Three scholars– Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose– have recently gotten several papers published in various top journals, despite not believing in the claims of their papers and despite the fact that their empirical data was faked. I congratulate Mr. Boghossian, Mr. Lindsay, and Ms. Pluckrose on their successful passes of the Intellectual Turing Test, although I wish they’d chosen a method of testing it that didn’t involve publishing false data in multiple peer-reviewed journals. Being able to write something you disagree with that is indistinguishable from what supporters of the claim believe is a rare skill.
I do, however, disagree strongly with the claim that this is an indictment of gender studies as a field.
Let us consider six of the seven papers which Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote. (The seventh was accepted into the Journal of Poetry Therapy, which is not a serious publication.) You may find all of Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose’s papers here.
Fat Bodybuilding
Fat Studies published a paper called Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding. The thesis of this paper is that it would be a good idea to have a non-competitive, body-positive bodybuilding event where fat people showed off their bodies, because that would lead people to question why they think some bodies count as “built” and others don’t. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose say this paper counts as a hoax paper because “it celebrates morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice.”
Let’s set aside the issue of whether competitive bodybuilding celebrates unhealthy life choices, such as anabolic steroid use and unhealthily low body fat percentages, and why it is okay to celebrate one unhealthy life-choice and not another. Obviously, fat studies celebrates obesity as a healthy life choice. That’s, like, the thing that fat studies is.
Imagine I published a paper in a theology journal arguing that it was a good idea to adopt a certain liturgy because it would help people praise God. Later, I announced that this was a hoax paper which proves that theology as a discipline celebrates delusional thinking. Certainly, many people believe that theism is delusional. But the ‘hoax’ paper doesn’t address the subject at all. All it proves is that you can publish papers in theology journals which work from the premise that God exists, which is also provable by (for example) picking up any theology journal and looking at the table of contents.
I have literally no idea why Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose would bother, unless they were confused and thought that Fat Studies was a medical journal about obesity prevention.
Dildos
Sexuality and Culture published Going In Through The Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use. Through (faked) semi-structured interviews with thirteen men, the paper found that man who enjoyed anal masturbation using dildos were less transphobic, less homophobic, more feminist, and more sensitive to their partners’ needs, but not more concerned about rape culture. It noted that, since the sample size was small, the results are suggestive but may be unreliable. The paper proposed that receptive anal penetration may be used as a form of “exposure therapy” about homophobic and transphobic anxieties, but cautioned that many men might simply decide that anal penetration was okay while continuing to be homophobic/transphobic in general.
I literally have no idea what is objectionable about this paper. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose claim the thesis is unfalsifiable, but it’s obviously not; they themselves say in their own discussion section that the data don’t support a correlation between anal penetration and concern about rape culture. If feminist men who oppose homophobia and transphobia never took it up the ass, while homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist men proudly showed off their extensive collection of Bad Dragon dildoes, the thesis would be disproved.
Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose point out that not wanting to be anally penetrated is a common and harmless sexual choice, which it certainly is. But nevertheless it is puzzling that many men feel disgust and shame at the prospect of exploring receptive anal penetration, given that receptive anal penetration is very pleasurable for many (perhaps most) men. Surely we can agree that a sexual choice is common and harmless, and also agree that societal stigma plays a role in whether people choose to do it? Is your claim that it’s a complete coincidence that women who grow up in socially conservative communities are also less likely to have casual sex? If a man says “I don’t want to have a dildo put in my ass because that’s gay,” are we supposed to pat him on the head and say “I’m sorry you’re a victim of false consciousness, but in reality all your sexual preferences are completely causeless and the fact that you don’t want a plastic dick up your ass is entirely unrelated to the fact that you think enjoying anal penetration makes you homosexual and being homosexual is the worst thing in the world”?
A choice can be common and harmless and still have reasons. Some of those reasons– particularly for something as culturally important as sexuality– are worthy of scientific study.
Hoax on Hoaxes 2
Published in Hypatia, When The Joke Is On You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire argues that irony and satire by marginalized groups acts as a force for social justice, while irony and satire from privileged groups supports oppressive power structures. Since hoax papers are in the latter group, it argues, publishing hoax papers is morally wrong.
Clearly, it is horrible that a philosophy journal published an argument that a thing that lots of people don’t think is morally wrong is actually morally wrong. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose have done us a great service by revealing that feminist philosophy journals somtimes do this. However, I’d like to draw their attention to the many non-feminist philosophy journals that sometimes argue that things that lots of people don’t think are morally wrong are actually morally wrong. Why, I have read arguments that it is wrong to eat meat, go on vacation instead of giving your money to help poor Africans, accept death as a natural part of life, lie to Nazis about the Jews hidden in your basement, fail to euthanize your severely disabled children, have an abortion, not have an abortion, masturbate, have gay sex, and fail to push fat men in front of runaway trolleys.
One hopes that Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay will soon turn their attention to the rest of ethical philosophy, and because of their hard work from now on all ethical philosophy papers will solely consist of arguments that it is wrong to murder people.
Philosophy is a field where there is not universal consensus that the external world exists, that time is real, or that science is an effective way of seeking truth. It seems a bit absurd to me to believe that “it is morally fine to publish hoax papers” is more obvious than any of those claims, and in fact so much more obvious that it is inherently ridiculous and a stain on the entire profession that they published a paper arguing for it.
(Personally, I agree with When The Joke Is On You that publishing hoax papers is unethical, because you’re literally faking data and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals. I don’t care what kind of high-minded reason you have for faking your data, it’s wrong.)
