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15th August 2022, 12:14 PM | #1 |
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Wanky research pulled off website
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10....87941221096600
Thought about sharing this one in the science and tech forum, but then I don't think this paper advances the state of human knowledge in any meaningful way. Here is a preview of the article back when it was still on the website: Screenshot 2022-08-15 14.13.33.jpg |
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15th August 2022, 12:19 PM | #2 |
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"Find a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. What I love is spanking it to shotacon. What about you?"
-The author of this paper, probably |
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15th August 2022, 12:45 PM | #3 |
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NSF discussion of the paper at Vice:
Quote:
Turns out the "researcher" has a long history of sexualizing adolescent boys:
Quote:
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16th August 2022, 04:59 AM | #4 |
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I'm generally in favor of airing even the most marginal ideas, but an autoethnographic wank journal strikes me as an edge case at best. Whenever I find myself asking whether Pluckrose actually wrote the article as satire, well, you get the idea.
Goes to show that even some academics don't actually read a paper before tweeting about it. Thankfully that sort of thing never happens on a skeptic forum. |
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16th August 2022, 11:30 AM | #5 |
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The entire concept of autoethnography is garbage. It's just a fancy word for "I'm going to talk about myself because I'm too lazy to do any actual research". This specific case highlights the absurdity pretty well, but unfortunately the extreme nature of it also means that the focus will be on the sexual aspects, and autoethnography in general will largely escape the criticism it deserves.
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16th August 2022, 11:32 AM | #6 |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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16th August 2022, 11:46 AM | #7 |
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16th August 2022, 12:01 PM | #8 |
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Sexy garbage, though.
Quote:
Okay, that's cheating. I picked a journal about sexuality. I do find myself wondering why purportedly scientific journals are basically publishing LiveJournal / Tumblr posts, though. If I wanted to get inside someone's head, there's no lack of volunteers on the www. |
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16th August 2022, 12:09 PM | #9 |
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Glorious thread title. Wish I'd thought of it.
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16th August 2022, 12:10 PM | #10 |
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Reminds me of Nancy Friday's "scholarly" collections of sex fantasies, published in the early 90s. After school, I'd hop on my bike, ride over to the mall, head into B. Dalton's, and quickly skim a story or two for later "academic review".
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16th August 2022, 12:16 PM | #11 |
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16th August 2022, 12:28 PM | #12 |
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In fairness, the journal doesn't describe itself as "scientific", but merely as "scholarly". And the distinction matters, because fields like literature and history can be quite scholarly without being scientific.
Nevertheless, I don't think autoethnography qualifies as legitimately scholarly either, and your description is accurate. And in fact, one of the articles in their journal is basically just ripped right out of reddit: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ful...63460720961300 In fact, browsing their article titles is an education in and of itself. As to why... well, professors need to publish to get tenure, and if that means resorting to autoethnography or trawling Reddit, well, some publishers are going to meet the demand. |
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16th August 2022, 12:41 PM | #13 |
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You remain free to do so. The usual elements of viral denunciation followed by institutional deplatforming appear to be in place, although the "IRL" element seems to be missing since no one involved encountered each other in meatspace.
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16th August 2022, 12:57 PM | #14 |
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Ugh. Seems like this research is a stain on the underpants of academics.
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1. He'd never do that. 2. Okay but he's not currently doing it. 3. Okay but he's not currently technically doing it. 4. Okay but everyone does it. 5. He's doing it, we can't stop him, no point in complaining about it. 6. We all knew he was going to do it which... makes it okay somehow. 7. It's perfectly fine that's he's doing it. |
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16th August 2022, 01:01 PM | #15 |
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16th August 2022, 03:49 PM | #16 |
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17th August 2022, 12:10 AM | #17 |
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17th August 2022, 01:20 AM | #18 |
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I only read scientific research for the articles.
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17th August 2022, 05:19 AM | #19 |
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17th August 2022, 06:22 AM | #20 |
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TBH, seein' as the guy seems to be an anthropology student, this autoethnography exercise strikes me more as the kind of pranking your professor that only seems to make sense when you're a student and drunk. I mean, like when (way back) I wrote my philosophy paper about Murphy's Law after the disk on which I had written the original paper went corrupt, and I absolutely couldn't be arsed to do all that effort again. This one seems to have been either a lot more drunk or a lot more stupid.
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17th August 2022, 07:28 AM | #21 |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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17th August 2022, 07:41 AM | #22 |
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If they don't stop publishing this sort of thing they will go blind.
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17th August 2022, 07:47 AM | #23 |
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17th August 2022, 10:01 AM | #24 |
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I really don't want to do a search so I'll ask in the hope that someone here will know the answer. Surely "Shota" - described in the Vice article as "...an illustrated Japanese comic genre that depicts young, underage boys in sexualized ways or in sexually explicitscenarios surely that is in the UK going to be consider pornography and therefore illegal?
