librarypunk - 015 - Snake Science

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

This week we’re celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Sokal Affair by talking about academic hoaxes. What are they? What qualifies as a hoax? Will the Leather Archives be our next guest on the podcast? Find out! All hail the snake science.  The “grievance studies” hoax does not reveal what its authors think. Editor response to Sokal http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html  https://twitter.com/dwschieber/status/1047497301021798400 < Reviewer for one of the papers Opinion: I Published a Fake Paper in a 'Peer-Reviewed' Journal Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (jacobbuckman.com) https://twitter.com/450Movement  "Robo-snakes" by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Just burp into the microphone really loud. Welcome to library punk. I'm Justin. I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and him? I guess I'm next. I'm Jay. I'm a metadata librarian and my pronouns are he him as well. I'm Carrie. I'm an academic health sciences librarian and my pronouns are she hers. And that was me belching. Sadie's dead. Just kidding. No, Sadie's uh, she felt like that. She felt like that. She felt off a bridge. We murdered Sadie with a podcast. She actually died of podcasting. I mean, I believe it.

She fell down the cliff. She's the new cliff wife. She fell off the fiscal cliff. Heyo. Just three of us. And we're going to talk about... Just the three of us. And we're talking about just the three of us.

U.S.Colublishing. Hoaxes. Did I ruin it, Justin? No. No, I was going to say we're going to talk about scholarly hoaxes because I wanted to throw it together an easy episode for me. And that way you guys can, I can just read through it and you guys can interrupt me and it goes easy. It is the 25th anniversary of the Sokol affair, apparently. I actually didn't verify that it's like really close. When did it happen? What was like the date of it?

1996. It has been, okay, it was in May. Yeah, 25 years because I was born in 93. and I'm 28. So. I was just wondering if it was like in June, but no, isn't it? So it's close. It's, it's just been the 25th anniversary of the so-called affair.

But first, we have a segment, a new segment, legislation. Letting the Hamhorn trail after it ends. Makes a really good drop. Yeah. So, premium drops tonight. VSOP drop. So Publishers Weekly had an article that the New York legislature passed a library e-book bill similar to Maryland's. It went into law.

It might go into law before Maryland, and publishers who offer to license e-books to the public must also offer those e-books to libraries on quote-unquote reasonable terms. Both bills came despite opposition of the Association of American Publishers. the testimony and runs a foul with federal cop-in-right law and is unconstitutional. I didn't look into their argument there because I don't care. Yeah, they're cops. Yeah. Yeah, basically cop shit. Yeah.

And then there's a surprise. Any of Pod. Can we get corn on the pod? Probably at this rate. Sweet. Anyway, so Maria Palante, AAP, CEO Maria Palante reiterated these terms, accusing library lobbyists and tech-funded special interest groups of working to divert copyright protection away from Congress to state assemblies

and of spinning a false narrative. States rights. Yeah, what the fuck does that word salad mean? I don't know. Snake rights or snake rights? Snake rights. Treadent, Puisno Steppy. Treadent. Yeah.

So it's good in the sense that, you know, they'll have to offer e-books to public libraries. It doesn't say what those terms will be, though, so they could just offer them under the most obnoxious terms available. I mean, that's what Amazon and DPLA are doing. So it's like, oh, yay, oh, no. This was my reaction. to that.

Yeah, basically. And with the news that overdrive's buying canopy, it's just going to be a weird year, I think, for public libraries. I saw that free library of Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia saying that they had to get rid of canopy, and people were like, why? And they're like, no money. You want to pay some taxes?

Some guy was like, I'm sad. And they responded, us to. And he's like, then don't do it. It's like brilliant problem solving going on right here in the Twitter. Yeah, people fucked around and now they're finding out is what's happening. Hey, that's how science happens. Hey. Fuck around, find out is that literal scientific method.

Speaking of science. Speaking of silence. Science of the lambs. Snike science. Science. Science. Snice. Snice.

Science. Snake science. So I want to talk about scholarly hoax. Oh, go ahead. Let's do scholarly hoaxes. This will be an easy episode, he said. It is. Kerry's like, oh, contrary.

So what do we mean by hoaxes? Not with snake science. Make science. Publications that are submitted in bad faith. to prove a point unrelated to the material. And I'm using this definition very specifically because there are publications submitted in bad faith and there are publications that are false

and like the author knows they're false. But these are hoaxes submitted in order to prove a point unrelated to the material they're actually putting in. Can you give us a useful analogy for what's a hoax and what's fake for like a rectangle box situation? like boxes are rectangles, but not all rectangles or boxes or squares. I would say they're just entirely different things. It's not like all boxes or squares.

It's hoaxes are done to, can be done with fabricated data, but are done to undermine like the authority of the journal or the authority of the discipline. Whereas a lot of publications that are just false are usually to pad the, resume of a publisher of an author and are or are meant to push forward a ideological point with which they're trying to make in the paper itself like the vaccine autism paper as a fake versus midi-chlorian paper the wakefield paper which is what you're referring to that guy was actually a co-author he was a co-developer of a new um MMR vaccine.