Feminist Mein Kampf
Published in Affilia, Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism is adapted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
It is a little-known fact that when you put different nouns in a sentence, the sentence says something different. For example, if you say “apple pie is delicious,” you’re making a banal statement about desserts, but if you say “cyanide is delicious,” you are maliciously trying to poison people.
A corollary is that many unexceptional statements become horrifingly evil if you put Nazis in them. For example, “we should all work and sacrifice to help freedom take over the globe” is a statement that can come from a particularly boring State of the Union address. “We should all work and sacrifice to help Nazis take over the globe” is a Nazi belief. You would not conclude from this that every US president is a Nazi.
Therefore, Our Struggle is My Struggle is full of paragraphs like this:
Fourth, for feminism to achieve solidarity, it must change culture. To accomplish this, it must change
the discourses defining culture. Feminist education must therefore take place indirectly through social uplift— “feminist politics are made, not born” (hooks, 2000, p. 7) –which is best achieved by a philosophical com-
mitment to inclusive values-based allyship and solidarity (cf. Edwards, 2006; Patel, 2011; Russell & Bohan, 2016), particularly in a way that listens (Dotson, 2011; Greenberg, 2014) and acts upon the awareness it has raised (Gibson, 2014). By exclusively pursuing this approach a feeling of liberation can be generated that per-
mits all oppressed people to fully participate in a state of justice.
See, if you listen to Nazis in order to figure out how to educate people into being Nazis, that’s bad. But that does not mean that it is somehow wrong for a social work journal to ever talk about the concepts of culture change, education, and listening. There is nothing wrong with culture change, education, and listening as long as you don’t use them as tools to help you kill seventeen million people.
Hooters
Sex Roles published An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant, which is an ethnography about the behavior of men at Hooters. The data is fairly weak, as one of the reviewers noted, and perhaps more caution should have been provided about how much you can generalize from one group of friends.
That said, I’m not sure why Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose think it is ludicrous to observe men saying things like “it’s just part of being a man to like hot young girls showing off their bodies” and then conclude that maybe part of the reason men like breastaurants is that it allows them to behave in ways they consider manly.
I myself was dubious of the article’s claim that part of the appeal of breastaurants is bossing around hot young women; I went into reading this article expecting to say “yes, I agree that’s stupid”. However, the paper claims that the subjects said some of the appeal of the restaurant is that you can “tell hot young girls what to do and have them do it for you with a smile”. The subjects literally said that. What would Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose have ethnographers do, ignore what their subjects say when it’s politically incorrect?
Dog Park
This one is legitimately extremely stupid and it won an award. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose should be proud of themselves.
Thing of Things 
You can’t evaluate what this hoax shows without looking at the reasoning in the papers. For instance, what makes the argument about the hypatia piece compelling is that it’s not deriving a surprising conclusion by using compelling philosophical arguments grounded in common intuitions (as good, even if highly controversial, philosophers like Singer do). Rather it’s clearly simply appealing to ideological prejudices and lacks anything that could even be remotely considered a compelling philosophical arguments. I don’t know about the other papers but they require similar analysis of arguments.
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In other words it’s not their conclusion that was damning but the junk content supporting it.
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This. The authors demonstrated with some (not all) of the papers that reviewers would gloss over faulty, implausible, or mis-represented results if the answers were what was desirable. The fact that the answers were mainstream in those fields is precisely the point.
I’ve done many peer reviews for scientific journals, and I’ve rejected several papers with results/conclusions which conformed to expectations (and two which would have validated a hypothesis I put forth) because of methodological shortcomings. In one, I literally loved everything about the paper…right up until I realized they’d used a common drug which few people know alters the very variable they were measuring; that single error tanked the paper and rendered the data worthless (to the authors’ credit, they accepted that and never submitted it elsewhere).
Conversely, I’m planning on submitting a major grant application soon for a project that began with the phrase “How can those values be right?” followed by a year and a half of error-checking my methods. The last time someone made a claim that was literally 1/3rd as different from prior values as mine, they got 5 separate rebuttal letters (which, in fairness, pointed out legitimate issues), but I’ve dotted every i, crossed every t, and looked at the data 10 different ways from Thursday, so I have no choice to accept the results. In all fairness, I’m also working on a very different species, and I found two other groups reporting values like mine without realizing what they had (they were focused on different questions), but still, the data over-rule everything else.
The second case is the *real* test. The Sokal Squared papers showed that the reviewers are sloppy, but that’s often the case – people are busy, over-worked, or may not know certain things or be comfortable with weighing in on certain methods or analysis. But if you sent a paper in with data which conclusively refuted some key ideological concern, could the reviewers and editors accept that reality was different from their preferred views?
If the reviewers, editors, and general readers can accept that solid, valid data disproves something they always believed, it’s a valid field of inquiry. If not, it’s so deeply pathological that it’s not worth saving. Simple as that.
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Hmm, it’s not clear that it’s bad to require claims which are in conflict with an existing consensus to meet a higher burden of proof. I mean it’s appropriate that physicists require any claim of FTL data transmission to be more rigorously justified than results which don’t raise immediate red flags which make error a particularly likely explanation. Remember journals aren’t merely repositories of random experiments but also choices about what is worth spending time considering.
So it’s a little more subtle what is appropriate. It’s something more like only granting a presumption to the currently accepted theory to the extent it’s actually supported by the data/theory. The problem is that those individuals defending mere ideological propaganda as an academic discipline can then try and insist that their ideological consensus is a theory akin to those we give weight to in physics.
