What the ‘grievance studies’ hoax is really about

I’m finding that this counter argument actually gives more evidence to the hoaxer’s claims. This is not a statement to show the hoaxers claims are unfalsifiable, but more that the amount of motivated reasoning and projection in this counter argument speaks to the hoaxer’s point. The author could not even help keeping her own ideological beliefs out of her response; a response to the claim that academics in her field are ideologues. Sargon’s Law has to apply here. Sargon's Law: "Whenever an ideologue makes a negative character judgement on someone else, the judgement is more likely to apply to them instead."

The article points to a long building separation between the social and physical sciences regarding the strength of the knowledge base and the methods used to achieve foundational knowledge. If this is not rcognized by the public, support for all the sciences will weaken. If what social scientists do is termed "science", then physicists need to find a new name for what they do.

Shock as people who set out to trick other people are able to trick other people. It's pathetic. Why not take on approaches, modes of argument and views you disagree with openly, for example in a real journal article. In the week that the US president mocked a woman who claimed she had been sexually-assaulted, this is a worrying conservative and chauvinistic backlash.

Two words: replication crisis

Close down all social studies departments. They have no real scientific empirical foundations. As left wing thinkers such as Chomsky and Pinker have pointed out.

There is much that is wrong in the statements made above, whatever the motivations of the hoaxers - whether worthy, or whether they just felt like stirring the nest for more puerile reasons (who knows). Like it or not there are many left-wing (and left-leaning), socially liberal people that also have a significant issue with some of the sweeping generalisations made when identity politics and the social sciences collide and critical, scientific enquiry loses. They are not all 'actually right wing' and 'trying to fuel the alt-right', or even closet patriarchs or whatever. However the alt-right etc, if they want to attack, will look to attack at the weakest point and it does help them do that if someone else does the work of pointing it out for them. You can't always blame the messenger - this is a challenge for the social sciences (and some of the critical discourses within the arts) to address and I would suggest is not about any innate problem with the disciplines themselves but is about a level of groupthink and homogeneity of thought that dampens the critical discourse within them. Thats no different than the situation in economics pre-2008, where valid critiques of neo-liberal economics struggled to get heard and we've seen the disastrous results of that. What the author seems to be saying is that we should be considering what to publish based upon whether or not it feeds neo-imperialist policy etc i.e. that politics, not science drives what academics should produce. That's no longer science, not even social science, and is an anathema to the critical perspectives that should be the core of academic enquiry. Of course social science is political, and yes it can do great things in the pursuit of equality, freedom from oppression etc. But it won't succeed unless the questions are asked without already having decided all the answers. And no discipline should be based on the premise of problematising something (that's a political agenda: a solution looking for evidence to support it). If you're findings identify it as a problem, that's different, and then you need to be willing to defend your case ideally from debate within the discipline as well as from mischievous physicists. That said another author could have put up a far better defence of the discipline, and of course a clever writer could hoax an article convincingly in all sorts of other disciplines, and that great contributions to the social sciences (and the progress of humanity) are being made from within all branches of the social sciences. But the author undermines that case and her peers here.

The hoaxsters didn't damage the social sciences with their stunt - they merely provided some desperately needed house cleaning. Cr@p science is the enemy (whether social or physical), not hoaxsters. The left has brought this down on their own heads but some on the right are (astonishingly) choosing to go down the same path (although in far fewer numbers, obviously).

Bravo, Alison. It's good to see the outing of what the hoaxers are really on about, their own "grievance" that women and minorities are building their own scholarly domain. The EU's inquiry into the strengths and weaknesses of peer review suggests that all peer-review can do is insert more cautions into strong conclusions: it cannot protect against hoaxing or falsified data. This was a political attack carried out by someone who is paid (by student debt and public funds) to teach and research within his own area of expertise: philosophy. Outside that area, he has no incompetence. He certainly has no competence in experimental design, because what he and his confederates has done has no validity, and no conclusions can be drawn. They would have flunked any freshman class on methodology.

What the fake papers proved, quite deftly, is that no one publishing "feminist critique" journals, can tell the difference between sense and obvious bullshit. And if an editor can't tell the difference, then why are they an editor anyway?

Many legitimate areas of study at their outset (for example, chemistry, psychology, geology) were filled with outrageous concepts, ideas, and errors. Over time, these were proven to be ridiculous and replaced by the scholars working in these fields with better concepts, ideas, and errors. On the other hand, abuse of power and political malfeasance arising from power seem to persist, not evolving into anything more redeeming. The proponents of these arguments seem to conflate the two. Leave the scholars' disciplines alone, but advocate to curb and censure abusers of power. The disciplinary expertise of a power abuser is as irrelevant as the disciplinary expertise of a pedophile.