Yep. Yeah. So that was why he published that research. Right. Yeah. It was totally for like capitalist reasons. Yeah. So he was lying and he falsified data, but it was not a hoax because he was trying to use the content of that paper. Exactly.

To make a point. For like a lawyer too. Yeah. Hoaxes are they don't believe the paper and they're doing it in such a way that it causes embarrassment most of the time. except for one that I have one example that might screw with this definition and maybe I maybe we'll determine whether or not it's a hoax but I want to go over so-called hoaxes so there's different types of hoaxes discipline specific so they're against a specific discipline or an idea so like humanities in general or postmodernism there are ideological hoaxes which they are

trying to undermine the authority of the academy or they are trying to undermine the authority of a whole field of study for political like culture war reasons. And then there are hoaxes that are just to show that certain journals are bad, which usually these will be done against like predatory journals and be like, see, we told you predatory journals exist. And it's like, yeah, we know. You just paid them money. You haven't proven anything. So I've got examples of all of these. So the first one, I would say against a specific discipline, is the so-called affair. And I wanted to ask, what do Carrie and Jay know about it before we get in? What is like your impressions of this?

Oh, man. What do you think it was about? I think it was about someone trying to, like, pull. So I read up on this. Jay, did you? I haven't been feeling well. Okay. So, no.

But I've been great. Okay. So, but in my little cursory Wikipedia thing, I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this considering I'm a Derrida person. Yeah, I was thinking, I was like, yeah, I was surprised you didn't because it's got, because Derrida was like very much involved in it. Yeah, but I'm, at least with like a lot of the theory that I'm into, I don't really know a lot about the people themselves. I've just read their theory. So that's sort of, like, I know Derrida was like Algerian. like French Algerian, actually, and that influenced his politics and his theory a lot, and that he did not agree with his work being called post-structuralist or post-modernist. And that's kind of what I know about him. But reading up on this, the sentence that sticks out to me is, at that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review, and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. that sticks out to me a lot because like I'm wondering how much like yeah this guy did it sort of like to you know prove a point but like you know academic writing especially with like post-structuralism but postmodernism is kind of dense and bullshit and annoying and so I can see where it's like oh this is a post-cultural thing this isn't science like I could see why they wouldn't

do it. So I can see how they get tripped up, especially wasn't actually peer reviewed in the way that we see now. So I think it sounds like an interesting topic, actually. If it were real, I'd be interested in reading it. I read an article that looked at the Sokol Affair and compared it to the Epstein affair, the Epstein experiment about social work, which was something that predated the so-called affair

and he compared it like from a scientific perspective like if we're actually looking at like scientific rigor and how this guy is actually like pulling off scientific rigor and what he's trying to do here he actually fucking fails

like in the process of like trying to prove that positivism is like Lord God King or whatever he's actually being not even that good at doing science. Right. And I don't want to get too much into philosophy for this episode because, but basically he's committing like an intro to philosophy 101 error,

which is, he says, these people are all ultimately relativists, which is a position that no one has ever held and ever could consistently hold that all truths are equally true. because it's self-defeating ideology and no serious person actually subscribes to it. You might find someone who says they do, but then so what? Like, end of conversation. There's nothing to talk with them about because they don't believe anything they say is any more true than anything you say. So it's a self-defeating ideology, but it's a straw man, basically, that he's arguing against.

And so he targets social constructivism as opposed to positivism. I was using the term anti-positivist. He's just saying, and to explain positivism, I've actually got a nice short definition. It's a philosophical theory that states that genuine knowledge is exclusively derived from experience of natural phenomena and their properties and relations, thus information derived from sensory experience, as interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge. So basically just common sense, the way you think the world works. Works. Correspondence. And if you want to dig down to like a theory of truth, it's like it's the correspondence theory of truth. That truth corresponds to things that are. And I don't, you know, we could get into theories of truth. But, you know, that's the most popular one. And really, you don't need to know different theories of truth. He's just saying that empiricism is the font of all knowledge. And he wanted to make fun of people who said, maybe it's not. And instead of doing that by writing, a paper saying what he actually believed, he said the opposite of what he believed. Which I don't understand how that proves his point.

It doesn't. Exactly. It doesn't prove his point because it would either show only that that one journal is bad and had no peer review and wasn't a very good journal to be writing in, or that he made a paper that was actually interesting and maybe should be explored more, which is actually which is actually something that comes up with the more recent hoax we're going to talk about. So to give a little bit, he created a caricature of the field. So the content of the paper is unrelated to the point being made.

