There are no statistics available for this player Thanks for visiting The use of software that blocks ads hinders our ability to serve you the content you came here to enjoy We ask that you consider turning off your ad blocker so we can deliver you the best experience possible while you are here After veering from the adult contemporary and pop worlds Montreal blues singer Sarah Sokal is bringing a sensational and powerful new album Twisted Games to listeners led by a delectable brawny single “Man Made.” It’s a beefy party-starting track that showcases Sokal’s alluring and alarmingly strong pipes keeping the blues alive by bridging the gap between tradition and modernity drawing in a younger audience who appreciate both timeless blues and the appeal of mainstream music “Man Made,” co-written by Sokal and Stewart McKie and produced by DUBë (who also mixed brings to mind the likes of classic Amy Winehouse and the late Sharon Jones with its feel-good Keyboardist Dave Lines complements Sokal’s introductory verse before guitarist Andy Dacoulis and drummer Jean Nadeau flesh the “Man Made” to perfection It’s a track that almost out-Dap-Kings Jones’ iconic backing group “I feel like being a woman in the industry calls for having a male sherpa to climb up!” Sokal says “I have always been accompanied by a chosen male advisor/protector I would love to experience being more surrounded by women creatives in the future but it wasn’t in my cards that much so far.” who cites Beth Hart and Susan Tedeschi as influences along with icons such as Peggy Lee grew up listening to rock and rhythm and blues in her teens That blues passion resurfaced and solidified after meeting producer Marc Dube for a coffee in Montreal a few years ago and I had a strong desire to record a full blues album destined to be a vengeance album turning the ugly I’ve experienced through my journey in the industry into something beautiful and empowering,” she says “Man Made” is from Sokal’s Twisted Games album a 13-track release whose origins began during the pandemic and faced challenges with social distancing during the recording process Wanting to put her own stamp on the record Sokal found the freedom to “express myself better” with this record and developing her artistic identity and sound She also says the creative process is what fuels her passion “It is never fully conscious decisions; I just go along with my instincts,” Sokal says “I like to paint and write songs without a plan or a proper canvas That’s where the pure and true energy feeds my imagination.” Sokal has had an illustrious career thus far Writing her first song at age five (entitled “Pourquoi”) the musician professionally recorded her first song “I’m Lost” when she was just 15 From there she performed as a teenager in various hotels around Montreal and Quebec before forming The Sarah Sokal Band Her group performed at various private functions She is also a vocal coach and has worked with a variety of Juno Award-nominated and Juno Award-winning artists Sokal’s previous releases include EPs entitled Ink and Paper the five-song effort Your Song and Broken Promises who recently performed at Montreal’s Sutton en Blues Festival was also a runner-up in the International Songwriting Contest’s Song of the Year category Now with “Man Made” sure to make airwaves internationally Sarah Sokal will be performing at Montreal’s La Marche A Cote on Dec It’s the first single in a new chapter of her career that should see her rise to new heights I have the accent of Celine and the face of Stevie Nicks,” Sokal quips “I think I can live with that for a while.” Using “Man Made” as a yardstick we can certainly live with Sarah Sokal for years to come '#' : location.hash;window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUQuery = location.search === '' && location.href.slice(0 location.href.length - window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash.length).indexOf('?') !== -1 '?' : location.search;if (window.history && window.history.replaceState) {var ogU = location.pathname + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUQuery + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash;history.replaceState(null "\/hope-is-mandatory-2\/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=c9EhXJKJwaz6hQQ3oThBMfxKn0irRwJLLYqYCTUYiws-1746538391-1.0.1.1-2ewuqZXYwcKhqWApoSFqTDM7gyQyf19LQ6CmcHzxoyY" + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash);cpo.onload = function() {history.replaceState(null ogU);}}document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(cpo);}()); Laura Sokal has received funding from SSHRC and the Canadian Mental Health Association Lesley Eblie Trudel has received funding from SSHRC and the Canadian Mental Health Association View all partners The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted schooling on a global scale challenging teachers with a flood of unmanageable demands These demands have persisted, resulting in an echo-pandemic of educator absences and attrition — educators leaving their jobs — that threatens the health of schools We wrote about ways to support teachers during the pandemic based on our 2020 national survey of more than 1,300 Canadian teachers Since then, we have followed more that 7,000 educators in their navigation and coping efforts during and after the pandemic. From these findings, we published more than 25 research articles reports to government and to the Canadian Mental Health Association A downside is these conversations reflect education systems that are out of balance in terms of resources and needs In the United States, the National Center for Education Statistics reported a rise in teacher absenteeism after the pandemic In Canada, research based on data collected from educators in Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador from September 2022 to August 2023 found “a significant association between sick days and the prevalence and severity of high stress, low resilience, burnout, anxiety, and depression among educators.” This study by psychiatry researcher Belinda Agyapong and colleagues also noted “short-term sick leave can escalate into long-term absences without adequate support for teachers.” Rampant absenteeism has severe financial costs. In 2023, the cost of educator absences was $213 million in the Toronto District School Board alone There are academic and social-emotional costs to students when their schooling is disrupted by educators’ frequent absences Schools across Ontario face shortages of administrators educational assistants and office staff on a daily basis An important step in solving a problem is defining its nature. A framework called the job demands-resources model developed by psychologists from the Netherlands provides a useful lens for understanding why educators are missing so much time at work It posits how personal and job characteristics foster employee well-being suggesting workplaces can be understood as a teeter-totter with demands on one end and resources on the other When employees have enough resources to meet demands and the organization’s goals are more likely to be met It is expected that resources in schools are supplied by employers adequate prep time and supports to meet complex student needs It is important to note that resources are also supplied by employees such as self-care practices and job skills administrators in charge of available resources and provincial policymakers in charge of overall funding to education must work together to achieve and maintain the balance between demands and resources So how have the demands experienced by educators changed since 2020 Our most recent research showed 60 per cent of survey respondents have experienced large increases in students’ academic Survey data were collected in Manitoba during the first four months of 2024 at voluntary school-based workshops provided by a national health organization over 30 per cent of respondents said they are rarely or never able to meet all these needs with their current resources Within education systems across the country, the demands are of greater number and intensity than prior to the pandemic without adequate resources to keep up Increased student needs are not being met within the current education system, and teachers’ workload and work-life balance are suffering UNESCO’s predicted 2030 global teacher shortage of 44 million teachers provides an impetus to solve this issue quickly Although there are calls for higher salaries for teachers in some countries, Canadian teachers are paid well and some have received recent salary increases salary raises alone do not make a job sustainable So how can we remedy the situation to bring back not only the effectiveness of our educational settings but also the joy of schooling Recognition of the current imbalance has resulted in some “bright lights” that show the way for other school systems to curb educator absences and attrition These initiatives suggest some governments and policymakers are aware of the imbalances and are working to address them Importantly, attention to the needs of education sector employees beyond teachers like educational assistants psychologists) is necessary to re-establish balance When educators are properly resourced to do their jobs and are allowed to see the results in positive learning and growth of their students the education system is adequately and proactively resourced to meet the demands schools can become better places to work and learn Reduced educator attrition and absences will be good indicators of a system regaining its balance Stockton University 101 Vera King Farris Drive Galloway, NJ 08205-9441 (609) 652-1776 Maps, Directions & Parking Accessibility Statement Additional Locations A scientist’s political and social values may influence her selection of topics to study — that is perfectly legitimate But those values should be carefully put to the side when evaluating the evidence has been the official policy of the scientific community for the past three centuries — implemented imperfectly but nevertheless functioning as an important regulative ideal But times have changed: now ideology threatens openly to corrupt the truth-seeking enterprise that we call science Two years ago, the prestigious journal Nature issued a new “ethics guidance” concerning proposed submissions But the guidance does not pertain simply to the protection of human research subjects; that issue has been strictly regulated for decades Nor is it about restricting the publication of information that poses serious material dangers such as facilitating the production of nuclear or biological weapons the guidance purports to address other forms of “harm” that could be caused by a scientific publication the editors arrogate to themselves an astoundingly broad power That vague and subjective language is an open door to ideological censorship of valid scientific contributions — a censorship that the editors do not even attempt to disguise It is therefore imperative to evaluate the justifications that the editors of Nature have offered in support of this brave new policy This is an excerpt. Read the full article here Metrics details Data from 1661 consecutive subjects with chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) receiving initial imatinib (n = 1379) or a 2nd-generation tyrosine-kinase inhibitor (2G-TKI; n = 282) were interrogated to determine whether the Sokal or European Treatment and Outcome Study for CML (EUTOS) long-term survival (ELTS) scores were more accurate responses and outcome predictors Both scores predicted probabilities of achieving complete cytogenetic response (CCyR) failure- and progression-free survivals (FFS and survival in all subjects and those receiving imatinib therapy the ELTS score was a better predictor of MR4 and CML-related survival than the Sokal score only the ELTS score accurately predicted probabilities of CCyR subjects classified as intermediate risk by the ELTS score receiving a 2G-TKI had better responses (p < 0.001~0.061) Our data suggest better overall prediction accuracy for the ELTS score compared with the Sokal score in CML patients People identified as intermediate risk by the ELTS score may benefit more from initial 2G-TKI therapy in achieving surrogate endpoints but not survival especially when a briefer interval to stopping TKI therapy is the therapy objective We compared prediction accuracies of the Sokal and ELTS scores on responses and outcomes in 1661 consecutive subjects with chronic-phase CML receiving imatinib or a 2G-TKI We found better overall prediction accuracy for the ELTS score People identified as intermediate risk in the ELTS score may benefit more from 2G-TKI therapy compared with imatinib in achieving surrogate endpoints but not CML-related survival or survival The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Peking University People’s Hospital compliant with the Helsinki Declaration Descriptive statistics were used to summarize covariates Categorical variables are reported as percentages and counts and continuous variables as medians and ranges Pearson chi-squared test (for categorical variables) and Mann–Whitney U test (for continuous variables) were used to compare the imatinib and 2G-TKI cohorts and MR4.5 were calculated using the Fine-Gray test that considered competing events such as death Failure- and progression-free survivals (FFS and survival were calculated using the Kaplan-Meier estimator and log-rank tests Potential predictive covariates for diverse responses and outcomes were tested in univariable analyses and those with p < 0.2 were included in multivariable analyses using a backward-elimination process to fit a Cox regression model Cox regression models were built to identify independent covariates associated with responses and outcomes reported as hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) FFS was calculated from TKI-therapy start to therapy failure or censored at the last follow-up PFS was calculated as TKI-therapy start to progression CML-related survival was calculated from TKI-therapy start to death from CML progression or censored at the last follow-up Survival was calculated as TKI therapy to death from any cause or censored at the last follow-up Propensity-score matching was used to explore whether the Sokal or ELTS score was a better predictor of responses and outcomes to imatinib or 2G-TKI as 1st therapy including all covariates tested in the univariable analyses Covariate balance was evaluated using the standardized absolute mean difference (SAMD) SAMD < 0.02 was considered adequate balance A two-sided test with p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant and GraphPad Prism 8 (GraphPad Software Inc. Subjects initially receiving a 2G-TKI therapy were younger (p < 0.001), had the higher WBC counts (p = 0.001), lower hemoglobin concentration (p < 0.001), higher percentages of blood blasts (p = 0.001), and basophils (p = 0.003), and were more likely high-risk using Sokal and ELTS scores (p < 0.001; Table 1) 33–85 months) in the imatinib cohort and 46 months (IQR 19–68 months) in the 2G-TKI cohort (p < 0.001) because of the later availability of 2G-TKIs 1074 subjects (78%) in the imatinib cohort and 247 in the 2G-TKI cohort remained on their 1st TKI (79% vs 298 subjects (22%) receiving initial imatinib switched to nilotinib (n = 224) olverembatinib (n = 8) as their 2nd (n = 257) or 3rd (n = 33) adverse events (n = 33) or by choice (n = 23) 33 subjects (12%) receiving initial 2G-TKI therapy switched to imatinib (n = 27) or olverembatinib (n = 6) as 2nd (n = 31) or 3rd (n = 2) TKI because of cost (n = 17) 9 subjects receiving initial imatinib (n = 7) or 2G-TKI (n = 2) discontinued TKI therapy after achieving ≥ MR4 19 subjects were lost to follow-up totally survival and CML-related survival by Sokal score Because of significant differences in baseline covariates between the imatinib and 2G-TKI cohorts, we used propensity-score matching to adjust subjects. In total 1332 matches were identified in the imatinib (n = 1064; 80%) and 2G-TKI (n = 268; 20%) cohorts (Table 3) We compared predictive accuracies of the Sokal and ELTS scores in 1661 subjects with chronic-phase CML We found that the ELTS score was a better overall response and outcome predictor especially in subjects receiving initial 2G-TKI therapy Based on HRs and CIs in multivariable analyses the ELTS score was a better discriminator between risk cohorts than the Sokal score these studies may not have been comparable for therapies given after initial 2G-TKI therapy It is not surprising that the