Off-Topic Update: Read the Gender Studies Papers That Inspired the ‘Penis Causes Climate Change’ Hoax

The Washington Free Beacon has a story on the background behind the recent gender studies hoax on which I reported here.  Elizabeth Harrington writes:

"We, like many, have been seeing stories and examples of ridiculous papers coming out of the far-left activist wing of academia, fields like gender studies, women's studies, and so on, based upon what's sometimes called ‘critical race and gender theory' or ‘radical constructivism,'" Lindsay said.

He first pointed to an infamous taxpayer-funded paper published last year that studied the "relationship between gender and glaciers." One goal of the study was to "improve human-ice relations."

"As many did, we strongly suspected the feminist glacier study was a hoax," Lindsay said. "But the journal and author stood by it."

Lindsay said he and Boghossian decided after the feminist glacier study that it was plausible to hoax the gender studies field, as Alan Sokal did in the 1990s. Sokal successfully submitted a paper that claimed gravity is a social construct.

Lindsay, a scholar and author, also said they witnessed many examples of gender studies proponents bullying other academics skeptical of their work, mostly by accusing their critics of racism and sexism.

Like them, I also thought the glacier paper was a hoax. The principle issue is that these people have become so theoretical that they cannot even make contact with the real world, so things that are objectively obvious to the vast majority of people escape them. Among the examples that are listed:

Donna M. Hughes wrote about a need for a "feminist critique of the scientific method," because science is "sexist, racist, heterosexist, and classist."

"Biological determinism has long been shown to be sexism, racism, and heterosexism at work under the guise of science," she wrote. "The objectivity of science has long been suspect or rejected."

Betsie Garner and David Grazian borrowed from West and Zimmerman for a paper published in 2016 that claims zoos are sexist.

An alligator's sharp teeth reinforces "hegemonic norms of masculinity" to boys, according to Garner and Grazian, who scold parents for engaging in dangerous stereotypes in conversations with their children at the zoo.

To your average, clear-thinking person, an alligator is an alligator. You know, order Crocodilia, family Alligatoridae, Sub-family Alligatorinae, genus Alligator. Not to these people. For them, everything is subtext.  Everything is grievance- or victim-related and nothing is objective.  They have to argue that the scientific method is sexist, because they cannot possibly use it in the service of their intellectually-bankrupt ideas. 

Off-Topic: The Troubling State of Social Science

Skeptic Magazine is reporting on a hilarious (in some ways) hoax that was perpetrated on the world of gender studies.  Two authors, Peter Boghossian, a professor of philosophy and James A. Lindsay, a Ph.D. in math and physics,  submitted a paper that, by their own admission, made absolutely no sense but appealed to far-left, liberal socio-political perspectives.  They write:

Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

In other words, as long as it bashed men, it was okay, even if the premise of the paper was completely unsupportable. As the authors note, it gets worse:

Not only is the text ridiculous, so are the references. Most of our references are quotations from papers and figures in the field that barely make sense in the context of the text. Others were obtained by searching keywords and grabbing papers that sounded plausibly connected to words we cited. We read exactly zero of the sources we cited, by intention, as part of the hoax. And it gets still worse…

Some references cite the Postmodern Generator, a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern “paper” every time the page is reloaded. We cited and quoted from the Postmodern Generator liberally; this includes nonsense quotations incorporated in the body of the paper and citing five different “papers” generated in the course of a few minutes.

On one level, this is hilarious.  It was difficult to get through either the paper, itself, or the authors' report of the hoax.  At one point, I was laughing so hard, tears were coming out of my eyes.  On another, it is deeply concerning.  The editors of this journal should resign in disgrace.

The social sciences have always had a somewhat checkered reputation in the general world of science, and examples like this simply reinforce this perspective. Once upon a time, I had an opportunity to read a social sciences dissertation written by someone that I knew at the University of Tennessee.  He made it clear that the dissertation had already been accepted by the graduate school.  It was terrible, full of spelling, grammatical and logical errors.  I marveled that, had I turned in the same kind of work to my advisor, he would have thrown it back in my face.

It is clear that, long ago, the social sciences burned objective scientific principles at the altar of progressive, ideologically hidebound politics.  This was exposed by the original hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, in 1996, in the journal Social Text.

What has just transpired in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, is unacceptable and all of those involved should hang their heads in shame.  Unfortunately, as the authors point out:

As a matter of deeper concern, there is unfortunately some reason to believe that our hoax will not break the relevant spell. First, Alan Sokal’s hoax, now more than 20 years old, did not prevent the continuation of bizarre postmodernist “scholarship.” In particular, it did not lead to a general tightening of standards that would have blocked our own hoax. Second, people rarely give up on their moral attachments and ideological commitments just because they’re shown to be out of alignment with reality.

Most people do not see themselves in the same light that other people do, and the facile nature of the discipline of "gender studies" will likely continue, in spite of this hoax. Nonetheless, these two authors have done an amazingly important service in exposing the shoddy nature of the academic standards of it.
 
P.S. for those of you in need of a laugh, here is the Postmodern Generator.  One of the papers it generated was from Barbara Porter, Professor of English at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.