And he could have made the point in any journal dealing with antipositivism, social constructivism, whether or not he focused on quantum gravity or not. So he could have argued against this way of thinking without having to talk about his own field of quantum gravity. And the thing about most of these hoaxers, and I think we might find a theme tonight, is they say, well, I'm a leftist or I'm a feminist. It's not ideological, but then they'll say things like this. And this is a quote, the editors of social text liked my article because they liked its conclusion, that, quote, the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project, unquote. So he's saying they only liked it because I said I like leftist politics. another quote. After referring skeptically to the so-called scientific method, the article declared,

it is becoming increasingly apparent that the physical, quote, reality is fundamentally, quote, a social and linguistic construct. In quote, it went on to state that because scientific research is inherently theory-laden and self-referential, it cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to heterode counter-gemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. and that therefore a liberatory science and an immense inventory of mathematics, burning the elite caste canon of, quote, high science, needed to be established for postmodern science that provides powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.

So his own caricature is also a caricature of leftism, which leftists do make fun of leftism all the time, but this starts to fit a pattern that we might see. As Jay mentioned, this is a non-refered editorial journal. This was really more of a magazine. It kind of was just like a leftist intellectual magazine. It only had editorial review, and it didn't do peer review. And in fact, when So-Call submitted this to them, they said, okay, get rid of the jargon,

which was part of what he was making fun of. and they said also get rid of some of the unnecessary references that you're making. And he was being a difficult author, so they put him in the difficult author pile. And so they didn't publish him in a regular issue. Instead, what happened was they had a special issue about like epistemology in science, and they thought, okay, we can put it over here. It's an interesting article. We'll put it over here with all of this other special issue.

And then, so I've got in the notes here, I've got some editor response to Sokol. But before that, that is a pretty like normal thing for a journal to do. It's just like, especially one that's not peer reviewed. If it's like, okay, we've got this paper. Like we will let you post it. And in the 90s, like where it's like, okay, we're going to let you because you've got credentials, we'll let you publish. I'm not saying that's a good instinct.

But I'm saying like, he didn't have a blog, you know. So they're like, yeah, fine, you can throw this out here. there are plenty of people who probably like So Call who create their own. I think there's like the journal of controversial ideas that just launched. Yeah, yeah, we've been pitching topics for it. Yeah, and they're just like, oh yeah, you can be anonymous and you can have any stupid fucking idea and we will publish it. It's like, okay, well, so the so-called do a hoax. He didn't destroy the field and he didn't do anything else.

it's really impactful. We'll talk about impacts at the end. But the editor responds to SoCal, which I'd never read before. So he responded in the Lingufranco, which was where SoCal showed that he had the hoax. And here's the quote, having talked to the real SoCal subsequently, we believe that most of the issues he intended to air are at this point rather well known to readers of social text and Lingufranca. Indeed, they have been going the rounds of the Academy since the first postmodern social constructionist or anti-foundational critiques of positivism appeared over 35 years ago, that many natural scientists have only recently felt the need to respond to these critiques as something about the restricted trade routes through which knowledge is still circulated in the academy,

policed as it is, at every departmental checkpoint by disciplinary passport controls. He appears to have absorbed these critiques only at the level of caricatures and has been reissuing these caricatures in the form of other. worldly fanatics who deny the existence of facts, objective realities, and gravitational forces. We are sure So-Kal knows that no such persons exist, and we have wondered why on Earth he would promote this fiction. So yeah, they're just saying you're doing the philosophy 101 error, which is, this is relativism. I saw someone on Twitter the other day saying that critical theory is bad because it says

all truths are the same as in the other truth. And it's like, you just defined relativism in a philosophy 101 way. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's clearly this is like culture worship. Yeah, like I was going to say, it's like, you know, despite his, quite frankly, terrible writing with that, like, end that you read. Like, I feel like that, like, without the straw manning that he does in general, I was like, how is this a novel thing that he's publishing? Because that's like the whole fucking point of post-structuralism.

Like, this, that's been a thing that's happened. It's like a valid thing to investigate. So I'm like, why did he have to be such bullshit about it? Well, something I didn't write in the notes is that a year later, he wrote a book about the whole affair. Oh, God, a very, if I did it moment. Yes. And this will return in the next one we're going to talk about. So the next one.

People love shilling. So he's, I wouldn't say he's like a full-time grifter, but I think he's got a little grifter. in them. This next group is full grifters. And so this category is ideological, and I've put dash political, since everything's ideological in a way. This is the grievance studies affair from 2018, which was in a magazine called Arrow, I think it was. And it's these three academics who made a whole bunch of bullshit papers and sent them out to be... Oh, by the way, one of them is like the owner of the... the arrow site. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was just like their personal website. I didn't think

it was like anything else. I couldn't tell the difference, but they made it seem like the website was more important than it actually was in the whole, in the way the whole thing is depicted. Yeah, they made it seem like a magazine, but it was just like from the moment I saw it, I was like, this is just their website. Yeah. So it's like a personal website essentially. Yeah, it is. I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be, but I could tell it they were like, we published this in the Arrow. But then You can't really find links to it anymore. I think they all just have their own personal websites again. The Grievance Studies Affair, actually, let me pull up the Wikipedia so I can get the full list of the papers that they did.

So this was clearly like a culture war hoax. Peter, Bacchosen, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. And they submitted these papers to journals of various quality. Most of them were pretty small journals. They didn't get anything into nature. And they said they were focusing on grievance studies, which are critical journals, cultural credit. First of all, the terminology tells you all that you need to know.

