Yesterday, I published my take on
the Sokal
Squared scandal on my page at Medium,
and was surprised that it got a bump from the editors, “Our curators just read
your story, It’s a Publish or Perish
World, that you submitted for review. Based on its quality, they selected
it to be recommended to readers interested in Education across our homepage,
app, topic page, and emails.” While the
recommendation immediately meant more people read my story than the one I
posted a week before (six reads vs. none), what really caught me off guard was
a related story I read this morning on The
Daily Beast. While I didn’t
specifically cite the Quillette story referenced, I did send the link to it to
my wife as an example of my sense that
the lefts’ obsession with identity was alienating people that should be politically
aligned with our larger goals. Yet, in
reading the Daily Beast article, I realized I’d been hoaxed (a direct response
to the Sokal Story) as well. The story I
linked to my wife was a hoax. The person
was not who he said he was and the publication that diligently reported on the
Sokal Squared scandal was guilty of what Peter Boghossian et al accused
“grievance studies” journals of. It was
this boomerang of people being blinded by ideology and not exercising due
diligence before putting things out on the media.
Strangely,
I’m still not sure this is really much of a story. My take is that if people want to be bad
actors and submit articles to websites or journals, is it really a surprise
that the editors’ bias might cause them to go full steam ahead with publication? Isn’t this what Post-Modernism (the Right’s
favorite bug-a-boo) argues? Yes, these
publications are “guilty” of not exercising due diligence before going to
“press,” and maybe they really are “guilty” of publishing pieces that support
their ideology. But the hoax, in both cases, doesn’t prove the second point,
while it clearly proves the first point.
It also proves a third point as well.
If you are a bad actor and want to hoax or sting a publication, you
can.
Using the ideology
of the editors against them is really no different than a poet reading poems
published in The New Yorker before
submitting there. Creative writers know
that you pick your submission based on what has been published there
already. Why do we think it’d be any
different in the non-fiction world? Do
we still hold on to the idea that objectivity is a thing? And, yes, I know that many people argue that
the Scientific Method and Research Ethics deliberately puts measures in place
to control for bias. Ultimately though,
aren’t we all taking some beliefs and actions based on faith or probability? Even the most controlled experiment “free”
from bias and replicated many times, may not be all that applicable because out
here beyond the confines of the lab we can’t control for every variable so
things may not exactly work out like they’re supposed to.
I
think we’ve reached a tipping point. We
have to understand that sometimes we are taking positions and actions based on
the best available data. Waiting for and
controlling for every possible variable may mean we don’t take any action at
all. Isn’t that what is motivating the
US government from taking any real action on climate change? Oh my, there’s still not a hundred percent
certainty that we’re experiencing human caused climate change so, therefore,
let’s not do anything at all. We may
never be able get to the “truth” but can’t we acknowledge that at the same time
we say, “We need to take some action.”
Why do we continue, to use a cliché, to make “the perfect the enemy of
the good.” So to all the people who want
to jump on this bandwagon or that bandwagon because their conclusions fit with
what they believe why don’t we take a step back and say, “I could be wrong and
you could be right, but let’s at least be open to what each other is saying so
that we can work together on making things better.” It’s not that we don’t have enough facts or
statistics to support one side or the other, it’s that we keep thinking that
facts and statistics are the only thing that will win the argument. And they don’t.
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