ELTS score is a better predictor of responses and outcomes of TKI therapy because it was derived from a dataset of subjects receiving TKI therapy whereas the Sokal score was developed in a dataset of subjects receiving other therapies the Sokal score is best considered prognostic rather than predictive score better reflecting CML biology than therapy persons with substantial other health problems were less likely to travel to our center Because there was no consensus definition of accelerated phase we analyzed our data including and excluding subjects in whom progression to accelerated phase was the failure event Complicating the NCCN recommendation is the question which predictive score should be used to classify someone as intermediate- or highrisk in subjects classified as intermediate risk using the Sokal or ELTS scores we found that initial 2G-TKI therapy improved that proportions of CCyR and FFS compared with initial imatinib therapy but not CML-related survival or survival In subjects classified as intermediate risk using the ELTS but not the Sokal score initial therapy with a 2G-TKI resulted in better PFS but not better CML-related survival or survival This finding may influence TKI-therapy decisions for physicians focused on surrogate endpoints Why 2G-TKIs had no advantage in high-risk subjects identified by both scores could reflect relatively few subjects but also no favorable impact of 2G-TKIs when disease biology is highly unfavorable the number of subjects receiving initial 2G-TKI therapy was only 282 2G-TKIs were available only after 2011 resulting in an imbalance in follow-up therapy options for subjects failing imatinib before 2011 were restricted there are likely selection biases which we tried to account for propensity-score matching We accept this is an imperfect simulation of a randomized controlled trial our subjects were younger than in most other CML studies in persons of predominantly European descent and need validation in these populations our data are from a specialized tertiary CML center with subjects coming from all over a large country This obviously introduces subject-selection biases we did not consider other 2G-TKIs approved for initial therapy Whether our conclusions apply to these drugs is unknown we did not analyze interval to stopping TKI therapy or success rate of therapy-free remission we did not monitor adherence to TKI therapy which may have differed for different TKIs we found better overall prediction accuracy for the ELTS score compared with the Sokal score in persons with chronic-phase CML receiving TKI therapy People identified as intermediate risk in the ELTS score may benefit from 2G-TKI therapy compared with imatinib in achieving surrogate endpoints but not in CML-related survival or survival The interval from start to stopping TKI-therapy and success rates of therapy-free remission were not compared A new prognostic score for survival of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia treated with interferon alfa writing committee for the collaborative CML prognostic factors project group Prognostic discrimination in “good-risk” chronic granulocytic leukemia EUTOS scores and pharmacogenetic factors on the complete cytogenetic response at 1 year in chronic myeloid leukemia patients treated with imatinib A comparative study of Hasford score and Sokal index in prognostication of the novo chronic myeloid leukemia patients and a search for new prognostic markers EUTOS CML prognostic scoring system predicts ELN-based ‘event-free survival’ better than Euro/Hasford and Sokal systems in CML patients receiving front-line imatinib mesylate Comparison of the utility and applicability of the Sokal and EUTOS scores in a population of Chinese patients with chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia undergoing imatinib therapy Predicting complete cytogenetic response and subsequent progression-free survival in 2060 patients with CML on imatinib treatment: the EUTOS score Prognosis of long-term survival considering disease-specific death in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia EUTOS long-term survival score discriminates different Sokal score categories in chronic myeloid leukemia patients analysis of the GIMEMA CML observational study The use of EUTOS long-term survival score instead of Sokal score is strongly advised in elderly chronic myeloid leukemia patients Validation of the EUTOS long-term survival score in a recent independent cohort of “real world” CML patients Prognostic discrimination based on the EUTOS long-term survival score within the International registry for chronic myeloid leukemia in children and adolescents The EUTOS long-term survival score accurately predicts the risk of death in chronic myeloid leukaemia patients treated outside of clinical trials The EUTOS long-term survival (ELTS) score is superior to the Sokal score for predicting survival in chronic myeloid leukemia The EUTOS long-term survival score predicts disease-specific mortality and molecular responses among patients with chronic myeloid leukemia in a practice-based cohort Validation of the EUTOS long-term survival score in Chinese chronic myeloid leukemia patients treated with imatinib: a multicenter real-world study European LeukemiaNet 2020 recommendations for treating chronic myeloid leukemia NCCN clinical practice guidelines in oncology Chronic myeloid leukemia: an update of concepts and management recommendations of European LeukemiaNet European leukemiaNet recommendations for the management of chronic myeloid leukemia: 2013 Evolving concepts in the management of chronic myeloid leukemia: recommendations from an expert panel on behalf of the European leukemiaNet Which method better evaluates the molecular response in newly diagnosed chronic phase chronic myeloid leukemia patients with imatinib treatment BCR-ABL(IS) or log reduction from the baseline level Differences in treatment and monitoring of chronic myeloid leukemia with regard to age but not sex: Results from a population-based study Bosutinib Versus Imatinib for Newly Diagnosed Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: Results From the Randomized BFORE Trial imatinib in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia in chronic phase (CML-CP) who have not achieved an optimal response to 3 months of imatinib therapy: the DASCERN randomized study Final 5-Year study results of DASISION: the dasatinib versus imatinib study in treatment-naïve chronic myeloid leukemia patients trial Bosutinib for pretreated patients with chronic phase chronic myeloid leukemia: primary results of the phase 4 BYOND study Long-term benefits and risks of frontline nilotinib vs imatinib for chronic myeloid leukemia in chronic phase: 5-year update of the randomized ENESTnd trial Long-term outcomes with frontline nilotinib versus imatinib in newly diagnosed chronic myeloid leukemia in chronic phase: ENESTnd 10-year analysis Dasatinib in imatinib-resistant or -intolerant chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia patients: 7-year follow-up of study CA180-034 Early molecular response and female sex strongly predict stable undetectable BCR-ABL1 the criteria for imatinib discontinuation in patients with CML Sex correlates with differences in long-term outcome in chronic myeloid leukaemia patients treated with imatinib Gender and BCR-ABL transcript type are correlated with molecular response to imatinib treatment in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia Adherence is the critical factor for achieving molecular responses in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia who achieve complete cytogenetic responses on imatinib Hyperleukocytosis and leukostasis in acute myeloid leukemia: can a better understanding of the underlying molecular pathophysiology lead to novel treatments Adolescents experienced more treatment failure than children with chronic myeloid leukemia receiving imatinib as frontline therapy: a retrospective multicenter study Moderate anemia at diagnosis is an independent prognostic marker of the EUTOS and Hasford scores for survival and treatment response in chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia patients with frontline imatinib Combination of white blood cell count at presentation with molecular response at 3 months better predicts deep molecular responses to imatinib in newly diagnosed chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia patients Download references We thank medical staff and patient participants RPG acknowledges support from the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre funding scheme by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No National Clinical Research Center for Hematologic Disease Beijing Key Laboratory of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation Collaborative Innovation Center of Hematology Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies QJ and X-JH designed the study and provided subjects QJ and X-SZ collected and analyzed the data and CStone Pharmaceuticals; advisor to Antegene Biotech LLC Russian Foundation for Cancer Research Support; and Scientific Advisory Board: StemRad Ltd The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of People’s Hospital Beijing compliant with the Helsinki Declaration Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-021-01387-y Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. International Journal of Hematology (2024) Indian Journal of Hematology and Blood Transfusion (2024) Volume 6 - 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.736992 Although the reciprocal relationship of teacher burnout and teacher self-efficacy (TSE) is well documented the literature still lacks studies investigating their (latent) changes and interrelations of change over time By applying a latent change regression model in our study we aimed to contribute to this research gap by examining changes in burnout and their relations to changes in TSE during the COVID-19 pandemic—a very challenging time for teachers As the implementation of digital learning material played a major role during the pandemic we were also interested if attitudes and self-efficacy toward e-Learning were related to changes in burnout and TSE Our sample consisted of 92 German in-service teachers who completed a questionnaire twice during the 2019–2020 school year Our main findings are that the burnout components depersonalization and lack of accomplishment significantly increased from the pre- to post-COVID-19 outbreak Changes in burnout were negatively correlated to changes in TSE but we found little evidence for relations of change in burnout and TSE with variables concerning e-Learning Our findings indicate that the challenge was not the work overload but rather a lack of resources Implications for research and practice are discussed providing online materials for their students and supporting them during a frightening time from a distance teachers were exposed to a particularly high risk of infection It further analyzes the role of self-efficacy and attitudes toward e-Learning in these changes as these are potentially relevant variables in times of distance learning Demerouti et al. (2001) provided the job demands-resources model of burnout (JD-R model) to explain the development of burnout The researchers divided working conditions into two main categories: job resources and job demands According to the JD-R model of burnout, burnout development follows two processes: First, high job demands result in increased emotional exhaustion. Second, emotional exhaustion is intensified by a lack of resources, resulting in burnout. Specifically, the workload level was often found to strongly predict the emotional exhaustion component (Pogere et al., 2019) Research has shown that job burnout is negatively related to work engagement (Hakanen et al., 2006), job satisfaction (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2017), and subjective health (Hakanen et al., 2006). However, burnout is positively related to the intention to quit the teaching profession (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2011) which underlines burnout’s role as a mental-health indicator and the need to examine job burnout predictors for the well-being of educational systems TSE can be seen as an internal resource and is rising between zero and 25 years of experience and declining during the last career stage Teachers with a high sense of self-efficacy show greater enthusiasm toward teaching (Allinder, 1994), superior teaching performance (Klassen and Tze, 2014), and higher instructional quality (Holzberger et al., 2013). Recently, Zee and Koomen (2016) have reviewed relevant relationships with TSE Bandura further described the domain specificity of TSE: Teachers can perceive themselves as very effective in teaching, in general, but feel less effective when applying specific teaching practices (Bandura, 2006). Accordingly, adapted measurements for TSE in specific contexts have been developed: for example, inclusive teaching (e.g., Sharma et al., 2012) or implementing self-regulated learning strategies (De Smul et al., 2018) TSE in the context of digital media is also a specific form of TSE we implanted this specific form of TSE as well as the general form of TSE no study has investigated the changes and interrelations of burnout and TSE during the COVID-19 pandemic they are also supporting students through theirs” (p 29) especially considering that some students have little support at home This emotional workload could very likely lead to depersonalization which in turn would have deleterious effects on the students in such a situation more research is needed to investigate the effectson emotional exhaustion depersonalization as well as lack of accomplishment in teachers another aspect that is possibly stressful for teachers is their high risk of infections at school due to the virus’s human-to-human transmission schools in Germany were gradually reopened teachers had to spontaneously switch to digital learning material—whether prepared or not—in order to teach students from a distance This switch noticeably changed daily work routines especially of those with limited experience in digital learning environments implementing distance learning was possibly related to a stress reaction (emotional exhaustion) could have led to feelings of depersonalization and a lack of accomplishment These feelings could emerge if TSE was low—especially if teachers felt inadequate in implementing digital learning material or had negative attitudes toward its use thus whether teachers are generally more or less favorable toward e-Learning Due to the sudden change to distance learning where digital media played a crucial role we argue that TSE for the use of digital media as well as attitudes toward e-Learning played an important role in explaining changes in teachers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic Both variables could have contributed to changes in burnout whereby teachers feeling less efficacious and having rather negative attitudes could have felt more stressed and overcharged high TSE for e-Learning and positive attitudes could have contributed to general TSE and less burnout in times of the pandemic no study has investigated these relationships until now We therefore analyzed in an explorative way if changes in TSE and burnout were related to attitudes or TSE for e-Learning we assume that teaching experience could have affected changes in burnout through teachers’ readiness for teaching with digital media As we wanted to control for such possible effects we included gender as well as teaching experience as covariates The purpose of our study is twofold: First, we investigate burnout changes in teachers from the pre- to post-COVID-19 outbreak as an indicator of mental health and its relation to changes in (general) TSE as a relevant resource against burnout. Hereby, we claim that the circumstances of the pandemic are a high job demand which would very likely lead to an increase in burnout symptoms (Demerouti et al., 2001) we analyze if those changes are related to specific self-efficacy for using digital media and attitudes toward e-Learning 1) Hypothesis 1: Burnout symptoms increase from the pre-(Timepoint 1; t1) to post- (Timepoint 2; t2) COVID-19 outbreak 2) Hypothesis 2: Changes in burnout are negatively related to changes in TSE (Dicke et al., 2015) 3) Hypothesis 3: Changes in burnout from t1 to t2 are related to lower specific TSE for using digital media 4) Hypothesis 4: Changes in general TSE from t1 to