Oh, yeah. But it's, yeah, anything that's like an area studies, gender studies, LGBTQ women's studies, anything that is based in critical theory, essentially. Right, and race. And actually, most of them were actually focused on gender. Oh, yeah, for sure. Even though they say we went after all of them. Yeah.

So this was over 2017, 2018, and then they kind of got caught from because they were using made-up people or they were using other people with their consent using their names, like professors, Emirates, Emirati. And they were taking their cue from So-called. This was not the first time they'd done this. They had done another one a few years before in the gender studies paper, but it was in a. predatory journal. And so everyone immediately said, okay, well, this is a, this is an APC funded journal of low quality. Like, who cares? Cool prank. Great cell phone. Yeah, exactly. Way to post your elves. Yes. So what they did was, they decided to send it to a bunch of different journals. And the really cringy thing they did, because they were like, oh, this was, this was a study. This was an academic

study, right? And of course, if you see the videos, they're like, we just got our first win. And they put these on YouTube. They're like, we got our first win. We got one in. And it's like, win, what are you talking about? Like, we just got our first positive result. Like, you need negative results. You need nulls. Like, and they didn't go through an IRB, obviously. 75% of them were. Yeah. So there are 21 papers. Two were actually the same. So they usually say 20. And they, were just shopping them around until someone would take them. And most of them were just like commentaries and they weren't particularly interesting. The ones I want to talk about come from an analysis that someone wrote up in Slate.

Because the ones that did the most rounds were ones that faked data. So three of the most revealing ones were the dog rate paper, the dildo paper, and the restaurant paper. each one of them was built on fake data, which they claimed was done empirically. The rest of them were kind of like theoretical papers. It didn't really. One of them was actually just a collection of poems, which was not peer-reviewed.

But they were bad poems. I mean, I'm no judge of poetry. I'm an English teacher, not a homosexual. Oh, fuck yeah, Fry and Lori. Put on your red shoes, Major Tom. So they tricked some journals into putting out made-up data, but it says nothing whatsoever about the fields they chose to target. I'm reading from this article. One could have run the sting on almost any

empirical discipline and return the same result. We know from long experience, the expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud, whether in the field of gender studies or cancer research, psychology, or plant biology, crystallography, or condensed matter physics. and if you don't believe me, subscribe to the RSS feed or follow Retraction Watch on Twitter. You will see things that will really make you doubt the efficacy of peer review. Probably more than you should doubt its efficacy because, like, you know, your brain can be tricked into seeing again and again peer review failing. You think, well, it never works. But, yeah, peer view is very bad at intentional fraud.

And that's something I want to get back to towards the end and the conclusions is how do you actually protect against intentional fraud? Yeah, especially because it's like, I'm assuming unless it's one of those dick peer reviewers we talked about however many episodes ago who just like dismiss things because competition. Like you shouldn't be reviewing something like on the defense. So like that's how I can understand how an intentional thing might go through if they're honestly trying to take whatever article it is in good faith. Now, the rigor to which they're holding that might be the issue, but, like, I can understand why they work if, you know, they're actually being peer reviewers that aren't just on the defense all the time. Like, should peer reviewers be on the defense all the time? I don't know. That's another question, maybe.

Yeah, we'll actually get to that. Because one of the peer reviewers for one of the studies speaks up. And so going back to the article, the field of humanity's hoaxing appears to suffer from several of the flaws. the field of humanity's hoaxing, so hoaxing of humanity's fields, poorly worded, appears to suffer from several of the flaws to expose. For one thing, it's politically motivated in the sense that its practitioners target only those politicized research areas that happen to annoy them. For another, it's largely stacked, it's largely lacking in scientific rigor, as we've just mentioned. They lack

meaningful controls, clearly subject to the most extreme variety in publication bias. That is to say, we only hear about the pranks that work, even though it's altogether possible that skeptic bros are writing bogus papers all the time. Yes, they are. And you can go to the Wikipedia page for academic hoaxes and see a long list of by field. So computer science pros love doing this. Oh, there's actually, have you heard about the academic doppelganger?

No. Please tell me more. There's a guy who's like a tattoo studies scholar. And he had an academic doppelganger. who would like tried to be him and tried to present at conferences as him. Tried to present at tattoo conferences? Yeah. He even like tried to get the same tattoos as this guy.

I want to go to those conferences though. Are we sure that he didn't see his own ghost? And this is like, he's about to die. I never know. Like did Thomas Mann write this? It's actually taking place. the sanitarium in the Alps. Right, right.

Like, this is some German bullshit if I ever heard. I've read German bullshit thing like that. It's an allegory for World War II. And homosexuality, of course, because Thomas Mountain was real gay. Real fucking yay. Happy cry. Everyone go read death in Venice. It's very good.

