Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber on the dud gender studies “hoax”:
[T]he research design, if you take it at face value is fundamentally inept. The authors of the spoof claim to be both illustrating the problems of review by gender studies academics, and the problems of predatory access journals. But you can’t really do two for the price of one – if you demonstrate that a bad piece got published, you have no way of distinguishing between the two causal hypotheses that you are proposing – that gender journals will publish more or less anything as long as it has the right politics, and that predatory journals will publish more or less anything as long as you come up with the money. Indeed, given that there is already compelling evidence that predatory journals in the sciences will publish all sorts of shite for cash, and that the authors report themselves that their article was rejected by the journal they first submitted it to, it’s hard to come up with a convincing rationale for how the ‘gender studies will publish anything’ rationale is doing any explanatory work at all.
Yeah. I think they started out just claiming to be illustrating the problems of review by gender studies academics, and then added the problems of predatory access journals after a lot of people pointed out that they’d simply published in a predatory access journal and that that demonstrated nothing except the obvious. (Pay to play journal will publish any old dreck. You don’t say!)
Second, my own pretend-social-science prediction (which may of course be disconfirmed) is that Steven Pinker and other prominent ‘skeptics’ are not going to rush to acknowledge that the hoax has gone horribly wrong, even though it obviously has. On the one hand, the skeptics’ own theory of themselves is that they are cool headed, rational assessors of evidence, who hew to scientific standards of proof in developing and testing their personal beliefs while their enemies are prepared to believe in all sorts of gobbledygook. If this theory were to hold true, then one would have expected either (a) that skeptics would have rejected the hoax immediately (perhaps treating it with particular suspicion given that it fit so closely with their political priors about postmodernism and academic feminism) or (b) that if they couldn’t quite get there on their own, they would acknowledge the flaws in the spoof and recalibrate their own beliefs and public arguments as soon as the problems had been pointed out to them.
And yet that isn’t what happened. In comments on the Bleeding Hearts Libertarians post we get this exchange:
Comments
13 responses to “The fact is that it was ideologically impeccable”
Jerry Coyne loves that particular fallacy: he uses it all the time when dealing with theists as well.
“You Catholics endorse cannibalism! You believe in eating human flesh!”
“No, we don’t.”
“Yes you do: transubstantiation!”
“We have a belief by that name, but it in no way implies an endorsement of cannibalism.”
“Doesn’t matter — it’s all stupid bullshit anyway!”
Yeah, it may be stupid bullshit, but why bother attempting to formulate a refutation if you don’t actually care whether it’s valid or not? The above isn’t the world’s best illustration, but this technique is used constantly by Coyne and his ilk.
“You people believe !”
“No, we don’t. .”
“Who cares? You’re nincompoops anyway and your beliefs are bullshit!”
Serious Skeptic Guy says: ‘Who cares if our experiment failed to prove what we said it proved; we all know it’s true anyway!’
I am afraid that I seldom read Jerry Coyne nowadays. I respect him when he writes about biology, and on occasion when he writes on other matters, but I have grown tired of the contempt for the arts and humanities that – despite protestations about how much he loves the arts – so often comes across. What seems to underlie it is the logical positivist dogma that anything other than the natural sciences is fundamentally meaningless, which is to say, the ideas of the Vienna School & Ayer ; thus, there is the constant suggestion that anything not scientific is subjective, emotional, has nothing to do with serious thought or knowledge (the latter in particular being something that only science properly possesses). There is nothing wrong in not having any great interest in the arts (as Pinker has remarked a great many scientists are philistines, and since he is both himself – a scientist and a philistine – he seems to be using the word non-pejoratively), but it is wrong to assume, on account of your lack of interest in them and because you assume, as many people in all sorts of fields do, that what you do is necessarily the most important thing in the world, that since (you suppose) the arts are essentially meaningless, mere expressions of emotion, subjective and arbitrary, anything that might be said or written about them is also a mere expression of emotion or arbitrary taste and involves no serious thought or ‘true’ knowledge; and that therefore, when you yourself talk about them, what you say is also merely subjective so that instead of thinking about them, you have free rein to spout whatever feeling or prejudice happens to be uppermost in your wherever. It strikes me that this attitude to the arts and humanities, that they are emotional mush, mean whatever you would like them to do and can be written about in any way you like, is oddly similar to certain extreme varieties of ‘post-modernism’. So I rather liked the Masked Avenger’s remark above: ‘…it may be stupid bullshit, but why bother attempting to formulate a refutation if you don’t actually care whether it’s valid or not?’
