tomlock

Great:

> I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience [sic] studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.

Dismissed due to lack of expertise.

> They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.

Dismissed (and stop listening to so much american commentary, arts degrees don't cost much here).

It isn't so impressive or surprising if you observe that a KGB man is in charge of Russia and the three letter agencies in America tasked with countering him have been tied up with other tasks since the the eleventh of september 2001 for some reason.

So at the time you and your colleagues chose to defer to experts in those fields, but currently you assume you are an expert in the content and character of the fields. What changed?

It doesn't demonstrate anything that isn't entirely comparable to the replication crisis, which stretches across many, many fields and many journals that the authors would almost certainly not call "grievance studies".

It certainly doesn't demonstrate that there is any "corrupting academic research" going on.

That last example is beautiful. Imagine someone in court saying "I am not strong enough to do thing x, which is easier than thing y". It sounds like in this case the judge's (your) response is "but you did y".

I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.

Oh so multiple people were not experts in the subjects. Cool.

Also isn't it strange that while administrations are supposedly stuffed with these "grievance studies" people - not one person on your board was qualified to properly evaluate those fields.

Sure, but to claim that a group looking to push an agenda, a group that wields, in the right-wing imagination, inordinate power, can't even increase recruitment into their ranks, seems counter-intuitive.

What's amazing is that you can scratch your head when confronted by the thesis proposal of someone who just got out of honours/masters in a field but simultaneously anoint yourself an expert in that field.

It is a super interesting jurisprudential question, because legal systems are typically objective in part, but also rely on some idea of what a "reasonable person" would consider factual or reasonable. It stands to reason then, that under a native epistemology, it is reasonable for oral tradition aka hearsay to be given legal weight - when under the modern tradition we wouldn't. It is probably worth wondering if we'd consider aboriginals to have no knowledge if we took a hardline view that all hearsay was not knowledge. I think that's a pretty counterintuitive conclusion, so I think there must be some credit given to knowledge in a system with no written record. And, the next question that comes to my mind anyhow is what would it be like if nothing was considered knowledge unless it was written down? This isn't even currently the case in our modern tradition, given that witnesses and memories are still considered to have at least some weight.

So you sat on a panel with no experts in a particular field, and so deferred to experts from that field, and also had bad experiences with university administrators, and this lead you to believe you were an expert in the field where you deferred away your authority. If there's a good case for being suspect of scientists who claim authoritatively that other disciplines are bad, it is being made by you, right now.

I'd be interested to hear more about this - but in the past its certainly true that indigenous myths were seen as useless to science. There are several examples of natural events and disasters being correlated with myths retold in indigenous oral histories.

You're right to point to Mr. Peterson regarding these postmodernism complaints. A succinct summary is that he claims in a movement called "postmodern neo-marxism". Marxism is a modernism movement, the phrase itself is already a contradiction. And yeah, almost no activists even know about postmodernism.

> The hoax authors have emphatically claimed that this field is more akin to theology than any kind of meaningful science, where any paper that reinforces the orthodoxy gets published, no matter the methodological flaws, and that's what they attempted to demonstrate (and they did I think). This result is far, far worse than the replication crisis.

Interesting claim, considering https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-th...

It is interesting to me that sometimes people seem to argue that the "grievance studies" subjects are useless practically, and then in the next sentence to argue they have a massive impact on other disciplines. In fields like economics we can, however, often see and measure the effects directly. And the effects of the orthodoxy that wants to justify, in this case austerity, using bad papers, with publically available data, that anyone could have checked, is far worse than the sokal squared hoax.

> No, I mean quite literally that these "academics" think that the scientific method, and that logic and mathematics itself, are tools of white oppression.

> There are thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts debating this claim.

The first article you linked quotes an orientation video. The second rests on the "feminist glaciology" paper, which I've seen parroted by the right as an example of this claim you're making, many, many times, and another article posted on a website. I might be justified in asking you to provide evidence that "thousands" of papers defending the claim that "the scientific method is oppressive" but I don't expect you to, or be able to, defend that statement. Lets focus on a smaller scope, and try to prove that there exist papers in the two articles you've linked here that make that claim.

People who read these papers often make the mistake of reading an argument against all knowledge by conflating a few things:

1) That the institution of science represents pure infallible access to scientific knowledge

2) That objective truth is equivalent to, and accessed by scientific knowledge

We only have to go back a short period of time to see scientific justifications of awful things. But, the vast majority of academics aren't arguing that we should discard all of science. And, anyone can make a blog post. Objective truth is always necessarily filtered through humans.

It is also a good point that scientists should listen to indigenous people and their theories about natural phenomena. There are many examples of scientists correlating myths and stories with natural events and discovering that there was an eruption at a particular time. Understanding those perspectives advances science.

Ok, and ok.