t2 are related to higher specific TSE for using digital media This study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty for Empirical Human Sciences and Economical Sciences (Saarland University) and the data protection committee of the Ministry of Education in Saarland The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study Our sample consisted of 92 teachers from 23 primary and secondary schools (41.50% were from secondary schools) working in southwestern Germany The teachers’ ages ranged from 26 to 64 (M = 40.19 and the mean teaching experience was M = 10.78 (SD = 8.25) Gender and teaching experience were included as covariates in our analyses which was designed in Questback’s online survey platform were sent twice during the 2019–2020 school year and teachers were required to provide informed consent before they completed the questionnaires The first data collection occurred during the beginning of the school year (October–December 2019)—just before the COVID-19 outbreak The second data collection started in mid-May 2020 The design of the study with its measurement time points had been planned before the outbreak of the pandemic the research aim was to capture changes in TSE and burnout to learn more about their development and reciprocity the pandemic provided an interesting opportunity to investigate this research question under unique circumstances Response scales for all instruments ranged from 1) don’t agree at all to 6) agree entirely Reliability was determined in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach’s α) To assess burnout in its multidimensionality, we used the well-established Maslach burnout inventory (MBI) by Maslach et al. (1986) in its translated version (Enzmann and Kleiber, 1989) The three scales consisted of emotional exhaustion (e.g. “My work frustrates me,” 9 items αT1 = 0.86; αT2 = 0.88); depersonalization (e.g. “I think I treat some students to some extent impersonally,” 5 items αT1 = 0.73; αT2 = 0.68); and lack of accomplishment (e.g. “I succeed well in putting myself in the position of my students,” 8 items αT1 = 0.83; αT2 = 0.73) The latter is inversely coded and was therefore recoded for better interpretability TSE was assessed using Pfitzner-Eden et al. (2014) scale for teacher self-efficacy (STSE) with three dimensions: classroom management (e.g. “I manage to control disruptive behaviour in class,” 4 items αT1 = 0.88; αT2 = 0.86); instructional strategies (e.g. “I am able to provide an alternative explanation or another example when students are confused,” 4 items αT1 = 0.65; αT2 = 0.66); and student engagement (e.g. “I can motivate students who have little interest in education,” 4 items αT1 = 0.83; αT2 = 0.77) In order to assess TSE for using digital media “I know that I can easily create digital learning environments”) Internal consistency was sufficient (α = 0.87) Attitudes toward e-Learning were assessed by a translated version of Panda and Mishra (2007) 11-item scale (e.g. “e-Learning can solve many of our educational problems,” α = 0.92) The mean difference score can then be interpreted as a mean change corrected for Timepoint 1 LCRM is particularly recommended when the change due to a particular event between two measurement time points is to be measured rather than an ongoing process Exemplary simplified illustration for a part of the LCRM Before answering the hypotheses in the following sections, we provide an overview of means and variances for all variables of the LCRM (Table 1) Please note that differences in means are not comparable to the within-person changes as modeled in the LCRM Means (M) and standard deviations (SD) of all variables we expected all burnout subscales to increase from t1(pre-outbreak) to t2 (post-outbreak) we found the means of the difference scores for the subscale Power = 0.97) as well as depersonalization (M = 0.94 the mean difference score for emotional exhaustion does not indicate a change (M = −0.24 Correlations of the difference scores for the MBI and TSE subscales we looked at the relations between the change scores and the covariates in an explorative way and found one positive significant relationship between the mean difference score for lack of accomplishment and teaching experience (β = 0.23 the more increase in ‘lack of accomplishment’ they felt Attitudes toward e-Learning are not related to the difference scores Correlations of the difference scores and related variables To the best of our knowledge, this was the first study to investigate changes in burnout and TSE by means of LCRM in a sample of in-service teachers. In particular, it is one of the first studies considering mental health changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic together with related constructs (see also e.g.,Sokal et al., 2020a; Kim et al., 2021) this study deals with a critically important topic considering that teachers had to switch to distance learning overnight we have seen that both scales have high standard deviations relative to their mean which indicate much variance within the sample The missing relations suggest there must be other reasons for increases in burnout which implies that significant effects were hard to detect those teachers struggle less and are less likely to feel a lack of accomplishment we did not find any significant relations to other variables which tells us that the development of burnout and TSE in times of the pandemic was independent of the teachers’ gender The predominant low power is one of our study’s main limitations there are some limits to the interpretation of the results which generally concern our sample and the associated generalizability of our findings Teachers took part in our study voluntarily which could have resulted in a selective sample of teachers willing to provide very personal information Our sample mainly consisted of teachers working in southwestern Germany, as well as female teachers (82%). Regarding the latter, research in gender effects in teacher burnout is still inconclusive (e.g., Timms et al., 2006) we cannot estimate to what extent our mainly female sample has contributed to our results the interpretation of our results is limited by the fact that we know relatively little about what the teachers did between t1 and t2—whether or how they taught online and what their situations were at home teachers were just about to return to school we were able to capture short-term effects in mental health but further data a few weeks or months later would have given insight into long-term effects The question whether these effects are remaining Despite these limitations, we have significantly contributed to the research and practice with this study by investigating systematic interrelations in the change of burnout and TSE, which have hardly been investigated thus far. Moreover, this is one of the first studies to analyze teachers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic (see also e.g., Sokal et al., 2020a; Kim et al., 2021) A further and particularly important strength lies in the application of latent change score regression modeling which allowed us to model the relations of change with other variables Future research should investigate the interrelation of TSE and burnout in longitudinal designs with more time points and different cohorts to gain insight into whether TSE and burnout development, as well as their interrelations, change over different phases of the professional career. Thus far, only a few studies have investigated Bandura (1977) sources for TSE, and those have focused on teacher practicum or preservice teachers (e.g., Pfitzner-Eden, 2016) we still do not know what happens during teachers’ professional careers and whether Bandura’s sources can predict those changes findings must be replicated in different cultures and with samples consisting of a balanced gender ratio to generalize findings Of further interest would be the closer examination of intraindividual differences especially in self-efficacy and attitudes toward e-Learning considering the COVID-19 pandemic Concerning the specific context of the pandemic future studies could focus more closely on what exactly contributes to teachers’ higher burdens in terms of specific job demands; the findings could help identify the best possible support for teachers This avenue is also relevant for political decisions The different development of burnout subscales indicates that the problem was probably not due to work overload but rather to a lack of preparation and information the question remains of how the pandemic and the additional burden placed on teachers have affected students The raw data supporting the conclusion of this article will be made available by the authors The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Ethics Committee of the Faculty for Empirical Human Sciences and Economical Sciences (Saarland University) The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study MW designed the study and collected the data This work was supported by the Ministry of Education in Saarland The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher A Meta-Analysis of Burnout with Job Demands CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar Allen, R., Jerrim, J., and Sims, S. 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The use distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited in accordance with accepted academic practice distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms *Correspondence: Marie Weißenfels, bWFyaWUud2Vpc3NlbmZlbHNAdW5pLXNhYXJsYW5kLmRl Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher 94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or goodLearn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish "\/let-us-deal-wisely-do-our-loved-ones-yet-live\/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=c00NkNY3BwWO_IupWHU8SsmF2XCtSjQhuHLAcHVsvb4-1746538447-1.0.1.1-8ObD7TRun8aln7de9Xnqe2AHw9VsPSt9yTMRfD9tAZQ" + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash);cpo.onload = function() {history.replaceState(null As part of the development of renewable energy and promoting sustainable development which is part of the Eco-Optima group of companies has started the construction of a small hydropower station on the Western Bug River According to Roman Karpyński "The installed capacity of the hydroelectric station is expected to be 999 kW/h which will allow generating an average of 6.5 million kW/h annually The estimated commissioning date for the hydroelectric station is the third quarter of 2025 as the development of 'green' energy is not only an environmental issue but also a strategic choice for the economy and energy security of our country." In order for the generated electricity to be transmitted to the Lvivoblenergo network and an overhead line with a voltage of 6 kV was constructed the day before You will receive a link to create a new password via email And the journal’s editors fell for it Hard.A few weeks after the paper was published Sokal revealed the truth: He’d come to bury postmodernism now universally known as the “Sokal Hoax,” proved that the editors of the most prestigious postmodern journal in America couldn’t tell the difference between an actual work of scholarship and a vicious satire intended to make them look silly Sokal’s paper remains stunningly funny and audacious; every word is a delight The academic absurdities that Sokal punctured with surgical precision no longer strike one as particularly outré The idea that science is just one of many equally valid “ways of knowing,” that Western rationalism is ideologically corrupt that “your truth” is largely determined by your gender or the color of your skin—these are no longer views held mostly by insufferable Yale undergraduates These notions underpin “anti-racist” training programs in Fortune 500 corporations and in U.S They shape curricula in American schools down to the early grades And they influence the views of ordinary Americans about everything from our own history to the safety of vaccines Sokal’s paper was a hand grenade tossed into the middle of one of the great intellectual debates of the 1990s which came to be known as the “Science Wars.” For the previous two decades postmodern ideas had been all the rage in elite academic circles Following a path blazed by leftist French thinkers (among them Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault) scholars were “deconstructing” everything in sight Western institutions including democracy and the rule of law were deemed mere façades designed to shield the privileges of the powerful The most basic facts about our world were asserted to be “socially constructed.” Even the methods and discoveries of the hard sciences were derided as ideological weapons wielded to enforce economic and social oppression postmodern thinkers loved to borrow—and usually mangle—scientific concepts and terminology they liked to think their own style of thinking was “scientific” in nature albeit conducted on a higher intellectual plane than the work of grubby researchers using outdated approaches such as the scientific method a few actual scientists spoke up to defend not only their own work but the whole project of scientific inquiry biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt waded into the controversy with a book entitled Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science In a recent interview on the Savage Minds podcast Sokal recalled when he first heard about it Sokal assumed it would be another “right-wing diatribe about Marxist-feminist subversives brainwashing our children.” But then he read Higher Superstition and went on to read widely in the postmodern literature about science He discovered that the truth was even worse than Gross and Levitt had claimed These trendy academics weren’t just arguing that the science community lacked diversity or that sexist attitudes compromised some medical research “these people were claiming that the content and methodology of the entirety of modern science—that means astronomy and medicine—all of this was somehow irredeemably infected by patriarchal Sokal began keeping a file of postmodern papers touching on the two fields he knew best “People were making off-the-wall claims about these things with no apparent knowledge of what they were talking about,” he said “Some of these people were quite famous.” But what could he do with this wealth of material He considered writing an article challenging postmodern fallacies but realized such a piece would likely wind up in a “black hole,” unread and unheeded His breakthrough idea came to him—as ideas often do—while he was sitting on the toilet: What if “instead of writing an article criticizing these people I would write an article praising them?” He decided to invent an absurd argument “woven around the worst quotations I could find about mathematics and physics from the most prominent intellectuals.” The piece would be a parody If leading postmodern thinkers took his pile of crap seriously that would say a great deal about their intellectual standards “I had to revise and revise until it reached the desired level of unclarity,” he said the editors of Social Text were planning a special issue intended to be a resounding rebuttal to the criticisms lodged by Gross Though Sokal wasn’t aware of the project at the time his faux paper fit their “Science Wars” issue like a skeleton key in a padlock Social Text’s editors included Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson and other top names in the field They wanted to put those quibbling scientists in their place And here came a real scientist—an expert in quantum mechanics no less!