But yah, I agree these disciplines are clearly failing a test of intellectual integrity but it’s complicated to specify exactly what that requires.
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@Peter Gerdes
Outlier papers are obviously more likely to be incorrect than papers that have the ‘standard’ result. However, it is possible for the outlier to have discovered and eliminated a systemic bias that effects the other papers. One must be open to that possibility.
Also, one must be very careful to not lower the standards for expected results, allowing poor researchers to publish crappy papers that don’t actually offer independent verification of the same result. Why go to the effort of doing more studies if there is not actually a seriously attempt to see if the result holds up to strong scrutiny? That just results in a false sense of consensus, where it looks like there is a mass of papers that show the same, but p-hacking, binning papers with ‘incorrect’ outcomes, etc means that this consensus results from mischief, rather than proper science.
Too much respect for established findings can very easily lead to systemic failure, where a paper is only considered publishable if it gets the expected result. When the quality of a paper is no longer judged by the quality of the methodology, but instead, by whether the result is the expected one, falsification has become impossible.
PS. We actually had a case in The Netherlands where a researcher didn’t actually do the surveys that he claimed to have done, but just fabricated the data. He had a huge status in his field (in part because he published so much interesting results, thanks to not having to do the difficult work and by fabricating interesting outcomes). This in turn resulted in his work to not be challenged for a long time, ultimately resulting in 58 retractions.
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@Peter Gerdes
I remember reading an account of a series of results in physics. I think it may have been in one of feynmans books cautioning against exactly this.
There was a physical constant where a respected physicist got value X.
The real value was Y.
In theory if everyone was doing science honestly and properly and correctly then the published research should have shown a broad spread of value around the real physical value.
But if you look at the history of the literature you see X, then a little bit lower than X then a little bit lower again in a liner way until they got to Y.
What was happening was that experimenters were failing to trust their data.
So they’d repeat their experiment until they got a value closer to X.
X was wrong… but it was the consensus and they were afraid of contradicting [respected physicist] who was, ultimately, wrong.
When it’s hard to contradict the consensus even if your data shows something else… that leads to bad science.
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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.
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On this note, I had earlier been looking at one of the rejected papers, about cisnormativity in the workplace, which consists of (fabricated) interviews with 18 trans people. The referees like the idea of doing empirical work, but criticize the methodology, and note that the paper makes several claims that are at odds with the data.
But in the Areo magazine article? Boghossian et al. quote the parts where reviewers say it’s a worthwhile project, and omit the negative comments about the methodology.
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+1.
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You have a very innocent view of modern theology if you think that would disbar your paper 🙂
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Ozy doesn’t think that, though? They’re arguing against that and similar ideas in most of this post.
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> Personally, I agree with When The Joke Is On You that publishing hoax papers is unethical, because you’re literally faking data and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals. I don’t care what kind of high-minded reason you have for faking your data, it’s wrong.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about all of those studies where they make up resumes and send them to various hiring departments?
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I would think the difference is that the papers are published and therefore can go on to mislead many people.
That said, I don’t think this is actually a problem considering that the hoaxers subsequently made their hoax VERY PUBLIC. Given that publicity I can’t imagine people actually being misled.
It would be wrong to publish fake data and then not tell people, but that’s not what happened here.
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I mean, the papers were out there post-publication for months, and the authors fully intended to continue the hoax for longer but had to stop because journalists were investigating.
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Ah, I didn’t know that part. Still I expect that they would have made it known eventually – that seems to be the whole point? – and at that point I imagine it would be difficult for anybody who had been misled by the false data to not learn that it was false.
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They were intending to finish the project somewhere between October and December 2018, I think, a full year from when they started.
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I don’t think it’s always wrong to deceive people (notice that I did not complain about e.g. the Fat Studies paper, which didn’t involve fake data). The harms of a fake-resume study are fairly small, because you don’t expect everyone who sends in a job application to be available to be hired (some are hired by other companies, etc) and the deception is usually disclosed promptly once it’s time for an interview. People do expect that the data published in peer-reviewed journals is not fake. The journal articles were reported about when they came out.
They had several options if they wanted to hoax journals without polluting it with fraudulent data. One would be to actually do the research; another would be to tell journals that the paper was a hoax as soon as the papers were accepted.
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If they would immediately disclose the hoax, it wouldn’t take long for journalists or others to start digging into their work and to make it impossible to continue.
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The point of a hoax like this is to cast doubt on every journal publishing the fake studies, and by extension that entire field. That’s why they cast such a wide net. The fact that so many studies were published basically without question because they confirmed the prevailing dogmas means people are already being misled. This means the harm is minimised (you could say it is “harm-neutral”,) especially since the studies in question are either already retracted, or in the process of getting retracted. It has after all already happened with the dog rape culture paper, and indeed their earlier conceptual penis paper.
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Ultimately, it is commonly accepted that causing lesser harms are acceptable to expose greater harms. For example, journalists may publish private documents that document bad behavior. Or they may go undercover, use hidden cameras, etc. However, journalism ethics generally require that there is good justification for using deception that outweighs the harm caused. Using a hidden camera to show the world that Justin Bieber likes picking his nose in secret is not justified, for example.
So IMO the question is not whether their actions caused harms, but whether the harms of this experiment were worth it.
One possible harm is that people come to believe what the fake papers say. However, such a belief would already indicate that those people have an unjustified certainty that papers published in (certain) journals represent ‘the truth’. Given that the fake studies would be exposed sooner or later, I consider this a good lesson.
Another possible harm is that academics might try to expand on the work, or unnecessarily try to replicate it. If they built on the work without waiting for replications, then I consider that bad behavior. So again: a good lesson.
