It's a strange world we live in. This critique of a critique is valid, and pointing out the stunt nature of the Hitler comparison is entirely reasonable. And yet... and yet I can't help but feel that the entire discipline within which their paper was accepted remains farcical. Putting jargon into any generic template, written by Hitler or anyone else, should not result in a publishable paper. That is a huge red flag when it comes to the validity of the discipline.
The article also points out that similar fraud occurs in the natural sciences (it is worryingly easy to falsify experimental data, assuming nobody is looking too closely). But even those who are deeply critical of contemporary practices in natural science research don’t discredit the entire discipline.
Being able to slip some garbage papers into some journals by itself really doesn’t prove anything about a specific discipline, at least not without a comparative analysis of published fraudulent papers (between, say, sociology and physics) that AFAIK doesn’t exist. You could follow your logic to claim that all disciplines have a validity problem... but then what is the point of the observation, other than that human reasoning is imperfect?
This essay seems to largely evade the main arguments brought forth by the hoaxers and retreat to attacking the imperfect mapping to Mein Kampf.
The hoaxers did not care so much that their paper mapped perfectly or even mapped well to Mein Kampf... the significance is that they got articles published and accepted in the first place, without having any formal education on the subject. Their writing was largely nonsensical and lacked rigor. Their statistics didn’t make sense, etc.
The author ends the essay stating,
“the gleeful efforts to humiliate other academics has nothing to do with a wish to preserve the integrity of science; it is an ideological and political crusade against an entire field of science simply because of its connection to feminism, social justice, and the fight for equality.”
This conclusion is completely undefended by the essay...
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.9 ms ] threadEDIT: If you go through their Twitter post, you can at least read the article (if you turn off your ad blocker): https://mobile.twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/137250143132906...
Being able to slip some garbage papers into some journals by itself really doesn’t prove anything about a specific discipline, at least not without a comparative analysis of published fraudulent papers (between, say, sociology and physics) that AFAIK doesn’t exist. You could follow your logic to claim that all disciplines have a validity problem... but then what is the point of the observation, other than that human reasoning is imperfect?
This essay seems to largely evade the main arguments brought forth by the hoaxers and retreat to attacking the imperfect mapping to Mein Kampf.
The hoaxers did not care so much that their paper mapped perfectly or even mapped well to Mein Kampf... the significance is that they got articles published and accepted in the first place, without having any formal education on the subject. Their writing was largely nonsensical and lacked rigor. Their statistics didn’t make sense, etc.
The author ends the essay stating,
“the gleeful efforts to humiliate other academics has nothing to do with a wish to preserve the integrity of science; it is an ideological and political crusade against an entire field of science simply because of its connection to feminism, social justice, and the fight for equality.”
This conclusion is completely undefended by the essay...