Academics publish a hoax paper

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Two academics posted a "paper" titled "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct."

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/con ... r-studies/

They go on to pose questions abut lax, academic standards, for what amounts to a user-supported, open platform.

What if it is never understood to carry any moral authority, in the first place.

These trolls / poseurs could have used the same expenditure, to promote whichever worldview they prefer.

But, noone should feel obliged by it, like the free marketplace of ideas, public library, or open forum.

Rather than calling for more rigid controls, more partiality, they could acknowledge that it's philosophical anarchism.

Yes!! !! I found out about that last night. Hilarious.

it's amazing how "accepting equal rights for women and non-whites" and "maybe other cultures and their worldviews are okay, too" turned into postmodernist gender studies....

plus: the guy in the video says " abomb dropped". no, not really. yeah, the journal is rightfully discredited.
but: I find the whole concept fishy - academics having to publish a certain amount of papers in a certain time-frame, and then a for-profit industry around that will publish it all.
I think the system on which academia is built is faulty.
doesn't discredit individuals, or any particular field of study, but the way "productivity" in academia is measured.

and that way of measurement.... I'm sure an economist came up with that. And that's what the humanities are for: realizing that the whole system is idiocy.

I approve this thread.

What is actually going on in academia is the following.

For most fields of study at universities, there is very little demand for those with PhDs in the field. Most job opportunities for someone with a PhD will be teaching positions at universities. At research universities, professors must make themselves relevant enough to keep, while having little, if any access to funding for actual research. So what do they do? They write papers on obscure subjects and position themselves as experts in that subject. In social sciences, they often fluff up these papers with their own personal theories. As illustrated above, the papers could be absolute B.S. and still get published, because no one on the peer review committee wants to admit that they don't understand a paper, and those people on the peer review committee are often in the same position as the person submitting the paper for review.

It's a racket designed to create job security for people with PhDs in obscure fields with few real world applications.

As an aside, a lot of university researchers aren't actually interested in the subject they are researching.

the age in which we live

As I always expected, PhD and their ilk know everything about nothing, and nothing about everything.

I don't have any problems with Nye's ordinary haircut, or any outmoded, teacher-y thing he is wearing. One look at his mischievous face, and I think, Maoist struggle session.

I think, they think, it's rhetoric.

But, there's no telling how far they will go, to seal the bit.

This is like the criminal narrative, or an excuse to misbehave. People parroting this stuff don't necessarily believe it to be true; they're still using it, as a lever, or crowbar, to obtain precious resources.

Wouldn't surprise me at all. When I was in college, they had terrible adjunct instructors in math who couldn't teach at all. Students stopped signing up for those instructors. Did the university get rid of those instructors? No, they stopped telling students who their instructor was going to be, listing the instructor category as TBA.

Not the first time this happens.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair


*insert Warhammer 40k call to Purge! here*

Maybe its the other way around.

Maybe its actually a social penis, and that it is actually a conceptual concept (as opposed to the other kind of concept).

So to summarise:

- Authors write nonsensical paper and submit it to a low-quality journal
- The journal rejects their paper without even sending it to peer review because it is obvious nonsense
- The authors take it to a pay-to-publish journal and pay hundreds of dollars to publish it.

Essentially, after failing to trick a human, they just showed what we knew all along - that pay-to-publish journals are usually trash.

The predictive text physics paper was much better.

Authors did not pay to have this published. The University they're at has a fund set apart to have papers published in publically available journals, but the authors deemed it unethical to use that money for their purposes. This paper was published entirely on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Huh, now I'm confused. It was paid for, but not by the authors nor the university, but somehow through a third party.

Most material published in academic journals is rubbish. Just throw in a sophisticated-looking statistical model, put in a lot of references to equally stupid papers, and you're golden.