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Fooling liberal academics with fake papers is incredibly easy. For example, high-profile social science journals published seven fake papers deliberately created as an experiment.
Tellingly, the fake papers focus on subjects like “grievance studies,” “queer studies,” “gender studies,” “white privilege,” and “fat studies.” The Atlantic reports it is easy to dupe peer-reviewed journals’ staffs with hoax papers.
Furthermore, journals are publishing fake papers with appealing and sensational but politically correct subjects. For instance, Gender, Place and Culture published “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.”
For example, that paper contains this sentence: “Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?” Likewise, the paper claims some dogs feel discrimination, Federalist writer John Daniel Davidson explains.
Silly Fake Papers Fool Liberal Academics
Notably, The Atlantic calls this paper “downright silly,” yet they published it as “science.”
“The sheer craziness of the papers the authors concocted makes this fact all the more shocking,” The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk writes.
Moreover, many of these fake papers also show how easy it is to disguise political propaganda as “social science.” In particular, one fake paper contains a chapter from Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf rewritten in the language of “intersectionality theory.”
It Is Easy To Fool Academics With Fake Papers
Three academics created fake papers because they wanted to see if they could fool academic journals. With this intention, they wrote 20 fake papers “using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions.”
Yet, journals rejected just six of the hoax papers. Additionally, journals published seven of the fake papers and are reviewing seven more.
Overall, 14 of the 20 hoax papers fooled the peer reviewers at various scientific journals. The three hoaxers, James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian revealed themselves on Friday.
The three succeeded by deliberately pushing academics’ political buttons. For instance, academics accepted a paper advocating extreme measures to redress “white privilege.”
For example, that paper advises professors “to take considerable care not to validate privilege, sympathize with, or reinforce it and in so doing, recenter the needs of privileged groups at the expense of marginalized ones.”
It further states: “The reactionary verbal protestations of those who oppose the progressive stack are verbal behaviors and defensive mechanisms that mask the fragility inherent to those inculcated in privilege.”
Moreover, Davidson claims the paper asks for “experiential reparations” for students deemed privileged, including: “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” In reality, they have not published the reparations paper, Davidson admits.
How Fake Papers Fool Academics
You must read news about academic papers with a critical eye because of fake papers. Significantly, there are several well-known methods for inserting fake papers into scientific journals.
To illustrate, the most common method is to create papers that appeal to reviewers’ prejudices or politics. In fact, a fake paper might contain “evidence” that a popular government program works.
On the other hand, the three hoaxers used a more sophisticated tactic. They deliberately wrote papers in confusing but fashionable jargon that made sensational claims.
Conversely, authors may begin to focus more on writing papers for publicity and media attention rather than science. Journalists will be more likely to report on dog discrimination, white privilege, or reparations than real science. Such papers are likely to get published because journals want publicity.
It must be remembered that scientists and academics are human beings that are just as easy to fool as anybody else. As a result, you must always view news stories about sensational claims from academic papers with skepticism.