I think you're assuming that your personal experience is representative and unbiased. Is there a particular reason you'd consider yourself an expert on "grievance studies"? Is there a comprehensive list of areas of study you'd consider members? Could we perhaps figure out what level of knowledge you have in those fields, and with the academics within them?

Yeah, this paper just lead to name-calling, which I think indicates that it was not out to really do anything, but to appeal to certain narratives. Additionally, its main demonstration is that bad papers can be accepted by journals, which we know is also true of many other fields. But, I'm pretty sure the authors wouldn't consider medical journals as members of "grievance studies".

1. The information you seek... is found in the first Google result.

2. Counter-question: Is it possible to simultaneously hold a post-graduate degree, and be studying one?

Ok so they simultaneously have an inordinate effect on other disciplines, like science, but can't hold it together enough to keep their own boat afloat?

Interestingly the field that talks most about epistemology and different epistemologies, is philosophy, which I'm pretty sure is part of the "grievance studies" bloc the authors wish to push a narrative about. It is absolutely the field you'd go into if you wanted to dissect and examine different epistemologies.

> post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction

I've worked in the pre-eminent enemy-of-the-right organisation in Australia, GetUp. I also am/was a postgrad philosopher. I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context.

Additionally, to read these four areas and to then claim that they form the basis of "identity politics" demonstrates a fundamental misreading. Perhaps this misreading is a motivated one.

> And I think here it's the only possible one.

> Can you seriously imagine the journal accepting an article even slightly negative about the field?

There are plenty of critiques of these disciplines that come from within. For people with a deep understanding of these fields, there is nuance in them, and argument. From outside, perhaps they seem entirely cohesive.

The truth is it is entirely possible, specifically in philosophy and gender studies, two subjects I've worked in at a postgraduate level, to find progress and disagreement, even with hints of ridicule! Hell, I've been exceptionally critical of some popular views in those fields and come out the other side unscathed.

But the difference between those critiques and the Sokal Squared caper is that it doesn't offer any meaningful critique of the field.

> which is corrupting academic research

This is a politically-motivated, biased leap to a conclusion that the hoax doesn't support. All the hoax showed is that bad papers can get accepted in academic journals in these fields. We can add those journals to the list of journals in the fields of medicine and psychology that have similar problems.

> They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass review in other fields,

Let me stop you right there. The replication crisis has shown repeatedly, across disciplines that have testable hypotheses, that bad articles are accepted in academic journals.

> In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression.

I'm assuming you're talking about the conclusion many have drawn - which I think is pretty uncontroversial - that science, logic and math are not fields free from bias. We only have to got back to relatively recent history to encounter periods when women were excluded from universities and phrenology was considered science. Unfortunately I think what you might mean is that people in "this field" (what field?) think science should be entirely thrown out. You'll struggle to show that more than a tiny majority (please quantify in your response) of people in any field (even theology) saying that science is in itself a "corrupt enterprise".

So you feel like these people control the university administrations, while their fields drop in importance, funding and staffing?

> The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness.

So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Why aren't their tenures and salaries going up, if that's the case?

> The rules are not being applied out of a sense of ethical obligation, but rather to punish Boghossian for his views and for causing offense to other academics.

This seems like a bit of a leap. What evidence is there for this being the case?

As someone who has been involved in academia and left-wing activism since the 00's, student politics has at least since then been an extremist cesspool, and looking back through history, it seems that plenty of vicious protests and movements seem to arise in universities. Increasingly, fields targeted by the hoax authors are shrinking, particularly since 2008, which seems to indicate they don't have as much influence in universities as the right-wing would enjoy thinking.

> which is corrupting academic research

Considering this paper was presumably hoping to bring about better standards in academia, how is this claim supported by the hoax AKA experiment?

> Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars’ worldviews, while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles if the topic is politically fashionable.

This hoax didn't demonstrate anything non-trivial about these fields. As we know from the replication crisis, it is relatively easy to get a paper accepted in academic journals. This hoax and the hoaxers were as guilty of the political bias and ethical malafice they were trying to accuse "grievance studies" of. The fields they target have all been shrinking since 2008, a clear sign they lack a vice-like grip on universities.

There are literally arms of the government in China that wish to silence other opinions.

If Altman feels comfortable in China it is only because he is divorced from the context there.

I find it hard to take Altman seriously as a well-reasoned thinker after his comments on political correctness which were intermeshed with him praising China's approach to the topic.

I am similarly pointing out something that exists, the falling life expectancy in America. I am also pointing out that patents are not a good metric for healthcare success, whether or not the OP intended that it be used that way.

I'm not debating anyone with my comment.

I think it is also worth noting that number of drugs patented is not necessarily the best metric for measuring healthcare success.

I think one of the best is perhaps life expectancy - and that's dropping in America, patents or no.