Anyway. Yay. I like the Magic Mountain. I like the Magic Mountain. I like the Magic Mountain myself. So how many botched so-called style hoaxes have been tucked away because they filled for their point? This week's project turns out to be the offspring of another hoax from Lindsay and Boghawson I mentioned earlier. Published in May 2017, that one called the conceptual penis as a social construct, which is an excellent title.

Yeah, that's the thing. I'm like, oh, shit, I want to read this. I want to know what the conceptual penis. Conceptual penis. Conceptual penis. Conceptual penis. Why isn't this in trans cities quarterly as like a legitimate thing is what I want to know? Just to lose that big dick. Exactly. I have a Twitter thread from one of the reviewers. I'm going to read some of it. I was reviewer one for the masturbation equals rape hoax paper that tried to get published in sociological theory.

As a grad student, it was my first time being asked to review a paper for a journal. I'm glad I recommended a reject and the paper was rejected. I remember thinking at the time it was probably a master's thesis. that a student immediately turned around to try and get published. Lots of long block quotes with no explanation, long sections with no organization. I mentioned this all in the review. So I structured a review off in a constructive rejection I received from ASQ,

where the reviewer clearly had read the paper. So I structured, constructive rejection that I received, where the reviewer clearly read the paper, pointed out problems and offered suggestions. This is the type of rejection where I immediately wanted to work on the paper again. I don't like reviews that reject the premise of the paper outright. I've received reviews like that since my papers are on the porn industry.

So I tried to buy into the paper and offer paths forward. These are the comments that hoax authors quoted in their write-up. So they said, even though this paper got rejected, they were like, oh, they were taking us seriously. This guy was like, no, I was trying to be a good peer reviewer. I was trying to be, and that's like an ongoing thing of like peer reviewers being mean and just shooting down ideas and not actually. helping people get their ideas through. And so he says, anyways, I guess I could be more critical in the future,

but I assume the grad student had written a confusing paper and I tried to be constructive. I'm embarrassed. I took it as seriously as I did. I'm annoyed. I wasted time and I'm glad I rejected it. Yeah. I think that's a really good point because it's like you have a bunch of bad faith actors, right?

The whole thing is you have all these bad faith actors working with people who are working for free in good faith. like this is free labor in good faith that person sounds like a great peer reviewer yeah like I feel sorry and I mean like yeah it's just people taking advantage of labor essentially there's just like so much taking advantage of labor because you have all the privilege to do this

because you're a fucking grifter and like I know sometimes people like applaud especially this which I'm sure you'll talk about later but like the sting operation hoaxes It's been the predatory open access journals. Like, oh, yeah, look, they

showed them. And I'm like, you know, those, you know, the predatory journals, but all journals predatory. But like those, it's like, yeah, but like, you know, people's labor still. And it's just bullshit. And it encourages that kind of thing in other journals.

And it's just like, it's just people stop being dicks. We know academia's fucked up. You don't need to prove your point anymore. Yeah. And it's not that they're even, proving a point is kind of the problem because it doesn't solve anything. So how do you actually address these issues in academia? And then also, you know, how do you deal with people who are always going to be acting in bad faith to undermine academia in the whole? And Kerry has a note here.

It's a different manifestation of the argument that certain things like area studies, queer studies, women's studies, black studies, et cetera, do not belong in the academy, either as a funded academic division or as legitimized area of scholarship. Yeah, it's just telling people you don't belong. Yeah. And so these people were obviously grifters. They went on to write a book that was titled like, I don't remember the title, but the subtitle was like how studying race and gender ruins everything.

It was called cynical justice or something. Or like cynical theory. That's such a jump title. They're like theory is ruining the academy. It's like the ultimate centrist kind of thing. It's so anti-intellectual too. They're like hard centrist. Yeah, I mean, they're just Republicans.

They're just, they'll get there eventually. Cynical theories, how universities made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody. Universities made everything about race, gender, and identity. Yeah, universities did that. It wasn't like everything else. No. Oh, my God. This is the problem with people like that.

Describing the problem is the same as doing the problem. It reminds me of, and you're wrong about, has had, like, I feel like one or two episodes about this so far. But the, like, media stuff getting fucking overblowing the, like, wokeness problem among undergraduates and universities. Like, that's what this feels like. I'm just, like, someone was stupid about theory. And therefore, there's this problem. I'm like, no. They're like freshmen.

Like leave them alone. You know. You made this a problem. Exactly. You made this a problem. Stop writing about it. Yeah. Under the ideological, political thing, I have one that I wanted to talk about briefly and I'll just describe it because I couldn't find it.

There was is creationists. So creationists love to get, they love to have people on their side with credentials, but most of the time they don't like traditional. academic credentials and peer review papers. So, like, they would love to say this is doctor so-and-so, but like, they don't actually care so that these hoaxes don't actually have a big impact. So they can, so a biostatistics paper published a creationist who didn't like use explicit creationist wording, but he used things like irreducible complexity or irreducible mechanisms and stuff like that that most people wouldn't pick up on.

