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by gbhn
2814 days ago
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I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers. For instance, the one they call "Hooters" is described as "A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists." The actual paper is written as a record of transcripts of visits to a restaurant and an extraction of particular conversation themes. At no point did I see the paper questioning why Hooters exists -- the (apparently totally faked) data seems pretty stereotypically motivated, which I think may be their point, but I'm not sure short of a fraud investigation how reviewers are supposed to know that the particular group this author claims to have visited Hooters with didn't say the things supposedly directly recorded. That's a really dramatic claim for a reviewer to make: "This conversation which the author claims is a direct transcription from a recording couldn't possibly have happened because it seems too stereotypical." Yes, the methodology isn't that great, and the paper was rejected. More generally, the "study" isn't selecting random journals to see if they could defraud -- it is instead aimed at specific academic targets and a "test to failure" scattershot mechanism is used. Thus we have no idea whether these journals are any more discriminating than, say, PLOS or Nature. Ultimately, I had some sympathy for the Sokal experiment in that it seemed to say something about the interaction of literary theory and physics. I don't get the same sense that there's much here other than "confirmation bias exists, even among gender studies folks!!!" which seems like it wouldn't take 3 people 10 months to figure out, and could be done in a much more direct way, and honestly isn't that shocking or rattling a conclusion. |
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So did I. The dog park paper more or less matches its description. The fat bodybuilding paper is exactly as described. The dildos paper is as described. Do you have any descriptions aside from the Hooters one that you take issue with?
> Yes, the methodology isn't that great, and the paper was rejected.
Sure, but lots of them were not. I'm not sure why you would focus on a paper that was rejected when they had 7 that were accepted.
> More generally, the "study" isn't selecting random journals to see if they could defraud -- it is instead aimed at specific academic targets and a "test to failure" scattershot mechanism is used. Thus we have no idea whether these journals are any more discriminating than, say, PLOS or Nature.
True, though I have a hard time believing you could get the same result in any STEM discipline, though i'm certainly open to data to the contrary.
> Ultimately, I had some sympathy for the Sokal experiment in that it seemed to say something about the interaction of literary theory and physics. I don't get the same sense that there's much here other than "confirmation bias exists, even among gender studies folks!!!" which seems like it wouldn't take 3 people 10 months to figure out, and could be done in a much more direct way, and honestly isn't that shocking or rattling a conclusion.
I think the point of all this is that the epistemology of the field is intellectually bankrupt. It's not just confirmation bias. It's that within the epistemology of gender studies, they aren't even wrong.