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17th August 2022, 10:14 AM | #25 |
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I'm not Googling the details at work, obvs, but in the US I know there's been court cases where the argument was is simulated or drawn child porn is child porn (or the same level of child porn or whatever).
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17th August 2022, 10:28 AM | #26 |
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“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago |
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17th August 2022, 10:34 AM | #27 |
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17th August 2022, 10:43 AM | #28 |
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This is one of those subjects that get decided by a court, then reversed on appeal, then reversed again on the next appeal. I used to track this particular question, but lost interest, and I've forgotten where the pendulum has swung right now. It's one way or the other.
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17th August 2022, 10:45 AM | #29 |
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In theory, just as depictions of completely legal sexual scenarios can still be pornographic, depictions of illegal sexual scenarios are not necessarily pornographic. I wouldn't want to have to test that theory in court, but for example if the drawings don't include visible genitalia, it might be difficult to prosecute as pornographic even when it's clearly implied, or explicitly stated in words, that illegal sex takes place in the fictional scenario.
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17th August 2022, 11:23 AM | #30 |
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The problem you are leaving out is the producers. Between the people trying to make pornography illegal for moral reasons and people consuming pornography for prurient interests, the people who actually produce the stuff are constantly making adjustments to their product to stay ahead of the law. This forces people to make further changes in the law, leading to more adjustments from producers.
A one-liner like, "I am your step-mother/brother/uncle/whatever", solves a lot of legal problems for producers, and is easy for consumers to tune out. |
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17th August 2022, 11:29 AM | #31 |
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17th August 2022, 01:43 PM | #32 |
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TBH, even leaving the legal aspect aside, I'm kinda dismayed that this even got published in the first place. I mean:
Anthropology in the 20'th century: I lived for a year among the jungle tribes of Bumscrewistan to understand their customs Anthropology in the 21'st century: I'll just write about how I feel about my masturbating to comics. (Or in the case of that Cat Pause fellow, "about how I feel about being asked to actually produce research if I want research money.") Like, fer fork's sake, find a proper statistically significant group of other wankers and produce a proper study Or maybe it's just nostalgia on my part. But then again, even nostalgia no longer is what it used to be |
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17th August 2022, 01:52 PM | #33 |
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How it got published is a genuine mystery. I saw that it was released in April and thought it might be a badly conceived prank, but it looks like it was published on the 26th of April, not the 1st.
If it was not an April Fools prank, then the editor of Qualitative Research needs to be fired. |
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17th August 2022, 05:01 PM | #34 |
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TBH, I'm not that fond of April's fool's articles and videos from otherwise respectable sources anyway. It's a pain in the butt to deal with people who misunderstood the serious articles, no need to give them that kind of extra ammo. You just know that they'll take it seriously if it supports their cognitive dissonance.
But yeah, this one doesn't seem to even have that excuse. |
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17th August 2022, 05:27 PM | #35 |
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I'm not sure it's that mysterious. Once a process is established as authoritative and valuable, it's going to attract all sorts of carpetbaggers, grifters, and cargo cultists looking to leverage the perceived legitimacy of the process to gain legitimacy for themselves without actually qualifying. "Peer review" is, I think, at this point in its life cycle as an institution. There's lot of journals out there pretending to be reputable. There's lots of reviewers going through the motions as a sinecure. There's lots of dishonest "researchers" looking for holes in the enforcement of standards, into which they can shove... Well, you get the idea.
Peer review is still a good principle. And there are still plenty of journals that do it right. But there are also plenty of journals that are jackassery masquerading as science. I don't think this has been a mystery since at least the Sokal affair. |
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17th August 2022, 06:21 PM | #37 |
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17th August 2022, 06:28 PM | #38 |
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18th August 2022, 05:29 AM | #39 |
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18th August 2022, 05:51 AM | #40 |
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I think people who love to bring up the Sokal Paper miss two important things:
1. It was published in a journal that did NOT (yet) do any peer review, and did NOT ask any expert's opinion before publishing it, so it really doesn't prove much. It's like saying I could self publish something written by my simple Markov Chains program on Amazon. Yes, I could. So what exactly does it prove about anything else? I mean, it's not a whole lot different than posting it on this site, which as the link above proves, I jolly well could. Just that nobody stopped me from posting it in the religion and philosophy forum here, doesn't really say anything about the state of philosophy (or religion) anywhere else. 2. It was in a journal of postmodernist twaddle, and frankly, it wasn't all even that ill-fitting there. I would assume that even after being told it's a hoax, a lot of post-modern philosophy professors were left scratching their heads as to how could you tell it apart from a genuine one. Or would be, if they did any honest introspection But at any rate, I don't expect they actually had anyone qualified in Physics in their staff, nor I suspect were they interested in how the Physics part checks out, as long as it does the right kind of navel gazing. Basically a lot of people seem to imagine it shows some profound and lamentable stuff about the state of peer-reviewed technical journals, when the whole point is that it wasn't either. If anything Sokal just showed what happens when you DON'T do peer review. |
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