This reminds me a lot of that documentary that came out a few years ago, the like, the one about geocentrism, where it was like these like really tradcath like geocentrists who made this documentary that was just quote about the Copernican theory and tried to show all sides. And they got like Cape Mulgrew to do the narration. And they got like Michi Okaku. Oh no, Justin died. Mityo Kaku isn't like all of these reputable scientists. Oh yeah. I remember about Kate Leroux narrating that. Yeah.

And then like, because they had no idea. Like they signed a release, but it was never explicitly this is for a geocentrist thing. And like the types of questions asked were very like vague and broad or like your colleague said this. How do you respond to that? Or just like the way that they would put like little interview snippets out of context with these people who got like PhDs from universities that were never accredited and no exist anymore in fucking bogus degrees. But just saying this. person has a PhD. And so that automatically means.

That's what this reminds me of a lot. It's a very clever technique. Sorry, I had to refresh my page. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Absolutely. Cool. Yeah, so I wasn't sure because on the one hand,

the person who wrote this is a creationist and does believe in creationism, but he didn't argue for it in the body of the paper, really. He kind of snuck it in. So in a way, it's more of a, ha, I got creationist language in a way that makes it kind of a hoax. But it's also more of just academic dishonesty. So I'm not sure if these counten's hoaxes and there really aren't enough of them. But I just threw it in there because it's something I think about a lot because it just, it shows that it sneaks into every field. Yeah, it's real sneaky.

Okay, so how do hoaxes like, do we want to go there like with white women pretexts? intending to be people of color, like, playing. And white men, that literally happened at the University of New Hampshire, like a few people on Twitter. Oh, yeah. In the business school, I think, or maybe it was at business school. Was that the guy who's like, as a black gay man? Oh. He was pretending to be a black woman on Twitter.

It was bad. I just remember the as a black gay man guy who was. Oh, yeah. I remember that dude, too. Twitter's person of the day for a day. Mm-hmm. I don't know how this fits in. I mean, that's more of, that's more on a discussion of like their whole career is a lie.

But they believe everything they say. They just say, well, no one would believe me if my name, my last name was Moskowitz. It's got to be. Like weaponizing identity politics and also like white liberal anxiety. Yeah. So it's like the same kind of logic at play. And I think Jay just identified it where you're weaponizing identity. identity politics and like white liberalism yeah and you're you're relying on white guilt to like

kind of exactly the whole i have to be a good ally and stand back mindset yep which is which is very annoying because um but i mean on the one hand if people of color could get away with like pulling off stunts like that it'd be great because like i've seen so many administrators say well my job white administrators say, well, my job is to go to you with this. And it's like, no, you're in a leadership position. You have to make decisions about diversity and equity. Like, you can't shove that off on someone that gets paid a third of what you do. So if you could, but, yeah, that stand back and it's not my place to say is just a stupid thing for white people to do. Accomplices, not allies, kids. Basically. More or less. It's just, it's even less that. It's just,

like, don't be afraid to talk about it. Like, you are the beneficiary of the racist system. Like, talk about that. Don't just be like, just don't lift up the people who you have privilege over that you agree with and then remove any accountability. Like, well, this person said it. Like, don't do that shit. Anyway.

Yeah. So the third type of academic hoaxes I put together was against journal processes. or low quality journals or scam journals. And these aren't really hoaxes. I said, well, these are hoaxes, but the mark is the author because you're submitting to a scam journal. So you can't really hoax a fake journal. You're just like giving them money and then saying,

look how bad this journal is I got them to print my, my bullshit. And so I found the thing on the paper, right? Yeah. Yeah. This one was kind of dumb because someone wrote up, there somewhere, and it says some quoting, while some straight-laced researchers simply get duped into submitting these journals, other people write bogus articles for more nefarious reasons,

to pad their publication record, for instance. So, okay, he's concerned that his colleagues are getting ahead of him by publishing crappy journal articles. Okay. To lend an air of credibility to pseudoscientific ideas that would never pass must with serious scientists. So what can be done to stop predatory journals and give the public more informed access to legitimate science?

social media sites could probably play a role in flagging known make-believe articles as misinformation. Since most of the traffic of these articles is driven by shares on social media, that wouldn't work. Unfortunately, that level of moderation requires an ability to discern whether or not information is legitimate, which is hard to do for a tweet, let alone a 10-page paper full of scientific jargon. And it was very funny because his whole article of his write-up was a waste of time, because he came to no conclusion and said, well, they're wasting our time. and he did so by writing an article that wasted my time. And oddly enough, he's patting his own publications by writing this opinion paper about how he wrote a shitty paper for a scam journal. Yeah, I thought that was weird.