Unnecessary attempts to duplicate is the most legitimate harm to me. However, we already know that scientists in most fields are loath to try to replicate, so sadly enough this seems like a minor worry. If anything, this hoax reinforces the importance of replication attempts and thus probably has a positive effect.
So overall, I think that the consequences of this hoax are most likely very positive and that the people who are harmed are mostly people who deserve a smack with a conceptual cluebat.
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Reblogged this on Peddling and Scaling God and Darwin and commented:
I thought this great taking the mick out of pretentious pseudo-social studies, which afflict academia today.
Maybe I am as bad as I am totally un-postmodernist
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The link include twenty-one papers, not seven. Here are the papers you didn’t talked about:
Self-Reflections on Self-Reflections: An Autoethnographic Defense of Authoethnography
Strategies for Dealing with Cisnormative Discursive Aggression in the Workplace: Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion
My Struggle to Dismantle My Whiteness: A Critical-Race Examination of Whiteness from within Whiteness
Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy
Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence Safety Research
“Pretty Good for a Girl”: Feminist Physicality and Women’s Bodybuilding
Grappling with Hegemonic Masculinity: Masculinity and Heteronormativity in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
Hegemonic Academic Bullying: The Ethics of Sokal-style Hoax Papers on Gender Studies
Rubbing One Out: Defining Metasexual Violence of Objectification Through Nonconsensual Masturbation
Rebraiding Masculinity: Redefining the Struggle of Women Under the Domination of the Masculinity Trinity
Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption
The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy
Queering Plato: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a Queer-Theoretic Emancipatory Text on Sexuality and Gender
Masculinity and the Others Within: A Schizoethnographic Approach to Autoethnography
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I talked about the accepted papers. Obviously, the rejected papers were silly; that’s why they were rejected. I admit it was a judgment call to not include the revise-and-resubmit papers.
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“Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist
Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence
Safety Research” and “Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on
Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in
Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption” were accepted.
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Neither of those papers had been accepted.
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@Barry Deutsch
When I click the link Ozy give as “You may find all of Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose’s papers here.”, I see that the former was accepted in Feminist Theory and the latter in Porn Studies. Do I have the same documents as everyone else ? Am I going crazy ?
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Both were asked to “Revise and resubmit.” You can see that at the bottom of the page, where they give abstracts for each paper.
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When I go to the link with the files, I see a Google Drive directory of files corresponding to the full content of each paper (not at the bottom, it’s the whole page). When I click on “FeministAI TYPESET.pdf” I see a paper which is typeset the same way a journal paper is typeset (like the papers Ozy talks about, and unlike, say, the feminist astronomy paper). There is “Feminist Theory” written on top (again, like all the other published papers, and unlike the non-published papers), which is the name of a journal. At the bottom the article ends and is followed by references to other papers, and there is no mention of revising and submitting.
What do you see ?
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Go to this link (same site the OP linked to, but higher in the folder tree), and then open the “Project Summary and Fact Sheet” file. It’s written by the Sokal Squared authors, and includes the final status of all the papers at project’s end.
There, the Frankenstein paper is described as “Under review/awaiting decision after passing first round of review at Feminist Theory.” And the elephant paper is described as “Under review/awaiting decision after passing first round of review at Feminist Theory.”
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Aaargh – copy/paste fail. The elephant paper is described as “Peer reviewed at Porn Studies – revision requested
Revision submitted to Porn Studies”
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@Barry Deutsch
This is correct and I’m confused about why the papers are typeset.
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@leftrationalist
They might have been asked to submit the papers with typesetting for the journal.
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Quick replies:
Fat bodybuilding:
Your defense of this paper, by comparison to theology, is basically just an indictment of Fat Studies — specifically, the problem here is that it proceeds from a particular object-level premise at all.
Hoax on Hoaxes 2:
This isn’t just “a thing that lots of people don’t think is morally wrong is actually morally wrong”. This is an attempt to cut the negative-feedback loop. Of course, this is really just a special case of the more general illiberal phenomenon that is “when a marginalized person/group contradicts you you have to listen, when a priveleged person/group contradicts you that is oppression“, which is, again, cutting the negative-feedback loop.
You need negative feedback to keep yourself aligned with reality; without it, tribal dynamics eventually take over and things become completely unhinged. Cutting the negative-feedback loop inevitably leads to disaster, but people constantly want to do so so that they don’t have to deal with people contradicting them. Basically, attempts to cut the negative-feedback loop should never be acceptable, no matter what clever argument someone can come up with for it. The fact that you can get an attempt to cut the negative-feedback loop published in a journal indicates that that field has already seriously lost its way and cannot be expected to produce truth.
Obviously this applies here as hoaxes are a form of negative feedback.
Feminist Mein Kampf:
Naziism (and Mein Kampf in particular, at least going by Sarah’s descriptions of it — I’ll admit I haven’t read it myself) isn’t just “OK structure, malicious payload”. You can’t just swap out “kill the Jews” for something harmless and get something OK; the basic structure is all wrong. For instance it’s anti-intellectual, anti-individual, anti-thinking; it’s all about listening to the inspiring leader and feeling the group unity and doing whatever they want you to and not thinking too hard about it. (More cutting the negative-feedback loop!) That’s still seriously dangerous regardless of the payload.
That said, I haven’t read the actual paper here and without reading it it’s impossible to say which side of the line this falls on, so maybe I should actually do that.
Hooters:
This one I completely agree with you on.