—telling them the postmodernists had been right all along “Transgressing the Boundaries” hits all the right progressive buttons The essay begins by rebuking the mainstream scientists who resist being enlightened by their postmodernist superiors These recalcitrant schmucks are still trapped in the “post-Enlightenment hegemony,” Sokal writes clinging to outdated dogmas such as the idea “that there exists an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that humans beings can obtain reliable knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so called) scientific method.” Sokal’s essay says that science as most of us conceive it is a scam 20th-century breakthroughs in physics and in the philosophy of science have properly undermined the credibility of science in general “feminist and poststructuralist critiques” have (so its facetious argument goes) revealed “the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity’.” “we can only conclude that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ‘knowledge’ reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it.” The essay argues both that scientific insights are bogus and that they exist only to serve the needs of various power elites it concludes that science and scientists don’t deserve the respect our society affords them to put that in postmodern-ese: “the discourse of the scientific community … cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.” You’ll note I write that “the essay” says these things rather than Sokal saying these things because PRIOR to publishing “Transgressing the Boundaries,” the editors of Social Text asked Sokal whether he could trim it a bit because “some of the best jokes were in the footnotes.” In fact even the first two footnotes in the article reveal how well Sokal understood his target audience when he mentions scientific breakthroughs that have undermined “Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics,” he drops a footnote referencing the German physicist Werner Heisenberg whose uncertainty principle shook up 20th-century physics he notes that “revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility.” A second footnote takes us to science historian Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which argued that scientists rely more on shared “paradigms” than on hard facts when building their models of the world the editors of Social Text were on the ropes powerless to resist Sokal’s flurry of postmodern nonsense Sokal knew his audience didn’t know much about actual science But he also knew that left-wing academics revered Heisenberg and Kuhn Heisenberg proved that scientific knowledge—really any knowledge of objective reality—was a physical impossibility showing that the entire scientific project was these two thinkers had revealed that even the hardest of hard sciences were built on a foundation of shifting sand while both Heisenberg and Kuhn made large contributions to human understanding their ideas are among the most widely misunderstood—and overapplied—concepts in the history of science Heisenberg first articulated his uncertainty principle in 1927 it expresses a technical limitation in our ability to observe tiny particles When scientists try to establish the exact location of an electron he and his colleague Niels Bohr discovered they can’t simultaneously determine the electron’s momentum “the more precisely the position is known the less precisely the momentum is known.” Is this limitation a quirk of how we observe these particles (The electron can be observed only if it happens to collide with one of the photons researchers blast in its direction But the impact of that photon instantly changes the electron’s momentum making it impossible to measure.) Or does the principle reflect a deeper property of matter itself suggesting that there are aspects of the physical world that are not just unknown The uncertainty principle quickly became one of the most famous concepts in modern physics—and not just among physicists Major scientific breakthroughs often attract followers from outside the field in which they occur And these followers usually want to apply the hot new concept to questions far removed from the original focus of the theory Darwin’s theory of natural selection was embraced by a host of thinkers who tried to graft ersatz “Darwinian” notions onto unrelated fields such as ethics and political science The late 19th century’s ruthless philosophy of “Social Darwinism” was an all-too-predictable result (Early-20th-century progressives also cited Darwinian notions as justification for their proposed human eugenics campaigns.) The uncertainty principle appealed to a certain class of thinkers—including those who couldn’t tell a proton from a photon—in a similar fashion it implied a welcome leveling of the intellectual playing field; why should physicists get to claim their conclusions are any more “real” than those of Heisenberg’s claims got a more complex reception In his new novel When We Cease to Understand the World the South American author Benjamin Labatut revisits the debate over uncertainty “Einstein sensed that if one followed that line of thinking to its ultimate consequences darkness would infect the soul of physics,” he writes the field of physics wound up doing just fine the questions Heisenberg raised still resonate But whether one takes the broad or narrow view of the uncertainty principle How could anything make physics impossible anyway our growing understanding of how particles behave at the quantum level has opened up new fields of research and new opportunities for applying that knowledge (as in the case of quantum computing) Nor did Heisenberg magically pull the rug out from under science in general Uncertainty about the behavior of subatomic particles hasn’t hampered the work of biologists we live in an age of unprecedented scientific discovery But Heisenberg’s ideas did become a magnet for postmodernists One of Social Text’s co-founders was the City University of New York sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz In his 1988 book Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society Aronowitz describes science as little more than a tool of capitalism one that has “imprisoned us in a logic of dominance and degradation.” Aronowitz embraces Heisenberg precisely because he believes the physicist proved that scientific knowledge lacks an objective foundation And that means everything is open to interpretation if even hard-nosed physicists couldn’t nail down the truth how could specialists in economics or psychology or history make any claim to be dealing in verifiable facts?  this absence of objective facts is considered a wonderful thing It allows the critic to treat any field of knowledge—about society even science—as something akin to a literary text the postmodernist is now free to interpret that text as cavalierly as a literary critic might dig for Freudian symbolism in one of Shakespeare’s plays This is why postmodernists like to describe their method as “deconstructing,” “unpacking,” or “interrogating” a text the work of the critic is the highest form of intellectual activity (This also explains why the journal Sokal hoaxed is called Social Text and why left-wing academics like to append the word “critical” to any field of study they’re trying to subvert.) Working in the realm of texts critics can make any claims they like without the need to defend them from factual rebuttal by so-called experts postmodern arguments—such as those in radical feminism and related fields—are unfalsifiable But sometimes the paradigm starts breaking down in the years before the Copernican Revolution astronomers struggled to accurately predict the movements of the planets since their paradigm held that the sun and planets all orbited the earth.) When scientists find that their observations aren’t fitting the paradigm their field enters a period of “crisis,” Kuhn says along comes a Copernicus or a Darwin to offer a radically new model that better explains the data many researchers resist such “scientific revolutions,” but eventually they fall in line The field has now undergone a “paradigm shift” (yes you can blame Kuhn for popularizing that idea) and the scientists all go back to work filling in the gaps in the new paradigm Much the way Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle influenced nonscientists dumbed-down versions of Kuhn eventually filtered into other arenas “He appeared to give intellectual underpinning to individual and cultural relativism,” writes the Australian education professor Michael Matthews many more people felt comfortable in saying ‘what’s true for you need not be true for me.’” Some educators embraced a particularly extreme version of Kuhn’s outlook the American education professors Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba wrote “Since all theories and other leading ideas of scientific history have so surely will any theories that we expound today.” This is a stunningly nihilistic stance on the possibility of scientific knowledge and one that goes far beyond anything Kuhn actually claimed such pessimistic views have deeply influenced the American education establishment Teachers are often told that “teaching children to learn” is more important than teaching any particular set of facts; those facts are so likely to change that they’re hardly worth bothering with in the first place By starting off his Social Text essay with references to both Heisenberg and Kuhn Sokal gave the impression that his hoax article was merely building on widely accepted ideas from two of the great thinkers of the 20th century Sokal wasn’t referencing the mainstream version of either man’s views He was recruiting the radical versions of Heisenberg and Kuhn and pushing their ideas into a zone of absurdity that neither thinker would have countenanced Sokal also made sure to stuff his essay “with as many citations to the editors of that journal as possible,” he later said Stanley Aronowitz alone gets more than a dozen unctuous references Sokal’s combination of shameless flattery and artful confirmation of the editors’ biases did the trick Despite containing what one fellow scientist called numerous scientific “howlers” that would have been detected by any undergraduate physics major who was paying attention the essay was published largely as written The controversy reached the front pages of the New York Times and Le Monde Some prominent academics accused Sokal of having constructed a “straw man,” saying his article presented a wildly exaggerated version of postmodern concepts in order to poke fun at them No legitimate postmodernist would take such silly ideas seriously some of the biggest names in the field had taken Sokal’s versions of postmodern ideas seriously—seriously enough to publish them in a prestigious journal the most absurd parts of Sokal’s article were not his deliberate misstatements of scientific concept; they were direct quotations from leading postmodern thinkers some might see Sokal’s hoax as an exercise in shooting some inconsequential fish in a very small barrel Did it really matter if some Marxist professors were advancing ridiculous  ideas in a few elite universities and various related schools of thought were challenging core elements of the Enlightenment tradition: the aspiration toward objectivity But haven’t universities always been places where young people are exposed to a range of ideas What’s the harm in learning about some radical views Won’t most students leave all this behind when they graduate and start making their way in the real world Thus did many on the mainstream left shrug off the warning that Sokal had delivered A radical mindset was chipping at the pillars of rational inquiry and democratic values Yet those ideas received surprisingly little in the way of vigorous academic counterargument (I’m not discounting the importance of thinkers such as Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb in the last century or Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt in this one But such voices are at best a fringe element on most campuses.) critics of academic anti-rationalism—or and the like—are even more likely to be dismissed as worrywarts New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently devoted a column to pooh-poohing concerns about the erosion of free speech on college campuses Defenders of open dialogue are being “histrionic,” she says she could find only a few  hundred cases in which academics have been “targeted for sanction by ideological adversaries.” Those complaining about the loss of academic freedom closet bigots who “resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm.” What do 400-odd cases matter The postmodernist bubble that Sokal tried to lance is not so clearly defined today Foucault and Derrida don’t loom over campus discussions as they once did “postmodernist ideas have come back more and more front and center albeit in an evolved way.” Over the decades these ideas filtered into related intellectual movements including various types of “critical” studies and today’s proliferating identity-based disciplines These movements might not describe themselves as postmodern but they all share the postmodern distrust of objectivity and truth is determined by one’s “lived experience”—especially if one is a member of some marginalized group and Peter Boghossian—three academics who describe themselves as “left-wing liberal skeptics”—decided to repeat Sokal’s hoax. Their target was what they call “grievance studies,” leftist academic disciplines including postcolonial studies Because the postmodern movement ridiculed by Sokal had by now splintered into dozens of overlapping channels the trio would need to perpetrate the hoax on a much larger scale Political scientist Yascha Mounk dubbed it “Sokal Squared.” The group produced some 20 parody articles and sent them off to a wide range of journals One article argued that the male penis is “a social construct.” Another was a version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf A paper that explored “rape culture” among canines at a Portland dog park was so outlandish that it attracted mainstream ridicule By the time the Sokal Squared conspirators were forced to go public nine had been accepted or were under review Clearly not that much had changed since the days of Sokal’s original hoax After the Sokal Squared stunt was revealed “Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?” The answer It doesn’t seem that any amount of ridicule can slow the left’s ideological juggernaut the main arena for anti-rationalist thinking is no longer just the elite academy The anti-Enlightenment ideas cooked up over the decades in trendy journals and in departments of literature and sociology have now escaped the lab They are self-replicating and circulating freely in our society neutral reality,” Robin DiAngelo writes in her bestselling White Fragility she sees that claim as so self-evident that it doesn’t even require an explanation or defense The New York Times’ “1619 Project” treats American history not as a set of facts to be weighed one whose true meaning is open to radical reinterpretation in the hands of critical theorists “Anti-racist” training materials urge us to reject the culture of white supremacy which includes dangerous ideas such as “the belief that there is such a thing as being ‘objective,’” or the notion that “linear thinking” and “logic” are desirable ways to understand the world When we look at the collapse of rationality all around us it seems that while Alan Sokal might have won his battle with postmodern lunacy Sokal wrapped up his 1996 hoax essay with a resounding call to action a campaign that “must start with the younger generation.” One hears a faint echo of China’s Cultural Revolution in his urgent admonition: “The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of feminist and ecological critiques.” Sokal meant his essay as a parodic warning. Twenty-five years later it appears that the Sokal Hoax was actually an instruction manual 1 I attended a lecture by Kuhn around 1980 The lecture hall was packed with comparative-literature majors I remember being disappointed that Kuhn’s answers to the deepest questions seemed to amount to little more than apologetic shrugs Start your risk free trial with unlimited access Explore the scintillating May 2025 issue of Commentary Site design by beck & stone Metrics details Prognostic scores support clinicians in selecting risk-adjusted treatments and in comparatively assessing different results For patients with chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) four baseline prognostic scores are commonly used Our aim was to compare the prognostic performance of the scores and to arrive at an evidence-based score recommendation In 2949 patients not involved in any score development higher hazard ratios and concordance indices in any comparison demonstrated the best discrimination of long-term survival with the ELTS score of 5154 patients analyzed to investigate risk group classification differences 23% (n = 1197) were allocated to high-risk by the Sokal score 56% were non-high-risk according to the ELTS score and had a significantly more favorable long-term survival prognosis than the 526 high-risk patients according to both scores The Sokal score identified too many patients as high-risk and relatively few (40%) as low-risk (versus 60% with the ELTS score) Inappropriate risk classification