Like, yeah, what an interesting use of your time must be nice. It's like the thing about satire and irony that includes like, look, I'm being sectical or ironic about ex-offensive thing here. like yes but that means you also have to say that and print that and do that kind of thing like oh look I prove my point yeah by participating in the system what are the effect of these hoaxes and I think the major number one effect is right wing propaganda like what no matter what the intention is it's to undermine either the academy in general because it's framed as leftist or particular left wing ideologies within the academy which there aren't that many most of them exist outside of it of the academy these days, the most radical thinkers don't actually exist in the academy anymore. So, for instance, the grievance studies affair, I remember that they had some sort of connection to campus reform, which was the organization that like finds Marxists teachers and then like harasses them. And as I mentioned before, creationists actually don't get anywhere with these hoaxes

when they try and get their papers published in real peer-review journals. The followers don't really care about academic legitimacy. Only the leaders like to claim credentials. The followers are happy to have qualified people on their side, but they don't really care about their scholarship dominating the field. So the people who do this are like a very small amount of people who are like with answers in Genesis or the Creation Research Institute or something. And like five or 10 people care that they get these things published. Everyone else doesn't give a shit. So what do we do in the future? So as the guy who was talking about predatory journals said, he's worried about his colleagues patting out their resume. So how do we assess publications for tenure?

And I think Dora is sort of an answer to that. But also, I think, like, that could also be a whole lot of paranoia that I've had to deal with when people come to me and say, my committee is questioning this journal. How can I find out if it's, like, legit? And I'm like, I don't know. It seems like perfectly fine journal. But, you know, if you're ranked by quartile or whatever, then you've got to print in these journals. So it's very frustrating. It's an overall frustrating situation when you're talking about assessment for tenure. Or there's information literacy approaches.

Everything's just a Wild West now. How can you be more skeptical of everything that you read, especially if it's a journal that you don't know? I mean, like, a lot of that is just like assume best intentions for the most part because I think so many of these things are just the minority of publication. that are out there because it's just such a like considering like the amount of information

that is out there that people are researching and what they might find and what tools they're going to be using like honestly I'm not too concerned like if you teach people about information and about like how to understand things about information which is what good information literacy should

do like it shouldn't be a problem and also like maybe don't get too in the weeds about it because I think so much of that stuff is the minority anyway and if they think it's bullshit they'll sniff it out like because they'll have had like decent enough information literacy at some point like yeah and like oh I don't know like a liberal arts education that's not founded in positivism it's yeah I mean it's so not an issue because it's such a small amount of papers to get through. I think the whole point of the hopes is to discredit the entire field, which is like, okay, well, then what can the entire field do? I've got an interesting solution coming up next.

So for us to close out on. But yeah, I mean, basic information literacy can help. But I mean, that's really, you can have perfectly good papers that get distorted by the media. So, like, that's really probably more important. It happens in news all the time, right? Like, yeah, I actually, like, that is one of the things I teach, like, a first, like a second or third year student to do as I'm like, hey, here's how you can find the academic article from a news article because chances are you're going to get different information from that. And I use an, I use a vice article about how like, hey, weed and drinking could be good for you. Like, and it's an academic article that looks at the livers of people who, you know, smoked. weed and drank throughout their life but didn't have like, you know, destructive kidney disorders or anything like that. And they even controlled for that in their research. So it's like if you

actually look at the article and read the context of the article, you get a much different depiction. Also, my cat is scratching on a chip bag right now. Chups. She's cheese cheese chips. Yeah, she wants some chops. Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of curious in terms of, how to save the time of reviewers because I want peer review to keep working. And so how do you screen for bad faith? Also, what you said earlier is people aren't going to cite something. There have been attempts of people to be like to do AI-generated citation analysis, which is like this paper has been mentioned in a positive way or in a negative way,

and it would actually show you all the negative citations, which is an interesting idea, but it probably won't work. I mean, I think a starter could be paying peer reviewers for their labor. You know, what a novel concept that is. Go check out 450 on Twitter. 450 movement. I don't remember what it's called. I'll put it in the show notes.

But yeah, how do you screen for bad faith? You know, like name verification, you know, to prevent these kinds of pseudonymous and fake because even if you were using someone's fake someone else's name, like you would have to track down like an 80 year old professor Emeritus about hey, are you applying to their journal and they'll go, what? No.

And you go, okay, it's not you then. So to close out, I've got this one thing where I really appreciate this approach, which is this is about academic fraud for credentials not hoaxes, but it's

an interesting take and I appreciate the approach that's more fuck it than sensible. So to quote, but worst of all, because everybody is complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody is willing to acknowledge its existence. So he's talking about, you know, just getting just enough data to get published, just enough to get into a conference. And he says, because everyone's complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody's willing to acknowledge its existence. Who would be such a hypocrite as to condemn another's behaviors they seek clearly themselves, and yet who is willing to undermine their own achievements by admitting their own work does not have scientific value. But now that blatant academic fraud is in the

mix, so he's talking about actual scams, the AI community has a fighting chance. This is about AI papers. By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring may finally have succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. And here's the solution. Blatent fraud. A Aggressive fraud. Form more collusion rings. Blackmail your reviewers. Brive your A.C.s.

Fudge your results or fabricate them entirely. Don't skip on your writing. Your paper needs to be written in perfect academic English, formatted nicely, and tell an intuitive, plausible sounding story. Let's make explicit academic fraud commonplace enough to cast doubt in the mind of every scientist reading an AI paper. Overall, science will benefit. So that's his approach.

