change the key words in the sentence
The idea that swapping around the group being discussed is all it would take to make it not awful is, well, novel if nothing else.
Edit: What the hoaxers actually say suggests that the passages were altered quite substantially: "The last two thirds of this paper is based upon a rewriting of roughly 3600 words of Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, though it diverges significantly from the original.". And you can read the paper here: https://newdiscourses.com/feminist-mein-kampf/#solidarity
From the link you provided - “Accepted by Affilia , August 21, 2018”
Don’t lie.
We're not in youtube comments here - assume good faith and be civil.
I did.
Twice in two comments foldr quoted from a source. Both of those quotes are literally right next to another sentence in the source which is exactly the opposite of what foldr asserted.
The Affila wikipedia page section titled “Grievance studies affair” is four sentences long. The sentence right before foldrs quote, which is the first in the section is this.
>In October 2018, it was revealed that the journal had accepted for publication a hoax article entitled "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism."
The New Discourses link does say the paper was rejected from a specific journal in the first footnote which is . The second footnote says the article was accepted. Both footnotes quoted here:
> Peer reviewed and rejected by Feminist Theory
> Accepted by Affilia , August 21, 2018
At this point I am no longer sorry for not assuming good faith from someone arguing that a reformulation of kompf could be “not that bad”.
> We're not in youtube comments here
Be civil.
>harping
I don’t accept the characterization of being thorough as harping, or that anyone would need to be unrelaxed for that. Is that ironic with me being told to assume good faith?
Not saying you're doing it but these rules of thumb don't scale. This is totally a valid tactic in internet fuckary.
Making shit up and attributing it to a source anybody could but nobody will verify is high-school Essaywriting 101.
The point of 'assume good faith' is that it's very easy to convince yourself that semi-anonymous people on the internet are liars. Most of the time they're not. It's very easy to inadvertently make factual errors. Published books that have been carefully reviewed are full of them. What chance do random morons ranting on the internet stand?
Sorry, but assuming good faith is like supporting free speech - if you only do it for arguments you agree with, you're not doing it at all. ;)
I am not sure this is obvious or even true. Can you provide one example? "Gas all the <X>"...what? capitalists? murderers? rapists? pedophiles? It doesn't even make sense for them, what else is there?
inb4, no you don't want to gas these people, you want to fix them if possible or jail them otherwise.
“We must fight against the influence of special interests in American politics.”
“We must fight against the influence of Jews in American politics.”
You may or may not agree with the first statement, but it’s hardly in the same category as the second (which is deplorable). It seems to me trivially easy to construct many more such examples.
The hoax paper replaced references to Jews with references to privilege. It’s hardly surprising that rants against an abstract concept are less offensive than anti-Semitic rants.
> “We must fight against the influence of Jews in American politics.”
To be fair, some people do use the former language to mean the special interests of "Jews." No all, but dog whistling does exist and dog whistling is explicitly about covert language. I don't think the special interest groups reference is a great example because it is a common phrase that is used to mean a lot of different things and isn't uncommon in various groups using covert language.
I do see what you mean though. There's something inherently gross about juxtaposing two sentences like that. I'm not doing it to suggest any equivalence between them. The point is exactly the opposite (and I would have thought an uncontroversial one): that switching out the major vocabulary items in a sentence can take it from being innocuous to offensive or vice versa.
Actually I think that's explicitly the issue and a main part of my point. In fact, dog whistling or other type of coded language typically depend on ambiguous language. It's literally because language works like an autoencoder. There's what you have in your head that's encoded into what you say and then decoded. The coded language comes through a learned/tuned decoding.
My point is that such phrasing isn't inherently innocuous. Vague language is always inherently dubious. The juxtaposition just makes it more obvious in this case, but it's always true. It may not always be dog whistling but in the least dubious case it lets people fill in whatever they want. That's why I'm saying it isn't a good example.
I'm not sure why you would be so caught up on "Jews" specifically when there are plenty of other targets that can be used. But yes, that term has been used to refer to Jews the same way one might say "Hollywood types" or "Bankers." I can't think of a specific example, but I think that's a bit high of a bar as I don't have an eidetic memory and it's not like I've been keeping a log of every time some mentions special interest group. Like most people I only remember the broad concepts and general notions. If you're aware of a way to easily Google or search this information, I'd be quite interested to know, because that's a very useful task. In the mean time, I'm sure you could find some if you dug around more around the Ukraine war, with both US right wing and Russian news platforms being the most likely place to find these. There's a lot of anti-semetic conspiracies revolving around Ukraine (with it even being the Russian's main initial propaganda) so that's why I suggest looking there.
By the way I'm not 'caught up' on 'Jews'. It's just that 'Jews' is one of the words that the authors of the hoax article replaced.
From what I have read so far, they showed that if you completely fabricate the data and follow the advice of peer reviewers, you can end up at a published paper.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Had these valiant warriors heard of Diederik Stapel, they would have known that fraudsters already made this point. Extensively.
These fighters for academic rigour seem to have lost sight of their own academic rigour in this "experiment".
Peer review is insufficient to catch fraudulent submissions. This is not a surprise as much as a misunderstanding of what peer review is.
To be clear: to show something, the authors should have shown that the ideas were obviously false, not that fraudulent data that supports findings would go undetected. Einstein's famous works were considered patently absurd at the time. The only way to substantiate or refute such ideas is with data. An experiment that abuses this to "show" anything is, itself, patently absurd.