jeopardizes optimal treatment selection The ELTS score outperformed the Sokal score and the EUTOS score regarding risk group discrimination The recent recommendation of the European LeukemiaNet for preferred use of the ELTS score was supported with significant statistical evidence These results are rather in line with 12% high-risk patients as suggested by the ELTS score than with 23% high-risk patients as defined by the Sokal score it is hence still essential to provide convincing data-based evidence when arguing for its preference over others Although the focus was on the comparison between the enduringly popular Sokal score and the relatively new ELTS score results for the Euro and the EUTOS score are also provided the same inclusion criteria were chosen as for the two other sections except that the restriction on patients with first-line imatinib treatment within 6 months from diagnosis was relaxed 68 had received first-line dasatinib (4%) and 247 (14%) first-line nilotinib treatment; similarly for 78 patients (4%) treatment start was later than 6 months after diagnosis Relaxation of the two criteria was based on the observation that both had no association with survival probabilities in the population-based section the score comparisons were based on the 2949 patients with data entirely independent of any score development data of the in-study sample used for the development of the ELTS score were added Only after addition of these patients was the number of events sufficient in order to assess the adequacy of low- or high-risk categorization between the different scores For the description of discrimination ability over time A higher concordance index hints at a better discrimination of the survival outcome a prognostic model provides clinically useful information different from chance; the closer to 100 the unadjusted significance level of 0.05 was applied for all statistical tests Estimates were presented with 95% confidence interval (95% CI) More on statistical methods is given in the Supplementary appendix Adding the population-based section to the 1118 out-study patients a validation sample of 2949 patients independent of any score development was achieved The combined sample consisted of 52% males Median age of the 2949 patients was 52 years (range: 18–91 years) and median follow-up was 3.3 years (range: 0.01–12.6 years) Six-year OS probability in the 2949 patients was 88% (95% CI: 86–89%) and 6-year probability of death due to CML was 5% (95% CI: 4–6%) a Stratified for the risk groups according to the Sokal score and b Stratified for the risk groups according to the ELTS score horizontal crossbars indicate the upper and lower limit of the 95% confidence interval (CI) for the estimated probability had significantly higher probabilities of dying because of CML than the low-risk group The corresponding SHRs were 3.559 (95% CI: 2.030–6.240) and 1.668 (95% CI: 0.934–2.978) b The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the ELTS score had significantly higher probabilities of dying due to CML than the low-risk group with P = 0.0031 and P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.203 (95% CI: 1.306–3.718) and 5.646 (95% CI: 3.397–9.387) The Euro score was not able to find a significant discrimination between the intermediate- and the low-risk group and the EUTOS score was not able to find a significant discrimination between the low- and the high-risk group In the combined out-study/population-based sample, 153 patients (5%) experienced progression. The cumulative hazard of censoring was significantly higher for patients in progressive phase (P < 0.0001). Differences in the state occupation probabilities for death after progression were observed (Supplementary Fig. 3) the probability of death after progression was 7.3% with the progressive illness-death model and 5.7% with the competing risk model for death without progression probability differences were small (10.5 and 10.6%) The intermediate- (HR: 2.256 [95% CI: 1.590–3.201] and high-risk groups (HR: 3.384 [95% CI: 2.359–4.852] of the Sokal score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group with both P < 0.0001 (Fig. 2a). The concordance indices at 1, 5, and 10 years were 62.9, 62.0, and 61.3, respectively. horizontal crossbars indicate the upper and lower limit of the 95%-confidence interval (CI) for the estimated probability a The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the Sokal score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group with both P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.256 (95% CI: 1.590–3.201) and 3.384 (95% CI: 2.359–4.852) b The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the ELTS score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group with both P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.479 (95% CI: 1.836–3.345) and 4.012 (95% CI: 2.884–5.582) With slightly higher hazard ratios and concordance indices of 65.6, 64.0, and 64.0 at 1, 5, and 10 years, the same was observed for the intermediate- (HR: 2.479 [95% CI: 1.836–3.345] and high-risk groups (HR: 4.012 [95% CI: 2.884–5.582] of the ELTS score (Fig. 2b) While the HRs and the concordances indices of the Euro score were slightly less favorable than the ELTS score, the EUTOS score failed to discriminate risk groups (Supplementary Fig. 4a–b) The sample of all three combined registry sections consisted of 5154 patients with 52% males and a median age of 52 years (range: 18–91 years) With a median follow-up of 5.3 years (range: 0.01–12.6 years) Six-year survival probability of all patients was 90% (95% CI: 89–81%) and 6-year probability of death due to CML was 4% (95% CI: 4–5%) a Stratified for the risk groups according to the Sokal score and b with the 1197 high-risk patients according to the Sokal score stratified for non-high-risk and high-risk according to the ELTS Score a The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the Sokal score had significantly higher probabilities of dying due to CML than the low-risk group with P = 0.0088 and P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 1.695 (95% CI: 1.142–2.515) and 3.161 (95% CI: 2.146–4.655) b The high-risk group according to both scores had significantly higher probabilities of dying due to CML than the non-high-risk group identified by the ELTS score The corresponding hazard ratio was 0.415 (95% CI: 0.256–0.671) a Stratified for the risk groups according to the ELTS score and b with the 3037 low-risk patients according to the ELTS score stratified for low-risk and non-low-risk according to the Sokal Score a The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the ELTS score had significantly higher probabilities of dying due to CML than the low-risk group with both P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.584 (95% CI: 1.795–3.721) and 5.667 (95% CI: 3.912–8.209) b The non-low-risk group identified by the Sokal score had no significantly different probabilities of dying due to CML than the low-risk group according to both scores The corresponding hazard ratio was 1.129 (95% CI: 0.653–1.951) Of the 3037 patients identified as low-risk by the ELTS score, the Sokal score allocated 1200 (40%) to non-low-risk. In relation to the low-risk patients, the cumulative incidence probabilities of dying of CML of the 1200 Sokal non-low-risk patients were hardly different (SHR: 1.129 [95% CI: 0.653–1.951], P = 0.6635, Fig. 4b) In the patient sample made up of data from all three registry sections, 275 patients had disease progression (5%). The cumulative hazard of censoring was not significantly different between the phases (P = 0.2868) and differences in the state occupation probabilities between the statistical models were not of any relevance (Supplementary Fig. 6) The intermediate- (HR: 2.049 [95% CI: 1.607–2.611]) and high-risk groups (HR: 2.596 [95% CI: 2.009–3.355]) of the Sokal score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group, with both P < 0.0001 (Fig. 5a). The concordance indices at 1, 5, and 10 years were 61.2, 60.6, and 59.7. The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.049 (95% CI: 1.607–2.611) and 2.596 (95% CI: 2.009–3.355) b The high-risk group according to both scores had significantly lower survival probabilities than the non-high-risk group identified by the ELTS score The hazard ratio for non-high- to high-risk patients was 0.615 (95% CI: 0.442–0.857) The 526 high-risk patients according to both scores had significantly lower survival probabilities than the 671 non-high-risk patients identified by the ELTS score (P = 0.0041, Fig. 5b) The HR for non-high- to high-risk patients was 0.615 (95% CI: 0.442–0.857); concordance indices at 1 With reference to the low-risk group of the ELTS score, the HRs of the intermediate- and high-risk groups were 2.631 (95% CI: 2.116–3.273) and 3.675 (95% CI: 2.861–4.720), respectively (both P < 0.0001, Fig. 6a) and the concordance indices at 1, 5, and 10 years were 66.6, 63.8, and 63.7. a The intermediate- and high-risk groups of the ELTS score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group with both P < 0.0001 The corresponding hazard ratios were 2.631 (95% CI: 2.116–3.273) and 3.675 (95% CI: 2.861–4.720) b The non-low-risk group identified by the Sokal score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the low-risk group according to both scores The corresponding hazard ratio was 1.490 (95% CI: 1.082–2.053) The 1200 non-low-risk patients identified by the Sokal score had significantly lower survival probabilities than the 1837 low-risk patients according to both scores (P = 0.0147, Fig. 6b) The main objective of this work is to provide evidence-based information on what score should be preferred comparing prognostic discrimination performance between the Sokal and the ELTS score To pay tribute to the improved survival evoked by TKI therapy the focus was the probabilities of dying of CML (i.e. after progression) rather than dying of any cause In 2949 patients independent of any score development the Sokal score failed to recognize significantly different cumulative incidence probabilities of dying of CML between intermediate- and low-risk patients the SHRs as well as the concordance indices were always higher with the ELTS score indicating a better discrimination than with the Sokal score This result was also observed in the combined sample of 5154 patients from all three registries No other score provided a better discrimination of risk groups all pairwise risk group comparisons led to significant differences in OS probabilities the HRs as well as the concordance indices were always higher with the ELTS score than with the Sokal score While the sample of 2949 independent patients guaranteed an unbiased comparison between the Sokal and the ELTS score the sample of 5154 patients was needed for provision of event numbers high enough to investigate risk group classification differences between the scores Of 1197 patients allocated to high-risk by the Sokal score the ELTS score classified 56% as non-high-risk Compared with the 526 high-risk patients according to both scores the cumulative incidences of dying of CML were significantly lower and OS probabilities were significantly higher for the 671 ELTS non-high-risk patients For 56% of 1197 patients the allocation of high-risk by the Sokal score was inappropriate Of 3037 patients identified as low-risk by the ELTS score the Sokal score classified 1200 (40%) as non-low-risk The cumulative incidences of dying of CML were only slightly different from those of the remaining 1837 low-risk patients pointing to another inappropriate classification by the Sokal score in relation to the 1837 patients assessed as low-risk by both scores at 92% after 6 years (95% CI: 90–94%) and 88% after 9 years (95% CI: 84–92%) OS probabilities were still high for the 1200 Sokal non-low-risk patients HRs and concordance indices showed the best prognostic discrimination in the unbiased comparisons in the 2949 independent patients Since the ELTS score was developed in the 2205 in-study patients their inclusion in the total sample of 5154 patients meant some advantage for the ELTS score compared with the other scores The extent of this limitation cannot be quantified but in consideration of the very distinctive results it is still fair to conclude that the risk of inappropriate classification is decidedly higher with the Sokal score A large patient sample would be necessary to recognize significant differences in long-term survival between TKIs within a certain risk group the ELTS score outperformed the Sokal score for the first time with statistical significance that the Sokal score is much more likely to provide an incorrect risk group classification The mechanism behind the superiority of the ELTS score is its development in imatinib-treated patients and its different weighting of the four prognostic factors together with a more adequate patient distribution into risk groups (about 60%/30%/10%) than the Sokal score (about 40%/40%/20%) in times when patients have much better survival prospects due to TKIs please contact markus.pfirrmann@ibe.med.uni-muenchen.de Deidentified individual participant data are available upon request and agreement of the scientific committee and the data security officer of our faculty Prognostic scores for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia under particular consideration of competing causes of death Writing Committee for the Collaborative CML Prognostic Factors Project Group Assessment of imatinib as first-line treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia: 10-year survival results of the randomized CML study IV and impact of non-CML determinants Ten-year outcome of chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia patients treated with imatinib in real life Long-term outcomes of imatinib treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia Bosutinib versus imatinib in newly diagnosed chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukaemia: results from the 24-month follow-up of the BELA trial Ponatinib versus imatinib for newly diagnosed chronic myeloid leukaemia: an international The EUTOS prognostic score: review and validation in 1288 patients with CML treated frontline with imatinib Treatment and outcome of 2904 CML patients from the EUTOS population-based registry European LeukemiaNet recommendations for the management of chronic myeloid leukemia: 2013 Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model The Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data Non-Parametric confidence interval estimation for competing risks analysis: application to contraceptive data A proportional hazards model for the subdistribution of a competing risk Concordance for prognostic models with competing risks Analysis of cause of death: competing risks or progressive illness-death model The mstate package for estimation and prediction in non- and semi-parametric multi-state and competing risks models Prognostic discrimination based on the EUTOS long-term survival score within the International Registry for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia in children and adolescents Prognostic discrimination among younger patients with chronic granulocytic leukemia: relevance to bone marrow transplantation The use of EUTOS long-term survival score instead of sokal score is strongly advised in elderly chronic myeloid leukemia patients Prognosis of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia presenting in advanced phase is defined mainly by blast count Nilotinib versus imatinib for newly diagnosed chronic myeloid leukemia Dasatinib versus imatinib in newly diagnosed chronic-phase chronic myeloid leukemia Final 5-year study results of DASISION: the dasatinib versus imatinib study in treatment-naive chronic myeloid leukemia patients trial Managing chronic myeloid leukemia for treatment-free remission: a proposal from the GIMEMA CML WP Chronic myeloid leukaemia: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines for diagnosis Imatinib is still recommended for frontline therapy for CML Evaluating random forests for survival analysis using prediction error curves Empirical transition matrix of multi-state models: The etm package Download references Open access funding was provided by Projekt DEAL The valuable assistance of Eva Spaeh is gratefully appreciated The EUTOS was a joint project of the European LeukemiaNet and Novartis Oncology Europe Novartis Oncology Europe provided financial support for the EUTOS registry project from 2007 to 2015 Institut für