Fucking blow it all up, man. Fuck around and find out. Yeah, he's basically just saying make people so skeptical that like peer review has to get better. And the complicit kind of that everyone's complicit and kind of fraud is not really a huge problem. I mean, it's just like these results are pending kind of things is what he's talking about. Like you're getting your work most the way done and you need to do a follow up paper and stuff like that. and maybe you don't really believe it by the time you're done, but you publish it anyway.

But it's like, you know, that's a problem of academic incentives. I know it's not really a problem of the process itself. And again, it's such a small amount of the issue that it's hardly worth noting. It's just we put scientific publishing, I think, I think people like Neil deGrasse Tyson are people who say like science has figured things out and does rigorous work in order to understand things. And forget that science is done by, people.

He's so annoying. I fucking cannot stand him. He's like the poster boy for other science is real like yard signs. I believe in science. He also might be like a creepy sex dude. Oh, fucking coursey.

I've heard that, yeah. The fact that like people still listen to him when all that stuff is out there is a little disturbing. Yeah, I thought we had like move past that because of how annoying he is on social media. I guess not.

Yeah, I don't know. He's no Carl Sagan. That's the shit sure. He's no Carl Sagan. He will never be Carl Sagan. He's no Bill Nye. Eat a fat one, Neil de Grass Tyson.

He's no Mityo Kaku. Who is it delight? Bichokaku does say some bullshit, though. I mean, everyone does. He was my favorite when I was a kid. because I liked like, you know, string theory bullshit. I was like, oh, he's talking about like 11 dimensions. Fuck me up, dude.

Me at 10. Indoor kids. 10-year-olds. Yeah. That's really cute. I like that. Yeah. No, I was really into like black holes and shit as a child.

I bet you were. Yeah, maybe. No, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Actually, I was really into astronomy as well as a child. I was way the fuck into astronomy. I had all kinds of. of astronomy books that I read. I loved them so much.

Yeah, I took an astronomy class in college for my science class. We had a stargazing lab. Did you have the computer program on like Windows 98 that would let you track the motions of the planets in the future? I didn't have 98. I had Windows 95. I don't remember if it was 95 or 98.

No, but I didn't have it. I was five, so I don't remember. It was like, it was like trivia, and then part of it was like, see what, where the planets will be in like 100 years and you could like speed it up and it would like watch them move around the sky. That sounds familiar or like those fucking

star labs that would come and like blow up a little igloo thing in your gym. And like you go inside and they project the constellations on the inside. We had an inflatable body. Oh, fuck yeah. Yeah, I got the inflatable human body. That's better than the dude with the skin suit.

I love slim good body. The slim good body, yeah. I don't know how he's not a queer icon. I know. Why aren't we all wearing Slim Goodbody suits, honestly? I didn't see Slim Good Body as a kid. I saw that cartoon that was like the upside down kid, inside out kid. Ooh, that sounds disgusting.

That sounds not as cool. He was on a swing and he went all the way around the swing and that turned him inside out. No, Slim Good Addy was like a fully creepy adult. It's like, what is this, a Cura? In a speed suit, like, in amazing physical condition that tell you about how your body works. Yeah. And it was really something. Yeah.

Inside Out, boy, it was more like claymation, stop motion stuff. Okay, that sounds fucking nopas hell. Okay. I was supposed to be like, ugh. It looked, I think it was the same studio that ended up doing, like, Prometheus and Rob. What was that show? Oh, shit on, like, Nickelodeon. Yeah, Nickelodeon shows.

Yeah, I love that shit. What was the name of it? that show like the yeah there was like Prometheus and I think it was Bob maybe and then there was like the one with like little melted dolls that were really weird looking yeah kab boom yeah kabbam

that was it yeah it yeah it looked like the same studio that did cablam bring cablam back I can find Inside Out boy I'll post it but the kids these days don't know about cablam they need to they do Nickelodeon if you're listening bring it back

Leather archives worked, apparently. Yeah, big news, leather archives are our friends. We're going to do an episode with them. I am elated. Can't wait. That's the best news I heard today. So we'll start working on that soon. I'll get some special attire for that episode.

Simpai noticed me. Oh, yeah, no, I'm totally, anyway. I, we might have to record the video if you guys do that. Please. Yeah, yeah, I'll do it. It's very hard to podcast with. the ball gag, but... I'm a spider gag. Does that count?

Any kind of gag, really. I imagine it's not the shape. It's the function, is the problem. Not with that attitude. You gotta get the house. That's the point of the spider gag, kids. Snake gag. I'm glad no one talked so I can clip that.

So that's it. That's all I got for tonight. Jay is fully ready for bed. My back hurts so much. I literally have tears running down my face. Okay. Yeah. Good, good episode, though.

Good episode. Good job, team. Good job, Arthur. Good job, Maud. Wherever Arthur is. He's nesting. Good job bunnies. I saw little bunnies hopping earlier.

They're just vireth. you know. There's just vibing. There's just vibing. Bunchie. All right. Night.