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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup"

The "more" is really the important part, though. I admit these people are in my "outgroup" but the point was the sloppy scholarship (and my disbelief), not the outgroup per se.

your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak

My evidence that the individual scholars I am directly complaining about are doing exactly what I am complaining about seems pretty ironclad to me, to the point where I doubt it could possibly be so straightforward, to the point where I asked a bunch of Internet strangers if they could maybe check the Portugese for me because surely these scholars aren't that stupid but--yes, these scholars are apparently at least that stupid. To the point where @netstack immediately identified a separate case of this same phenomenon happening in other articles referencing Freire.

you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?

I care, as I believe I stated in my original comment. It's offensive to me, as a professional, when other professionals do shoddy work, especially when it costs me time. If that's not enough for you, like, okay! You should go talk to someone who counts in your eyes, instead of telling me that I shouldn't care about things that I care about.

And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit.

This is how I feel about all critical theorists, but surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.

For what it’s worth, I do think this sort of OP pushes the boundaries of

Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?'

“Boo outgroup” isn’t a rule. It works as a report category, though, because it requires toeing a number of others. Being a bit uncharitable or a bit general or a bit angry at Those People is normal. Feeling all of those at once is a recipe for less-than-clear thinking. It’s also a good way to get other people to make the same generalizations.

So I sympathize with @Gdanning. Your OP got my hackles raised. I made my response anyway because, well, the object level really was dumb. Not terribly surprising (per the gwern link), but dumb, and therefore a good distraction.

I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.

Consider a creationist, posting to a creationist forum. “Just learned about the Piltdown man. Forty years to figure it out! I don’t want to believe my outgroup were such misguided fools. Please, won’t anyone prove that it was real?”

Even if said poster had the best of intentions, there’s only one answer to the question, because he chose to ask about a hoax. And he’s asking to an audience which shares his preconception. And he’s saying, up front, how bad it looks for his outgroup if this suspicion is correct. What answer does he expect?

I have a lot more faith in Nara than in most posters. No doubt he would actually feel relieved to find a sane explanation for this scholarship. I will note that I answered his question, did not report it, and did not chime in until I thought I could add an alternative to @Gdanning’s position.

But in general, how do you know if the intentions are good?

We saw this with JB and his questions about child liberation. Show up, pick the least defensible parts of the school system, and ask if there’s any defense for them. He wasn’t booing an outgroup. But he was asking questions to which he already had prepared answers, fully intending to catapult into his pet topic. That’s not in the spirit of testing one’s ideas.

Yeah, I’m not really satisfied with the situation, either. If there is any place for actually just asking questions, it should be here.

My reaction was instinct. I think @naraburns could have warded it off by really focusing on the question, and cutting out the commentary on what it could mean. None of gwern’s leprechauns give me that feeling, because he’s clearly signaling “quirky research” rather than “possible partisan.”

But that’s a rather isolated demand for rigor. After all, this forum does allow hot takes, so long as they’re backed up—and nara wasn’t wrong.

Shrug. One of many, many reasons I’m not a mod.

This is all strange internet stuff, you've contradicted your own stance.

I don’t follow. Are you saying I’m outgroup-booing?

You supported the op in your comments, even seemed to be enjoying the process, then turned around right at the end following the other comments. This is inconsistent behavior and reads strangely.

Oh. Yeah, I can see that.

I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.

I literally implored y'all to show me I'm wrong. I actually wanted to be wrong about this. I wanted someone to show me the quote, maybe in Portugese, so I could say, "ah, yes, I'm a dumbass, that's much less surprising than all of these doctorate-wielding people being such complete dumbasses." That wasn't rhetoric; I came here to test my shady thinking, I wanted to be talked down, and the second thing you did was find another horrible example right there in the material I was citing.

That suggests to me that I'm not criticizing these people because they're my outgroup and I want to boo them, but in fact because they have earned criticism. Surely that's a valuable thing to learn?

surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.

Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.

And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it? Surely it is stuff like this:

"For example, think about the Resident Assistant system, where you have to report these fellow undergrads, whom for whatever reason, are drunk. Rather than center care practices of holistic healing, or therapy, they’re disciplined before they can understand themselves in this way. That is not benefiting people of color. It's not benefiting folks going towards their true passions. But it's really going to maintain the status quo. So, policing looks like surveillance in and out of the classroom, and it looks like literal police, and it looks like all of the systems of control that we have at UC Santa Cruz: for example, to surveil our fellow students. So it looks like the regents, whom have nothing to do with education, but are overseeing us. Overseeing. Do I have to spell it out for you? "

Emphasis in original.

Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.

Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.

But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.

And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it?

See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.

It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.

Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here.

Google scholar is great! It frequently provides a link to a pdf in some foreign university professor's home directory for a paper that Elsevier wants $35 for!

Oh you meant in terms of the paper quality in search results. In my experience it's fine if you know what you're looking for and what you're looking for is a field of research that actually exists. If you are affiliated with a university it's probably much less valuable though.

Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit

I am sure it is incomplete. Nevertheless, if this specific phenomenon were at all common in the academic literature, more than 2 hits would show up. For example, when I search for Freire pedagogy, I get 385,000 hits.

You made a claim about academic malfeasance without any evidence apart from one person. When I pointed out that the most widely avaliable source of academic publications contains no evidence of others misusing the quote, I would think that someone whose primarily concern is intellectual integrity would either 1) demonstrate that other, more complete, sources include many examples; or 2) concede that perhaps he or she misspoke when referring to academic malfeasance? Can you see that your failure to do either might lead one to infer that you are less concerned with calling out sloppy quotation practices in principle than you are with denigrating your outgroup? Especially given that you posted your comment not on a culture war forum, and your one example of bad practices just so happened to be by an outgroup member?

You made a claim about academic malfeasance without any evidence apart from one person.

I'm done talking to you. Either you didn't read my post, or you didn't understand it, or you're flat-out trolling (which I often suspect you of doing, but I try to pretend that's not the most likely explanation for most of your participation here). I gave you a list of several people who did the same thing, I linked multiple examples including books from academic presses, and then I repeated that list to you when you ignored it the first time.

"Oh but Google Scholar only has two examples" is a non sequitur in that context.

Well, I apologize for not going back and looking at every one of your links to see who published them, but I am afraid that you are the one who is trolling. Because if you weren't, and instead were acting in good faith, when I said that you don't have any academic examples, you would have pointed to the books from academic presses, instead of simply denigrating Google Scholar.

And, your post linked to four books: Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change (published by Policy Press); Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices (published by Stylus Publishing); Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education (published by Multilingual Matters); and White Reign : Deploying Whiteness in America (published by St. Martin’s Press). None of those is self-evidently an academic press. St. Martin's certainly isn't. So, again, someone arguing in good faith would have said, "note that the books I cited are by academic presses; for example, Stylus Publishing is owned by Big State University Press." But, you didn't do that.

Let me just google these:

  • Policy Press seems to be attached to Bristol University.

  • Stylus Publishing doesn't offhand have an association with any university, though they certainly depict themselves as a university publisher.

  • Multilingual Matters "is an independent academic book publisher based in Bristol, UK"

  • And St. Martins just seems to be a freeform publisher.

So depending on qualification, this is either 0/4, 1/4 or 3/4. What do you consider an "academic press"?

As I said, "None of those is self-evidently an academic press." That's the point: He is upset that I said he did not provide evidence for his claim of "academic malfeasance" nor "shitty scholarship" because he linked to a couple of books that are published by what are arguably academic presses, but his initial links were to Amazon pages. so in order to figure that out, you need to 1) scroll down to find out who the publisher is; and 2) google them.

And, let's not lose sight of the larger picture: If the misuse of this quote was indeed common "academic malfeasance", it would indeed show up more than a handful of times in a Google Scholar search. He is making an inflammatory claim about his outgroup, based on almost no evidence.

I gave you a list of several people who did the same thing, I linked multiple examples including books from academic presses, and then I repeated that list to you when you ignored it the first time.

Well, I apologize for not going back and looking at every one of your links to see who published them, but I am afraid that you are the one who is trolling. Because if you weren't, and instead were acting in good faith, when I said that you don't have any academic examples, you would have pointed to the books from academic presses, instead of simply denigrating Google Scholar.

lol what the fuck

Don't post low effort, contentless comments like this.

Tell Gdanning that, please. Most of his posts lately seem to be nothing but a lot of words to say "I didn't read the post I'm replying to". It's obnoxious and infuriating and hard to believe it could be in good faith and I can't judge anyone too harshly for this kind of reaction. Just because it's superficially more polite (although even that gets borderline at times!) doesn't make it higher quality.

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See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate.

I thought it was perfectly clear. I would put the onus on the other party in this case on being unreasonably obtuse.

How do you find archive.org vs google books? I mostly just use the latter. Does it have shortcomings?

I usually have to search for books directly at archive.org (but the same is often true of Google Books, with the difference that Google Books will then often tell me I can't see more than a preview). But archive.org will search text as well as metadata, and the interface is quite lovely. The primary shortcoming is limitations being imposed by copyright law.

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