Fake academic papers published to illustrate the shoddy standard of grievance social "sciences"

[Zorba]

Facts be damned. Science isnt about that anymore...it's all about feeeeeeelings.

Don't confuse soft sciences with the hard sciences.

But like I said before, there are a lot more journals than there used to be and the lesser ones are willing to drop standards to get content.

 

[imported_tajmahal]

https://phys.org/news/2018-07-beware-scientific-studiesmost-wrong.html

"The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy," said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.

This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."

Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made.


It's nothing new under the sun, not just in Social sciences, but in medical and other "hard sciences"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-false-claims/

Trusting everything you read is for small children, even if you're reading it in a science journal.

 

[pmv]

Might be a bit of a point in there somewhere.

But academic journals in many disciplines have always published a fair amount of rubbish. It goes back a very long way.

Not all journals are equally reputable though - surely to be fair you have to ask, are the journals that published this taken that seriously anyway?

I personally think it's to do with how class works. A lot of middle-class 'professions' (by no means just academia) parlay a small amount of real knowledge and useful skills into excessive claims for status and income.

The work that actually keeps the world running and does something of definite value tends to be low-status, boring, and badly-paid. A lot of high-status, well-paid work doesn't actually produce much in the way of real value. Economists, financial analysts, doctors, psychiatrists, and academics of multiple disciplines and varying political affiliations have produced a _lot_ of bullshit over the decades and even centuries, often actively destroying value or harming people in the process by getting things spectacularly wrong (cf the banking crisis or some of the misguided theories medics and psychiatrists have pushed in the past).

(psychology, followed by medicine, apparently has the worst reproducibility rate for published research)

In my experience the actual left has always been skeptical about academia. If someone's paying you a good salary to do something, there's a fair chance it's serving the interests of someone with power. Unfortunately we now have a strange academic left who want to be activists while still having a well-paid career.

I almost 'liked' Taj's comment, but couldn't quite bring myself to do it.


I wonder about this study, for example - how, exactly, do they control for the possibility that the same demographic or lifestyle factors (being poor, having a crap job, or poor housing or lack of cooking facilities or endless other stressful life circumstances) that make one predisposed to eat junk food might also make you predisposed to develop depression? They say they control for those who _already_ have depression, but don't say how they control for unidentified factors that might make you likely to become depressed later?

https://www.theguardian.com/society...s-risk-of-depression-says-multi-country-study

 

[UglyCasanova]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hungary-gender-studies-ban-draws-university-anger-170629116.html

I agree gender studies is a dubious science and a financially worthless degree to pursue but I don’t agree with the approach of banning it.