There is also a bullying streak in the man I have come to dislike.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, like Coyne, is at the University of Chicago. has written well on Greek tragedy, its implication in the social world, its implication of us, and its addressing of profound ethical matters, as has the philosopher Bernard Williams. They are excellent books in many ways, but in this connexion I simply want to say is that they are models of how the arts can be spoken of in responsible and illuminating ways.
Alex Rosenberg drew attention to a fundamental problem when, in ‘The Atheist’s Guide to Reality’, he asserted, with Henry Ford, that History was essentially bunk since there was no way it could be proper science and make properly scientific predictions about the future… Well, I think Rosenberg, who has since written a probably not very good novel about the Holocaust based on the accounts of relatives of his, should be glad of what history can do; I, for one, was delighted with Richard Evans’s demolition of David Irving.
I remember, also, an American scientist with an Indian name, who was, he said, conservative politically, remarking in an interview that a great many scientists, he felt, were both naive and arrogant when it came to talking about matters outside the range of their expertise, and in particular political matters.
I should add that I much admired Hannah Cairns’s splendid rejoinders, one of which you have posted.
I think what finally ended any real respect in me for Jerry Coyne was when he smeared Paul Krugman for saying that people should vote for Hilary Clinton rather than DT by suggesting that he (Krugman) was angling for a job in her administration.
I lost my respect for Jerry Coyne and I stopped reading his blog when he deleted the following comment from this thread in 2014:
The woman who wrote that comment was smart and experienced enough to say women’s issues (skirting that loaded word feminism), so I take Coyne’s deletion of her comment to be literally an action against women’s issues (not a problem with PZ Myers, FTB, SJW, or any other dog whistles at the time).
I have her comment because I copied and pasted it into a word processor so I could write Coyne a letter about it. I’m sorry I don’t have her name because I didn’t expect him to delete her comment. I never sent him the letter because I just wrote him off at that point.
Ouch, Dave. That’s sad.
It’s sad, for one thing, because he apparently couldn’t slow down or detach long enough to see it from her point of view. I don’t know if that’s because of his loyalty to Dawkins or what but it’s sad sad sad.
Tim @ 3 –
I don’t know, though – the Coyne of the early days of his blog wasn’t like that. He wrote an impassioned post about the glories of James Joyce’s story “The Dead”; I don’t think a philistine could have written that. But the Coyne of now isn’t that Coyne, so maybe even that has changed.
But the bullying streak yes, and that’s the thing that puts me off.
Nussbaum – her stuff on the classics was what first alerted me to her, and she alerted me to Bernard Williams. Great stuff.
When I encountered sexism in the workplace at my first Biology-related job, I sort of thought it was because I was working in a red state, and even the educated people were caught up in the nonsense (and since pretty much all of them were also evolution deniers in spite of having advanced degrees in Biological sciences, I realized that sexism went deeper than just the “common man” I grew up with/as, but still thought overt sexism tended to be prominent only in the highly Christian areas). Now I find it pervasive everywhere.
That’s disheartening. I used to fantasize that I could get into a genuinely tolerant group of people if I moved to blue states, but at least some of these people are not from red states (and some are from overseas, like Dawkins). There is no escape.
I’m actually in a halfway good spot right now, because there is no nastiness in the building where I work; I do still get the anti-woman vibes from other parts of the campus, but I spend most of my time around people who are comfortable to work with and never (at least that I know of) treat the women with scorn, derision, or objectification. Now if I could just see that attitude permeate the rest of the city, infect the entire state, move through the country, and, as a result of globalization, manage to become the norm around the world.
Oops, have I been asleep? It appears I’ve been dreaming again….
Good to see Steven Pinker saying that the hoax “missed the mark”
Ah, so Salon wrote about it.
Of course, his comment about gender studies is a field that deserves criticism – while true – is a bit missing the point, since he seems quite put out whenever anyone criticizes EvoPsych, another academic field that deserves criticism. In fact, I think it would be fair to say that every academic field deserves criticism at times. If the field is a worthy one, it will listen to legitimate criticism, and attempt to improve.
“How does this sort of thing not spectacularly trip your breakers?” sums this up so well. The breakers are locked and hardwired in a particular direction and when it results in the house burning down they’ll still argue that it was right to have them that way.
The lack of flexibility in their thinking is astonishingly unsceptical.