Medizinische Informationsverarbeitung Department of Molecular and Clinical Cancer Medicine Clinical Department of Hematology and Oncology L Michele Baccarani & Fausto Castagnetti Medizinische Fakultät Mannheim der Universität Heidelberg Ministry of Healthcare of the Russian Federation University of Uppsala and Section of Hematology University of Helsinki and Department of Hematology Helsinki University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center University Hospital Brno and Masaryk University Romanian Academy of Medical Sciences and Medical University The authors declare the following potential conflicts of interest: REC and VSH declare no potential competing interests All studies complied with the Declaration of Helsinki They were approved by the local human investigations committee and performed in accordance with the legal requirements of the corresponding country Informed consent was obtained from all patients Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-020-0931-9 a shareable link is not currently available for this article Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker a critique of their function as public intellectuals.” a critique of their function as public intellectuals I think the three of them are interesting because they are representative of a larger phenomenon that seems inevitably tied to culture warring cancel culture is a problem in some sectors of the Left and the type of scholarship these three writers criticize—which is overwhelmingly left-aligned—has real issues and many on the Left have pointed this out (a fact I even believe some of their specific critiques are warranted I think who makes certain critiques—and why—is an essential piece of information To critique their positions on these matters is necessary for the Left because the direction in which the criticism is pushing matters I believe their criticism of disciplines such as critical and feminist theory is sloppy and unserious they fall into the exact form of ideologically motivated reasoning that they (sometimes correctly) accuse scholars of these disciplines of using so I will do my best to substantiate it in what follows There are three threads that run through Boghossian and Pluckrose’s general argument that I think merit the most interest First of these is their approach to what they group under the umbrella term “grievance studies.” Second and third—which are related—is their treatment of questions of truth and reality in themselves the way we know whether we are arriving at truth and reality Oregon.” The paper makes very bold claims about themes like rape culture as inferred from human reactions toward canine interactions it claims to look at how humans react to dogs fighting and “humping” (initiating sex with) other dogs in relation to the sex of the dog being humped all false because everything claimed in the paper is false The upshot is meant to be that since the claims in the paper—ridiculous as they may be—support a particular grievance narrative the journal editors were keen to publish them because their purpose is advancing that narrative rather than rigorous and scientific pursuit of truth I can even accept that this might have formed part of the motivation for publishing I do think that had the review process been more rigorous It would have been useful to have some way of verifying that the observations did the article contains some rather unique pieces of writing such as “the gendered status of the a-/moral paradox in human interpretations of domesticated canine behavior.” It seems clear that the way “a-/moral” is spelled with a hyphen and a slash serves no linguistic purpose and its meant to mock the liberal use of punctuation by many postmodern or poststructuralist authors It is much easier to make fake grandiose claims if one simply creates an entire fake dataset to support such claim the reviewers ought to have had some way to ascertain the data; however I find it very difficult to argue that the findings would not have been at least worthy of some attention The paper claims that the fake author conducted observations every day for one full year (excluding days of heavy rain) for a period of between two and seven hours per day Further it is claimed that on some occasions the incidents had a frequency of up to one every three to five minutes The number of data points collected under these assumptions would have been staggering—more than enough for a statistically valid sample 97% of humping in which the dog being humped was male there was an intervention by humans to stop it compared to only 32% of the time when the dog being humped was female These results—with a sample of that size—would have been notable there is an almost one to one correspondence between intervention something virtually unheard of in any social science study (admittedly this should have raised some red flags) a difference in proportions of 97% to 32% with a sample that large would unquestionably have a statistical significance way beyond that which is expected in any kind of social science study A further complication with Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian’s arguments is that it is not hard to find academic studies in the exact fields that they criticize that fly in the face of what they claim. Take, for example, the paper “Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory” by Liam Kofi Bright published in Philosophy of Science in 2016 This paper does have some criticism for the field’s reliance on subjective experience and its suspicion of quantitative approaches it takes specific claims made by intersectionality theory and organizes them into claims that make specific predictions which can then be tested using statistical methods is entirely compatible with the scientific methods that the authors of the Sokal Squared hoax claim these theories have abandoned in favor of advancing political agendas it is certainly not as straightforward as testing whether two spheres of different weight fall at different rates from a tower this added complexity should—under no circumstances—be considered a hinderance to the potential scientific status of such theories it seems to me that it is precisely this that is at the heart of the trio’s disenchantment with theories like intersectionality In what follows I will try to explain why I believe that to be the case As for the other two matters, one of Lindsay’s (and to a lesser extent Boghossian’s) latest crusades is a good starting point. It begun—as many discussions do nowadays—on Twitter, with Lindsay defending the seemingly simple assertion that 2+2=4 is an obvious immutable mathematical proposition even goes as far as to say that we cannot build an apartment complex or bake a cake if we cannot accept this simple fact (now this particular piece was not written by any of them but I find it hard to believe that they would publish it if they did not support the basic argument) and Boghossian’s past writing—argues that a failure to accept such a basic fact amounts to nothing short of the destruction of Western Civilization As mathematicians and philosophers pointed out whether “2+2=4” is true depends entirely on the arithmetical axioms or assumptions under which we are operating who believes that mathematical objects and structures really exist somewhere then mathematics is nothing more than a set of mental constructs or—more plausibly in my opinion—a set of rules that follows from a finite set of axioms which we accept prima facie I want to make a precision before moving on: I take Lindsay’s crusade over “2+2=4” to be about more than this particular arithmetic operation it would be a rather pedantic and uninteresting point I take it instead to be more generally about the inviolability and universality of the rules of mathematics—and whether holding that to be true is somehow a political statement Let us first look at this through the lens of the Western philosophical canon His claim—even if he is not explicitly saying it—that suggests that “2+2=4” is what philosophers call an analytic statement This identifies a statement that is true by virtue of its meaning A classic example of this is “all bachelors are unmarried.” The definition of a bachelor is an unmarried man; therefore the sentence “all bachelors are unmarried” is true in virtue of the meanings of the terms that it contains Analytic truths are logical truths that follow from the rules of the language that we are using such as identity or synonymy including formal languages such as mathematics Another way of understanding this is that the negation of an analytic statement results in a logical falsehood This can be readily seen through the negation of the previous example (i.e “not all bachelors are unmarried”) which is a clear contradiction Statements such as this should not be confused with others that may seem trivially true such as “the daytime sky is blue.” While this may seem just as obvious as “all bachelors are unmarried,” a key difference is that nothing about the definition of “daytime sky” implies that it must be blue It just happens to be the case based on the composition of the atmosphere of the Earth which require some form of empirical evidence before anyone accuses Quine of being a postmodern neo-Marxist Quine was notably a social conservative—and one of the signatories of an open letter urging the University of Cambridge not to grant an honorary doctorate to Jacques Derrida arguing that there was a lack of rigor and seriousness in his work Quine, of course, was not a postmodern neo-Marxist. He was, however, a logical pluralist, as Quine scholar and University of North Carolina professor Gillian Russell explained in a lecture delivered for the Edinburgh University Philosophy Society is the view that there is no such thing as a single universal logical system there are several distinct logics which are—in some sense—correct are most appropriate in particular circumstances or capture different correct senses of inference) It is worth noting that logical pluralism is a mainstream position among logicians and completely within the Western tradition which Lindsay so adamantly claims to defend yet this is something that his worldview does not admit The subject of that same lecture would perhaps be even more appalling to anyone who holds this simplistic and naïve worldview and that all our perceived logical rules are contingent and arbitrary but she nevertheless presents it as a philosophical position that should be considered this move is made by including true contradictions in the set of logical possibilities A true contradiction is a case of a proposition P and its negation not(P) being both true we need to do away with the idea that Law of Non-Contradiction as a fundamental logical truth further elaboration on this is beyond my present purpose but there are several rigorous academic resources on these subjects for anyone who wishes to know more about them while  explaining why none of this amounts to relativism of the “anything goes” kind Just like Priest has drawn on East Asian philosophy to guide his work on different areas of formal logic is it not possible that one may find analogous cases of useful “ways of knowing” in African or any other forms of non-Western philosophical traditions It seems to me that it is an entirely reasonable possibility I think it is perfectly fair to argue that this simplistic picture of science we saw how the Western philosophical tradition—even leaving aside postmodernism and other bogeymen—is at least skeptical of this notion of universal immutable truths we saw that there can be some value in looking beyond the West for different forms of approaching science and reason the correspondence theory of truth—as understood by philosophers who work on these matters professionally—does not say anything about how we arrive at the truth so Boghossian’s addition about reason and science is not part of the standard definition it is a way for Boghossian to contrast it with something that should be identifiable as a favorite opponent of the trio: alternative ways of knowing he contrasts the correspondence theory with the idea that heterosexual cis-gender white males might not be able to see the full truth about the world by virtue of their privilege whereas underprivileged people are more attuned to the social realities of the world we should note that it is quite odd that the theory of truth on which the balance of the world presumably hangs is not even defined properly the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article that Boghossian himself links in his definition makes no mention of science or reason in the definition because they are not a part it opposed to these so-called alternative ways of knowing One could imagine gaining knowledge by means of divine revelation which—despite being completely independent of science and reason—would I should clarify that I do not believe in divine revelation but the example should serve to show why the “way of knowing” that Boghossian characterizes as anathema to the correspondence theory is actually wholly compatible with it It is entirely possible that only underprivileged people but that this knowledge acquired through lived experience still corresponded to reality I do not endorse this position either; however the example should show why Lindsay and Boghossian’s claims about the correspondence theory do not actually bear out and I even think some of Linsday et al.’s really is that I also think it is important to recognize the majority of their project as what it is: a political project against the Left under the guise of a dispassionate defense of a rather particular conception of Western reason and science in social sciences from The University of Chicago “It begun—as many discussions do nowadays—on Twitter with Lindsay defending the seemingly simple assertion that 2+2=4 is an obvious immutable mathematical proposition” this is not correct you will see that it starts with nothing to do with maths at all he sums it up this way: ‘2+2 = whatever all that matters is who is making the claim and who benefits from it being any particular value’ what 2+2 really equals doesn’t matter we can play philosophical games all day long to deny anything which is what makes this whole situation absurd the people he criticises as having an orwellian ideology have made a political litmus test of 2+2 and have come down on the side of it equalling 5… as if 2020 could be any more surreal… This is a wild misrepresentation of their work and intentions – all of which they have made clear They’ve been consistently transparent and reflective this is a thin and superficial understanding of their work It’s laden with strawmen and false premises You should have waited until Cynical Theories is released Or you could have carefully read the work they’ve already published You haven’t read Pluckrose’s writings in Areo or Lindsay’s (extensive) analyses on New Discourses https://asadhaider.substack.com/p/critical-confusion Not sure I agree with your conclusions here While you have brought up some points of nuance that I think are lost in the conversation Lindsay and Boghossian all seem more focused on their critics’ disingenuous attempts to explicitly and intentionally redefine terms you can probably come up with some situational expressions wherein 2+2=5 in every rebuttal about a way in which you may come to such a conclusion the terms are either redefined or the situation changed and every case still uses logical outcomes The problem that they (the collective you write about here) are addressing are arguments that would take those fancy manipulations of terms and conditions to absolutely state that 2+2=5 To use your example: bachelors are married Both are patently false based on the proper and common definitions And in the case of the ethno-math peddlers their bailey is just that argument and when called on it they use arguments like yours to claim that no in fact they were using some kind of alternative calculation wherein a rounding computation or clock math would produce 5 — or where a man named Bachelor is married; that P is also !P For the same reason I like my fellow drivers to stay in their respective lanes and signal when they merge it is important that we also have clear definitions for the topics that we discuss – we need boundaries within our discourse Just like it is okay for a race driver to exceed the speed limit on a closed course we can wax philosophical on exceptions when it is appropriate But when we have to move whole communities countries and populations in a