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I don’t think it’s necessarily problematic for a field to proceed from a particular object-level premise. That would imply that creationists are right that evolutionary biology is a diseased discipline!
Is cutting the negative feedback loop so obviously awful that it can’t be argued for even in a philosophy journal? That’s far from obvious to me– it seems like philosophy is for questioning things that seem like an obvious bad idea.
I did find some parts of the paper questionable. (And others my eyes glazed over about– Hitler is unfortunately a terrible writer, even when he’s being edited to talk about feminism.) But I think that even something as questionable as “you should sacrifice your autonomy for equality” is quite different when it’s instead “you should sacrifice your autonomy for the Aryan people”: the former can be a subject of legitimate debate, the latter is obviously evil.
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I’m astonished at this claim (honestly). Equality is the opposite of quality; there is no other way to achieve equality but to sink everyone to the level of the lowest common denominator. The European people, on the other hand, are pretty great, and far preferable to any other. Sacrificing one’s autonomy for their benefit makes total sense in a way sacrificing it for equality doesn’t.
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I don’t think it’s necessarily problematic for a field to proceed from a particular object-level premise. That would imply that creationists are right that evolutionary biology is a diseased discipline!
That’s an interesting point. I am not convinced it’s analogous, but I’ll admit pinning down the correct distinction may be a bit tricky.
Is cutting the negative feedback loop so obviously awful that it can’t be argued for even in a philosophy journal? That’s far from obvious to me– it seems like philosophy is for questioning things that seem like an obvious bad idea.
Well, that’s why I phrased it as “an attempt to cut the negative-feedback loop”, not “an argument for cutting the negative-feedback loop”. 🙂 If people want to explicitly argue for cutting the negative-feedback loop — engaging with the premise and stating why the think it’s wrong — that’s fine by me. But that’s not how I would classify this. I read this sort of thing, and the more general phenomeon it’s an instance of, not as an attempt to say, “Hey, maybe there are parts of the negative-feedback loop it would be safe to weaken?” but as a barely-dressed-up assertion of dominance: “We get to criticize you, you don’t get to criticize us, and if you try we’ll rally every right-thinking person to our side and get you ostracized by everyone respectable, so no questions, got it?”
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I think the distinction is whether the premise is true! It’s tricky in the case of fat studies because there are a couple of premises bundled together: true ones, like that overweight people suffer from unfair discrimination, that society has unrealistic views about weight loss, and that the health effects of obesity are sometimes exaggerated, but also false ones, like that obesity does not cause health problems.
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“You should sacrifice your autonomy to the Great Idea, and you should never ever do anything that may make our Great Leaders look bad, because that would weaken the Great Idea” is the ideology of abusers and cults. These two hoax papers independently confirm that academic feminists are okay with abuse and cults as long as they get to be the Great Leaders and their ideology gets to be the Great Idea (or at least consider whether they aren’t okay “far from obvious” and “a subject of legitimate debate”). I think this is very useful information, much more than academic feminists thinking it’s somehow useful to analyze AI risk from a feminist perspective.
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There’s a word for a group where you have to sacrifice your autonomy for the group’s ideology and where doing anything that might show the group to be wrong on some things is considered unethical: an abusive group, or a cult.
That academic feminists think abuse is okay as long as they get to be the abusers and feminism get to be the abusive ideology is very useful information.
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But, see, that can’t be distinction, because truth or falsity isn’t always something we can know in advance, whereas whether a department is acting in a diseased way is something we can tell without knowing what the actual truth is. Even if the proverbial pre-Cambrian rabbits were found tomorrow, we wouldn’t say “Aha, this proves that evolutionary biology was a diseased discipline all along!” We’d just say that they turned out to be wrong, not that they were acting incorrectly.
So, if I’m going to try to elucidate it here — basically, an evolutionary biologist is just a biologist who’s specialized. Any biologist accepts the theory of evolution — not as a foundational assumption, but as a discovery within the field. An evolutionary biologist is just one who’s focused on the implications of that discovery. Take away the evolutionary biologist’s premise of evolution — e.g. with a pre-Cambrian rabbit discovery — and they’re still a biologist. (And really, a biologist is just a scientist who’s specialized, and a scientist is…)
That doesn’t seem to be what’s going on with fat studies, or theology. These really do seem to have the particular premise as a premise. Basically I guess you could say it’s not a matter of truth but rather a matter of justification.
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Re: Fat Studies: maybe it’s more like subfields of economics, which does sometimes segregate by contradictory object-level premises? Or maybe like string theory?
Re: Cutting the negative feedback loop–opposing *one form* of negative feedback isn’t the same as opposing negative feedback altogether.
Re: Feminist Mein Kampf, I skimmed it and I disagree with the argument–it’s basically for non-liberal feminism (see https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/love-me-im-a-liberal/). But, like, I already knew non-liberal feminism existed? It did convince me that the journal that published it has no writing quality standards, though.
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I think our conclusion should be that Hitler is SUCH an awful writer.
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Perhaps the conclusion should be that lots of people like awful writing.
After all, Hitler did have some groupies back then. >:)
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I think very few of those who bought Mein Kampf actually read more than a few pages of it.
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From “Our Struggle Is My Struggle” (that title does amuse me):
“Second, then, in creating solidarity for overcoming oppression, sacrifices will be necessary, and, though we must remain aware of the real and material barriers feminists and others may face that limit their potential for activism, no accessible sacrifice that abnegates neoliberalism should be considered too great. As Ferguson (2010, p. 251) remarks, Feminists need to publicly make judgments about personal matters sex, career decisions, dress and makeup, power in intimate relationships because reimagining our personal lives is an essential component to a feminist reimagining of the world we share. Whatever compromises are made by neoliberal feminists for the causes of oppressed people, they do not stand in significant proportion against the potential gain of those oppressed, including women, if oppression is considerably remedied.