direction of common good then we need to have traffic lights and we need people to stay in the lines The 2+2=5 crowd are quite literally trying to argue that it is acceptable for a student to give that answer in class they expect that such an answer will come from someone who is not “privileged” and that as such that person will have a reason for producing that answer and that answer will be correct for that person if we are in fact talking about a child in a public school classroom (and this is the intent) then we all need that child to understand what 2 and 2 are and why they produce 4 and not 5 A child shouldn’t have to worry that their teacher really means 2.3 and 2.7 or some variation thereof That alone would be nefarious for a whole slew of reasons that are also reasons why this discussion is both dangerous and alarming I think we can both agree that there is value in common definitions and conclusions I may not be as apocalyptic in my thinking as you have suggested Boghossian might be but there is definitely something to be said for why we might want to teach basic logic and mathematics and require that our children “get it right” before moving on to more advanced or more abstract ways of thinking about things I am happy that the engineer who designed my house or the foreman who poured the concrete in the bridge I drive across both drafted and followed plans that relied upon a common understanding of math – in base 10 no less I assume they used the imperial measurements for both but even if they used metric the math still has to come to the same conclusion Maybe the painting of the bridge can include both but the construction cannot rely on such semantics I think you both hit the point of their papers and completely missed it Your criticism of their point sounded as if you were reviewing commentary on SNL’s weekend update: this could be useful content if only they took it more seriously Gabriel Stolzenberg – Debunking the Conventional Wisdom about the Science Wars Especially the Sokal Affair and its Aftermath http://math.bu.edu/people/nk/rr/ That’s dishonest framing right from the get-go Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. TechTarget and Informa Tech’s Digital Business Combine.TechTarget and Informa we power an unparalleled network of 220+ online properties covering 10,000+ granular topics serving an audience of 50+ million professionals with original We help you gain critical insights and make more informed decisions across your business priorities Syberia: The World Before game director Lucas Lagravette discusses the task of carrying on the Syberia franchise without creator Benoît Sokal The best-selling Syberia game series is inseparable from its creator, cartoonist Benoît Sokal. Though Sokal did not become a full-time game developer himself, his vision and distinctive style fueled one of the most beloved entries in the point-and-click adventure game genre Sokal's vision didn't just include an alternative-universe Europe fueled by intricate automatons—he was also deeply invested in protagonist Kate Walker and how her journeys through Europe picked through a continent shaped by a century of painful conflict The famed cartoonist's passing left the team at Microids with the unenviable task of finishing The World Before without his guidance game director Lucas Lagravette had worked closely with Sokal for some time and had already gotten his sign-off on many of the game's puzzles Lagravette and his colleagues also worked to make the mouse-and-keyboard designed series more controller friendly so that The World Before could be released on consoles Lagravette knows more about what the cartoonist's vision can still offer the video game world he discussed how the point-and-click adventure series can still thrive in our modern world and why Sokal's alternative vision of Europe is more relevant than ever There were plenty of PC point-and-click adventure games in the '90s that found commercial success but Syberia is one of the few that's successfully transitioned to the 21st century Lagravette explained that while Syberia's far-flung European landscapes and autonomous machinery have visual and thematic appeal it's Kate Walker has resonated with players for so long Lagravette said out that when the first Syberia games were released Walker was something of a unique figure for game protagonists The series followed her journey not just as an adventurer but as a person growing through their travels "People wanted to see where Kate is going to end up," Lagravette explained other game heroes like Lara Croft were first and foremost action heroes—vessels for the player to explore the game world Walker was her own person; a literary character who had her own reactions to the puzzles and machines she encountered the Syberia series has a dedicated fanbase that doesn't necessarily play a lot of other video games That made the direction for the fourth game in the series a particular challenge Sokal wrote a new story for Walker where instead of pushing forward as a gung-ho adventurer she spent more time looking back and reflecting on her own past—and the past of Europe allows players to explore a fictional Eastern European nation beset by rising fascism in the 1930s "The two elements blended very well together," Lagravette observed Preserving Sokal's vision was a task the Microids team was already working on before his passing Lagravette said that in the last few years he was like a "teacher" to the team invested in letting a new generation of developers carry on the Syberia story His main focus was apparently making sure that the game wouldn't be a "caricature" of older Syberia games and ensuring the series didn't shift too far into more modern alternate history genres like steampunk or clockpunk "You can say Syberia uses a clockpunk aesthetic but it's doing its own thing with it," Lagravette noted This comment illustrated something striking about Syberia and its use of Automatons like train operator Oscar Sokol's art style was operating parallel to a growing audience interest in a genre called "steampunk." The genre's literary origins are in the 1970s and '80s but its creeping aesthetic influence in the '90s even influenced cinematic commercial disasters like Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West Sokol was never strictly operating in the genre he guided the design team on The World Before to try and make sure the fantastic machines of the game's world had as much diegetic purpose as possible—that applied for the puzzles that were built with the machinery too "We have so much backstory—all written somewhere—little pieces of stories that helped us build the setting and the environments," Lagravette said He also said that Sokol wanted the puzzle mechanics to feel like they might realistically work The automatons and clockwork machinery of the series allow their creators to "cheat" a little with the laws of physics "Repairing a car is tough and complicated and you can't learn just by doing it," Lagravette but we cheat a little to make it easier and feel rewarding." It's a design philosophy that complements Sokal's vision of an "alternative" Europe a Europe that works like our world but where the countries have different names and autonomous clockwork machines ride the rails across a connected continent the Syberia games were almost kind of a journaling experience for Sokal Syberia wasn't about the automatons or Kate Walker "It was his vision of Europe and Europe's history," he said He noted that Sokal himself traveled to the regions fictionalized in the game—places like Austria In Sokal's fictional European countries real-world political forces still have their analogs Walker wanders through former Soviet camps and the damage wrought by early-20th century fascism still hangs over the story With The World Before's focus on a character living through the rise of a "Brown Shadow" faction (a not-too-subtle nod to the "Brown Shirts" of Germany's National Socialist Nazi party) or the other developers felt conscious of the new rise of right-wing authoritarianism that took place during the game's development "We discovered that we were releasing the game in the reality of 2022," Lagravette admitted but obviously there's a more universal message I guess that fascism sucks whether it's 1937 or the 2020s." It was a more subconscious than conscious decision he said to tackle a topic that would become uncannily relevant by the time the game shipped Sokal dreamed up a Europe that was deliberately different from the one in our world but he was conscious that it was a parallel world where the same political forces and selfish desires could deal lasting damage on the world heroines like Walker and Roze play an important role Players invested in their journeys can find some agency in uncertain times and that agency doesn't demand a reliance on force or violence The Syberia series rewards intellectualism Putting those traits at the core of your story not only reward players who find those emotions as a worthy fantasy it makes for great game worlds and interesting puzzles alike a leading B2B publication for the video game industry His credits include Proxy Studios' upcoming 4X strategy game Zephon and Amplitude Studio's 2017 game Endless Space 2 This website is owned and operated by Informa TechTarget influences and connects the world’s technology buyers and sellers Informa PLC’s registered office is 5 Howick Place Normally, I avoid blogging on anything topical; I want to write for the ages, not our daily hysteria.  But I’m going to make an exception for… “Sokal 2.0.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an overview: they also received four requests to peer-review other papers “as a result of our own exemplary scholarship.” And one paper — about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland — “gained special recognition for excellence from its journal and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.” The scholars behind the hoax describe their master plan here: Our paper-writing methodology always followed a specific pattern: it started with an idea that spoke to our epistemological or ethical concerns with the field and then sought to bend the existing scholarship to support it The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or conclude We then made the existing peer-reviewed literature do our bidding in the attempt to get published in the academic canon Needless to say, active practitioners of “grievance studies” were displeased.  But quite a few more traditional academics have been equally quick to dismiss this project’s importance.  Thus, my old friend Jacob Levy remarks “I am so utterly unimpressed by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it.” Well, unlike Jacob, I am impressed.  Deeply impressed.  Why?  Because, on reflection, Sokal 2.0 amounts to an Ideological Turing Test Mill states it well: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”  If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it that position is less likely to be correct And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it that position is more likely to be correct But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom My idea has inspired multiple actual tests none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0 Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles in earn tenure The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal the less they impugn the honor of their target averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers amply supports their main theses: The fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously they will continue to produce little knowledge My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax The Ideological Turing Test point holds for the “fat bodybuilding” paper the dog park paper) were helped along with fake data I’m unimpressed by the papers that use fake data The core of it is a fake observational study showing that humans are more uncomfortable with gay dog sex than straight dog sex attached to a silly discussion section that mentions “dog rape culture” It looks to me like the journal accepted it based on the interesting observational study but the coverage is calling it the “dog rape culture” paper Only the papers that didn’t use fake data count as passing Ideological Turing Tests the “fake data” papers should count as well because the authors deliberately constructed them to ‘present very shoddy methodologies including incredibly implausible statistics (“Dog Park”) making claims not warranted by the data (“CisNorm,” “Hooters,” “Dildos”) and ideologically-motivated qualitative analyses (“CisNorm,” “Porn”).’ Thus any which were accepted does demonstrate the thesis of low scholarship levels and academic rigor in these fields I’d say that the inability to recognize a terrible data set counts as evidence of a lack of understanding by the peer reviewers I’ll use an example from my own field of training If a paper was submitted that showed a crystal structure with two carbon atoms 110 picometers apart Chemists know that neighboring carbons should be about 120-155 pm apart A C-C bond distance of 110 pm probably isn’t real and any paper claiming such a thing should at least be written as if the authors know it’s really unusual and have lots of data designed to convince the reader of that specific fact if you wrote an economics paper saying that a minimum wage increase caused employment to rise Economists know that it doesn’t usually work that way and anyone claiming that it did work that way would be expected to have sufficient evidence to convince an extremely skeptical audience If an amateur can make unrealistic claims to supposed experts about the experts’ claimed field of expertise without challenge that’s pretty strong evidence that the expertise is deficient The fabricated data sets may have been bad but were they bad enough to be outside of the range expected from such data sets in this era what does that tell us about the reliability of conclusions based on data sets in this era (i.e. about all the other papers in those fields) This all hinges on the extent to which these are ‘high-impact’ papers or just part of a for-profit network with low standards which help researchers get more length on their CV It would be useful to see on average how many papers from these journals ever get citied There are a lot of low-quality for profit journals I’d be interestd in seeing the impact factor of the journals they published in Heck maybe they invented fake journals too (hoax within a hoax theory) It is quite interesting that the journals that were fooled and not fooled did not seem to be random This means that serious editors and serious referees are hard to fool People at the Chronicle who are critical of this need to consider this fact and update their opinions I’m sure many blackface comedians studied black people enough to know them well and thus take ‘new’ behaviors and distort them in such a way as to get laughs from a white audience This doesn’t change the fact that blacks at the time were engaged in the same noble struggle against life as whites (though from a socially lower stratum) Knowing a viewpoint enough to state and then reject it has no bearing on whether one’s own unspoken biases in that matter are justifiable E.g.: http://thesubjectsupposedtoknow.us/paul-blooms-against-empathy-is-a-right-wing-trojan-horse/ Their papers were accepted by leading* journals in the fields so this is more like the blackface comedian of your example being offered tenure in an African-American Studies department *The hoaxers claim that these were leading journals I have no idea whether this claim would be widely accepted within the fields involved; if it turned out that these were generally regarded as crappy journals And Fat Studies may be the leading journal for the study of overweight people but it may also the the only journal specializing in overweight people It looks like a total of six colleges, at the height, may have taught fat studies courses.  That plus the occasional interested faculty member or desperate grad student elsewhere is likely barely enough to fill a quarterly journal if they’re going all out (Fat Studies published three issues in 2017, with a total of 20 ‘articles’, plus miscellaneous non-article reviews, commentaries and the like). *as constructed, i.e. the journals which were generally called sociology journals by people who called themselves sociologists and worked in departments called “Sociology” I think that it may be possible to publish a fake article in a scientific journal, but probably not a hoax article along the lines of Sokal Squared. The point was not just that the articles were untrue, but that they were absurd and were published anyway. Likewise, the point of the Sokal article was not merely that it was flawed or untrue, but that it was complete and arrant nonsense. Where are these scholars teaching?  