“Only myopic selfishness, as often arises in neoliberal and choice-centered contexts, can forward individual autonomy over collective autonomy and thus prevent understanding that genuine liberation requires achieving liberation for all. This cannot occur unless, through right allyship and solidarity, feminism can be solidified internally first.”
And here’s the corresponding passage from “Mein Kampf”:
“To win the masses for a national resurrection, no social sacrifice is too great.
“Whatever economic concessions are made to our working class today, they stand in no proportion to the gain for the entire nation if they help to give the broad masses back to their nation. Only pigheaded short-sightedness, such as is often unfortunately found in our employer circles, can fail to recognize that in the long run there can be no economic upswing for them and hence no economic profit, unless the inner national solidarity of our people is restored.”
Although the faux-feminist essay is too extreme (imo), the hoaxers have softened it enormously from their source material by adding nuance. Where Hitler flatly said no sacrifice is too great, the faux-feminist essay puts in a lot of hedging: “…we must remain aware of the real and material barriers feminists and others may face that limit their potential for activism, no accessible sacrifice…”
Essentially, it’s the difference between someone saying “no sacrifice is too great,” full stop, versus “after we account for all these reasonable reasons people’s sacrifice has to be limited, no sacrifice is too great.”
For my tastes, the faux-feminist essay is too militant. But it’s simply not as extreme as “Mein Kampf” is misleading, and I suspect those making that claim haven’t read either.
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I’m so bad at proofreading. Please omit the phrase “is misleading” from my final paragraph, when you read it, kind reader.
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Props to Barry for wading through two awful texts to bring us that illuminating side-by-side. I tried to do the same and lost patience.
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In conclusion… Sokal Squared was badly executed, but they still just barely manage to prove their point, thanks to Dog Park?
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Great post, well done! I had the same reaction – ‘what exactly is wrong with the ideas in some of these papers’? Even if it turned out wrong that taking it in the ass is at least correlated with being more open-minded among men, even if it turned out no one goes to Hooters for the implicit/imagined/simulated power-play…it seems reasonable enough to ask the question.
I’m very sympathetic to the hoaxers’ overall aims – to try to see if political bias in these fields will corrupt them so much that there’s a critical mass of nonsense in support of the fields’ politics, combined with an almost complete refusal to publish any critical work, no matter how good, that might challenge the field’s politics. Those are things I hope people keep looking into. Even mild “isolated demands for rigor” can skew a field’s findings substantially, and it seems possible the isolated demands for rigor in ideologically-driven fields might go way beyond mild.
But these papers themselves don’t seem like the worst ideas!
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I think that their argument that some claims should not be made because they are immoral is rather silly.
However, this is not the only thing they aimed for. They also tried to show that journals would accept papers with unsupported claims, with an obvious disconnect between the presented data and the claims, with extremely shitty writing, etc. If reviewers and publishers overlook these problems because they like the claims that are made for their alignment with the reviewers’ and publisher’s politics, that seems like an issue to me.
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Dog park was indeed quite silly, but the paper claims 1000 hours of observational data involving over 1000 incidents, with pretty big effect sizes. I can see why reviewers would give it the benefit of the doubt.
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It makes you wish for someone to do this project in collaboration with the journals, rather than with antagonism toward the field—pen testing peer review, as it were.
That would require a more robust operationalization of the definition of “bad papers”, and might lead to more interesting results.
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Journals, even the most respected, are not great when it comes to looking at their own failings.
There was a big push to get medical research journals to sign up to the CONSORT guidelines to prevent various problems with p-hacking and file-draw effect in human research.
Someone did a project checking how much the journals were enforcing the rules they’d promised to enforce.
The results were not good for the journals.
http://compare-trials.org/
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gah, submitted before completing post.
it ended up being a public slap-fest. most of the journals refused to publish letters pointing out outcome-switching.
with many of the journals editors publishing anonymous articles basically declaring that they’re such experts that they don’t really need to follow good practice and that pre-registrations published after the trial are just dandy.
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The social sciences will continue to have these sorts of problems until they become more historical materialist; that is they become Marxist. This would lead to journals becoming more logical and rigorous but I’ve got a feeling many of these hoaxer types would get upset with a more Marxist academia.
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Lol, I’ve looked up Marx’s logical proclivities and he favoured Hegel, the inventor of postmodern logic. I suspect Marx would be entirely comfortable with the excesses of modern academia. If anything, I’d go with late Hume, early Popper, possibly Quine, and Haack. The scientific method everywhere.
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Marx hated philosophy and preferred the scientific method:
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Indeed. It’s such a pity then that he didn’t test his theory fully, and that every test since has been ignored. Because despite his disdain for philosophy, he did identical work himself.
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wait, we’re not supposed to put white children in chains now?
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You jest, but this was actually one of the objections in the reviews:
> What are experiential reparations? [This seems to be the heading under which they suggested “put them in chains” as an example.] Say more about this. Also, some of your suggestions strike me as “shaming.” I’ve never had much success with shaming pedagogies.
> This still makes me feel uncomfortable, because it’s shame-y […]
I guess this shows the difference between the kind of feminist who has been in the field long enough to end up on an editorial board, and the kind who’s just opened their first tumblr account.
An accurate if rather boring headline for this would be “Taking existing theory and making it more radical does NOT automatically get you published, studies find” (the paper got rejected three times in a row).
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I don’t understand the argument that the Journal of Poetry Therapy is a less serious publication than Fat Studies. (Or the others, but seguing straight to Fat Studies after dismissing the first out of hand is the lowest-hanging fruit imaginable.) I looked through the back issues of both papers, and while Poetry Therapy is in the Weird Low-Status Humanities cluster, I don’t see any lack of ‘seriousness’ in its publications. They generally seemed rather more intensive and data-driven than the Fat Studies ones. I also didn’t find anything on the internet to imply the journal is itself a hoax or anything.
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Ah, someone agrees with me that the anal masturbation paper is actually fairly reasonable content-wise. But I think at the same time you’re missing the reason for a lot of the outrage that usually surrounds this kind of paper: the high-strung tone of the Cisfinder General passing judgement on people’s sexual preferences. What makes them think anyone should give a damn about the way they think men should/shouldn’t masturbate?
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I don’t think you’re really getting at why the Hitler rewrite is so objectionable. That whole chapter is about demonizing (in the sense of over attributing bad characteristics and under attributing good characteristics) certain groups for the purpose of diminishing attention to their needs, and strengthening in group out group dynamics. The problem is that is the method by which you get Nazi like interactions. Dehumanizing is an important step to permitting yourself to do nasty things to people. The rewrite faithfully captures that dynamic. Feminists especially should know that dynamic is a dangerous one as a huge portion of the field focuses on how dehumanizing leads to terrible things for women.
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Sebastian, I wonder if we’re referring to the same Mein Kampf based paper?
The Sokal Squared hoaxers wrote two papers based on Mein Kampf, but only one of them – “Our Struggle Is My Struggle” – was eventually accepted for publication. But it’s a real stretch to say that “Our Struggle Is My Struggle” is “about demonizing” or “dehumanizing.”
Your argument here sounds like it may be based on “My Struggle To Dismantle My Whiteness,” a hoax paper which was rejected.
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From the OP:
That is not, typically, what fat studies means, and my impression is that many people in fat studies would disagree with it, because they do not agree that being fat is a “choice” at all for most fat people.
The editorial in the first issue of “Fat Studies” gave a good definition of what fat studies is about:
But if the goal of the Sokal Squared authors was to publish a paper ““it celebrates morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice,” then they failed. The idea of obesity as a healthy life choice isn’t a clear theme of the Sokal Squared paper; it comes up, obliquely, only on page 5 (and even there omitting the “healthy” part), and doesn’t rate a mention in the abstract.
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Fact is that if you ingest fewer calories, you lose weight. Furthermore, it is pretty obvious that cultural differences are the main major factor in how many people become obese, if you compare countries and times.
You can argue that some fat people don’t have enough money, time, etc to make certain choices, that they lack fortitude and/or that their culture punishes certain choices. However, generalizing this as a lack of choice for all people seems like a major mistake that harms those who can make a choice, as well as harming your ability to make good policy.
A big danger of fat advocacy is that it can result in people defending or even worsening an obesity-creating culture. For example, an obvious way to reduce obesity is to make taking the stairs the default, by putting the elevators a bit out of the way. Presumably, fat (and disability) advocates will oppose this, but if the elevator is extremely convenient, this may cause many people to use it, who could just as easily take the stairs.
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Aapje:
First of all, that’s not really relevant to my argument. Even if everything you say is true, it would still be the case that “the thing that fat studies is,” is not what Ozy seemingly thinks fat studies is.
Secondly, most fat people cannot choose to become thin, in a healthy and sustainable manner. Moreover, once class and culture are controlled for, it doesn’t appear that fat people actually eat more calories than non-fat people. Citations for both of these claims can be found here.
Finally, if it’s your claim that typical fat people can cease being fat people through programs of calorie control or climbing stairs, then can you cite any peer-reviewed studies which have shown that your weight-loss plan works? (But please read this post first).
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Diets do tend to work, although the difficulty is often sustaining them long term. That may have a lot to do with living in a society/environment that offers too many temptations/bad examples/etc. So a more successful approach may be to focus more on changing that environment.
Furthermore, it seems better to prevent weight gain in the first place, as that seems way easier than weight loss.
Anyway, fact remains that there is a great disparity across nations and periods, which provide rather strong evidence that the cause is nurture and thus can be ‘chosen.’ Perhaps not so much at the individual level, but almost certainly at the societal level. For example, if I was dictator, I might want to tax the shit out of fast food.
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“Diets do tend to work, although the difficulty is often sustaining them long term.”
I think we’re defining our terms differently.
If the question is if being fat is a “choice,” then I think for a weight-loss diet to be said to “work,” it would have to have a proven track record for turning fat people into not-fat people. But no diet plan does.
Also, a diet that isn’t sustainable over the long term cannot be said to “work” in any but a trivial sense. (Unless the goal is purely short-term, i.e., to fit into a smaller wedding gown).
“Furthermore, it seems better to prevent weight gain in the first place, as that seems way easier than weight loss.”
In theory, I agree with you, this seems like it should be easier. Pragmatically, however, nothing that has been tried for this (so far) seems to work consistently. Afaik.
“Anyway, fact remains that there is a great disparity across nations and periods, which provide rather strong evidence that the cause is nurture and thus can be ‘chosen.’ Perhaps not so much at the individual level, but almost certainly at the societal level.”
That doesn’t logically say anything about if a fat person can choose to become thin. If you look at the history of dieting in the US, for example, fat people a century ago did not seem to find it any easier to lose weight than fat people today do, even though there were fewer fat people overall.
And if the “choice” is at the societal level rather than the individual level, then that seems to support what I’ve been saying; typical individual fat people cannot choose to be non-fat.
Your discussion so far seems prone to “magic bullet” thinking – raise taxes on fast food! Take away elevators! I’m skeptical about magic bullet approaches. Brian Wansink, the most influential researcher on environmental factors in weight, is retiring in disgrace because so many of his results came about from data dredging. As the linked article points out, though, it’s not just Wansink; people making big claims based on weak data is very common in the field.
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Most medicine that we treat people with doesn’t measure up to your standard of working for all sick people, solving the problem entirely, etc. So I think that your standard is absurdly high. It’s fine to argue that diets don’t work for many people, but that is a far stronger claim to say that it doesn’t work for anyone or is useless altogether.
I am quite receptive to the idea that seeing diets as a magic bullet is wrong and that losing weight or preventing weight gain needs a more holistic approach. However, when I give examples of other possible environmental interventions, you seem to see that as “magic bullet” thinking. I suspect that you have mindkilled yourself into place where you dismiss all specific steps that we can take, resulting in a dream of an unrealistic revolution (or real magic bullet), instead of seeing what practical steps we can take. Many minor interventions can add up to a big change, but if you dismiss each intervention because it doesn’t solve the problem sufficiently, you never get those benefits.
Ultimately, I worry that a strong focus on ‘let’s make it easier to be fat’ will result in more people being fat, which may then not make people happier overall or otherwise better off in the aggregate. Ultimately, the explanation that you quote (“It regards weight, like height, as a human characteristic that varies widely across any population”) suggests that the goal is to regard being fat as being purely or largely due to genetics, which is a falsehood. I oppose spreading falsehoods.
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“Most medicine that we treat people with doesn’t measure up to your standard of working for all sick people, solving the problem entirely, etc. ”
Strawman. I have never suggested “working for all/solving the problem entirely” as a standard.
Honestly, I’d be delighted if weight-loss diets had to meet the standards medicine has to meet before being prescribed by doctors or advertised as effective. But no diet plan could meet those standards.
“It’s fine to argue that diets don’t work for many people, but that is a far stronger claim to say that it doesn’t work for anyone or is useless altogether.”
Strawman. I’ve never said diets don’t work for anyone; obviously, there is a minority for whom diets work. See the National Weight Control Registry, for example.
I am arguing that, for the overwhelming majority of fat people, weight loss diets do not work over the long run, if “work” is defined as no longer being fat. I am emphasizing this point because it relates to if fat people “choose” to be fat – which is the substance of our disagreement.
“I am quite receptive to the idea that seeing diets as a magic bullet is wrong and that losing weight or preventing weight gain needs a more holistic approach.”
But are you open to the idea – or, rather, the fact – that no non-surgical weight loss approach, “holistic” or otherwise, has ever been shown to work over the long run? And that most fat people cannot choose not to be fat?
“I suspect that you have mindkilled yourself into place where you dismiss all specific steps that we can take, resulting in a dream of an unrealistic revolution (or real magic bullet), instead of seeing what practical steps we can take.”
I’d prefer that you refrain from making personal attacks on me, as I’ve been refraining from making personal attacks on you. I don’t think examining which of the two of us is mindkilled would be a worthwhile discussion.
“Many minor interventions can add up to a big change, but if you dismiss each intervention because it doesn’t solve the problem sufficiently, you never get those benefits.”
The odd thing is, many of the interventions you might suggest, are interventions I’d favor. Getting rid of elevators is a bad idea – as you acknowledged, the burden on the disabled would be unreasonable – but designing cities to encourage walking is something I’d favor. I’m all for showing calories on menus; I’m all for making smaller portions available for those who want them; I’m all for providing public facilities for exercise (running tracks, basketball courts, yoga spaces, etc). I’m all for requiring large workplaces to provide workers with opportunities for mid-day exercise breaks. And so on.
The difference is, I am aware that the benefit you’re claiming for these sort of changes – that they will lead to weight loss – is unproven. And the literature is so filled with weight loss plans that have failed to pan out that skepticism is justified.
But there’s a lot of evidence that exercise and healthier eating are, for most people, extremely beneficial. This includes fat people.- even if we don’t lose weight, exercise and eating veggies is still beneficial for most of us.
So bring on the hoard of minor interventions! But if these interventions are intended to promote weight loss or to reduce the percentage of fat people, they might end up being considered failures. Given the long history of failed weight loss plans, it’s a denial of reality to think that failure isn’t a real possibility here, too.
However, if instead we say that the goal is to promote health and well-being, then there’s every reason to think that this “holistic” approach could be successful, even if – like every weight loss plan ever studied – it does not lead to significant long-term weight loss for most people.
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Yes, please don’t personally attack people in this comment section.
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Wait, that’s it ? Ozy managed to convince one of the hoaxers ?
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Or possibly she took it as a slam on “modern moral philosophy”?
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I assume she’s just good at taking criticism, which makes me respect her. (I already have a certain amount of respect for her, of course, because successfully writing a philosophy paper you don’t agree with is hard.)
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That sort of reminds me – I wanted to recommend this book to you. The author does a very good job at convincingly writing philosophical arguments from multiple perspectives (I had to google her after reading to find out what her actual perspective is), plus it’s very entertaining reading.
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I didn’t like the description, though. Socrates isn’t always right in Plato. There are lesser dialogue writers with infallible spokesman characters, but Plato was better than that.
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@leftrationalist
A like doesn’t have to indicate agreement.
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