Every single article about this topic is giving these 3 people credits as being scholars but the only academic link thus far is to an assistant professor. Can anyone qualify who these 3 are and also let us know why these academic journals are significant?  I have never heard of any of these and I have many years of postgraduate training. I nice story would do more background checking than any national news outlet has bothered to do. Enter your email address to subscribe to the Econlib monthly newsletter. © 2024 Econlib, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Part of the Liberty Fund Network. explainedWhat really mattersIn a world with too much noise and too little context We don’t flood you with panic-inducing headlines or race to be first We focus on being useful to you — breaking down the news in ways that inform We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today The “Grievance Studies” or “Sokal Squared” hoax aimed to discredit gender and critical race studies by Zack Beauchamp An ethnography of men who attend “breastaurants” like Hooters Research on rape culture among the dogs at Portland dog parks scholarly journals written by a group of three people — magazine editor Helen Pluckrose But if they sound to you like parodies of a certain style of academic research and Boghossian wrote and published the articles as part of year-long hoax campaign targeting fields like gender studies Pluckrose et al. wrote 20 papers and submitted them, under false names, to a variety of journals. By the time they ended the experiment in early October seven out of the 20 had been accepted for publication In a lengthy write-up explaining the sting the authors describe their hoax as proof that fields focusing on identity — gender studies — were “corrupt” to their core “Grievance studies,” as they chose to refer to these fields elevate politically fashionable nonsense over rigorous scholarship; Pluckrose et al see them as a cancer on the university that needs to be excised “These fields of study do not continue the important and noble liberal work of the civil rights movements,” they write “They corrupt it while trading upon their good names to keep pushing a kind of social snake oil onto a public that keeps getting sicker.” This isn’t the first time that academic journals have been pranked to prove a point the prank has resulted in backlash against the pranksters themselves Some scholars from fields unrelated to so-called “grievance studies” have come out swinging at the prank rejecting Pluckrose et al.’s methods as unscientific and the conclusions they draw about the entire field of identity studies unsupported by their evidence “God this is dumb,” Harvard political scientist Matt Blackwell tweeted “It’s an amazing self-own that these people didn’t even engage in a scientific process.” though I think the critics get the best of it What’s really at stake here is less a dispute over academic method and more an opening of another front in America’s great culture war and Boghossian are not neutral scholars: All of them are critics of so-called identity politics and the social justice left more broadly he told me openly that the project was born of a concern over “political correctness” run amok in the academy and the United States more broadly is to reveal the identity left as an emperor wearing no clothes: To show that the ideas you hear from liberal intellectuals activists in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and even some Democratic elected officials are vacuous at best see this as a war to save liberalism from itself But it actually reveals a shift in modern political debate one in which ideology and identity have supplanted some of the old left/right divisions — aligning a certain brand of liberal with the forces of reaction The Grievance Study hoax started with concerns that people were being unfairly accused of racism and sexism — illustrating the political stakes of all of this practically from the get-go Boghossian (a professor at Portland State University) and Lindsay (who has a PhD in mathematics and works outside the academy) were both involved in the atheist-skeptic writing community they had both been alarmed by what they saw as a wave of unfair criticism directed at individuals under the banner of social justice and “systemic” discrimination One such example, per Lindsay, is James Damore, the Google engineer fired in 2017 after writing a memo defending the notion that men are intrinsically better suited to the technology field than women “We noticed a trend that included people we respected being pilloried on accusations of racism and sexism,” Lindsay tells me “When we looked into these more closely we realized that they were using particular definitions of sexism and racism — specifically they were using ‘systemic’ racism and sexism.” The theory of “systemic” discrimination holds that the issue is not merely a matter of individual attitudes but rather of broader social structures and ideas The American criminal justice system is racist under this theory because despite formally guaranteeing equal protection it is set up in such a way that black people end up getting arrested and incarcerated at wildly disproportionate rates the notion of systemic racism and sexism is used to attack people for all sorts of behaviors that are not motivated by personal racial animus They blame a particular application of poststructural theory that’s become popular in fields like gender studies one that focuses heavily on the role of language in maintaining oppressive structures “Political correctness is one public manifestation of a strong focus on the idea that language constructs society through establishing and maintaining power imbalances which is a very [poststructural] idea,” Lindsay says The hoax idea was conceived of as a way to test the quality of the underlying research behind this theory If poststructural theory was rooted in rigorous academic research then its scholars should be able to ferret out fake papers during peer review But if they can cover a totally nonsensical argument in poststructural jargon that would suggest the entire edifice is corrupt Lindsay and Boghossian’s first attempt didn’t go so well. In 2017, they published a paper called “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” in the journal Cogent Social Sciences It argued that penises were better understood as a kind of masculine identity than a biological organ and that the “conceptual penis” was responsible for The problem, as critics pointed out, is that Cogent Social Sciences was not a leading gender studies journal, or even a reputable academic outlet at all. It’s an extremely low-quality publication that charges a $625 fee to publish. Indeed, when Lindsay and Boghossian tried to submit “The Conceptual Penis” to an actual journal of gender studies, NORMA the experiment “mostly failed.” The grievance studies hoax was designed explicitly in an effort to address the shortcomings of the conceptual penis stunt as a contributor; they also improved their methodology we’d only use peer-reviewed journals We’d use the highest-impact factor journals within the aims and scope of the kinds of paper we were writing,” Lindsay explains “We would never use a pay-to-publish journal .. and we would also do more than one paper.” But then they committed to studying the kinds of papers that had been written on the topic in the past and improved their ability to mimic the arguments in them This was a full-time job for Lindsay: He secured funding from a group of donors whose names he would not reveal to spend “90 hours a week” on this project The result was that by the end, seven out of the 20 papers were accepted for publication in target journals. As Slate’s Daniel Engber notes three of the seven are the most compellingly absurd examples and the ones that have received the most attention: the dildo and breastaurant papers I highlighted earlier These three accepted papers contain made-up research like 10,000 hours of fake observation of dogs humping other dogs at dog parks They also are filled with sentences like “because of my own situatedness as a human I recognize my limitations in being able to determine when an incidence of dog humping qualifies as rape.” And the papers come to some strange conclusions on the basis of “semi-structured interviews with thirteen men,” that there’s “potential socially remedial value for encouraging male anal eroticism with sex toys.” Put more simply the paper argues that men who masturbate by penetrating themselves anally might be less homophobic and transphobic as a result The fact that these silly-sounding arguments were accepted at all vindicates their initial assumption: that much of poststructural theory underpinning modern arguments about race and gender is rotten “If we’re going to base policy on those things I think that the scholarship itself has a duty to the public to be trustworthy,” he says “I’ve lost my ability to trust I’m sure some of the work is very good The problem is now I don’t know how to tell.” If the various identity studies subfields can’t be reformed then those departments — some of the relatively few in which women and minorities have a significant presence — should be shut down “These departments can continue to do what they want to do but outside of the university system,” he told me The reaction to the Grievance Study hoax was mixed. Some scholars, like Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk, celebrated their findings. Others were more critical. James Stacey Taylor a libertarian philosophy professor at the College of New Jersey pointed out that two of the journals they submitted to — Afflia and the Journal of Poetry Therapy — “aren’t really academic outlets at all but seem aimed at practitioners,” meaning social workers and therapists It seems clear the hoaxers exposed a problem with these journals Academic identity studies is committed to a progressive political view; in fact it’s more accurately described as a radical one The hoax experiment shows that it’s possible for bad work to be published that flatters those biases which is certainly something reviewers working in the field’s journals should be more wary of than they seem to be any field can be hoaxed if you lie about the data you’ve gathered and hide your true intentions: The entire system depends on good faith and honesty by submitting bad-faith arguments or by manufacturing data the system is not well-equipped to catch it Peer reviewers can’t tell if a statistical paper is flawed in this way because by definition they don’t have access to research results that are excluded from the paper They have to trust that the researchers came by their conclusions honestly; the entire peer review system depends on establishing a certain level of trust This is why it matters, as Engber notes, that the most striking papers from the hoax actually invented interviews and data from observation. “We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud,” he writes “These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.” In order to draw the big ideological conclusions about gender and identity studies that Pluckrose et al you need to show that this is something different from the standard problems with academic publishing But the hoax doesn’t show that fake papers are more likely to be accepted than real papers nor does it show that gender studies and journals of poststructural theory are more likely to accept fake papers than those in any other field it’s hard to know if gender studies is uniquely corrupt — or if there’s a bigger flaw in the peer review system writ large expressed exacerbation at this line of reasoning it would have been logistically impossible for his team to learn all sorts of different academic disciplines and submit to journals in them it’s irrelevant: The fact that there might be problems in other fields doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem with research on identity topics “Suppose the ATF runs a big sting on a nightclub that they think is running a drug dealing operation .. ‘Why didn’t you check out grocery stores to see if they’re selling beer to minors?’ You didn’t check the Safeway to see if it had similar problems.” But drug sales at a nightclub have nothing to do with alcohol sales at a grocery store whereas academic publishing has certain relevant similarities and weaknesses across fields In order to show that the ideas underlying identity studies are corrupt relative to the ideas that dominate in the more traditional sciences you have to show that those ideas make their journals more manipulable than those of other fields are And that doesn’t appear to be the case Cornell University food researcher Brian Wansink, for example, built his career on studies arguing that people’s psychology and environment subtly but profoundly work to make them overweight. But it turned out his work is dubious, relying heavily on what one expert called “p-hacking on steroids.” Wansink has announced he is resigning from his post at Cornell next year No one would say Wansink’s downfall discredits the very idea that the environment affects our weight — just that his specific claims can’t be supported based on the available evidence the Grievance Studies hoax doesn’t discredit the idea of “systemic” racism or sexism; all it’s shown is that work that depends on related ideas can be bad and still get published have failed to show that qualitative inquiry informed by poststructural theory is particularly prone to being manipulated or that the core claims in the various identity studies disciplines are invalid “We already know all kinds of crap is published because people are willing to put a thumb on the scales,” Duke sociologist Kieran Healy tweeted “If you hate an area enough you can gin up a fake paper and get it published somewhere if you try To understand the answer to Healy’s question you really need to understand the academy of the 1990s the academy of the 1990s was obsessed with debates over “identity politics” and “political correctness.” In the world of academic research this manifested in something called the “science wars”: a debate about whether scientific research really establishes “objective truths” about the world Natural scientists and their allies in disciplines like philosophy defended the traditional idea of objectivity while critics in fields like science and technology studies argued that scientists were ignoring the inherent limitations on objectivity created by human perspective and biases Many of the critics were concerned about the way that power structures had historically twisted scientific inquiry (eugenics and Nazi race science In a prank that would inspire Pluckrose et al. years later, NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to the poststructural journal Social Text titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The article made a series of obviously absurd claims including that gravity itself was a social phenomenon dressed up in the language of poststructural philosophy The point was to show that you could get away with anything if you made it sound properly poststructural and come to the right political conclusions “The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that ‘the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.’” Sokal’s hoax was self-consciously more limited than the Pluckrose et al sting (which some observers are calling “Sokal Squared”) But it reveals what’s going on here: These hoaxes are not so much about academic hygiene as they are about discrediting one’s political opponents all three of the Grievance Study authors identify as political liberals Lindsay emphasized this point in our phone call noting his personal support for significantly higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy In September of this year, Pluckrose and Lindsay co-authored a piece blasting practitioners of “identity politics” as betraying the liberal legacy of the civil rights movement polarizing the American mainstream against progressive causes “Identity politics in the form of Social Justice .. could undo decades of social progress and provide a rationale for a resurgence of racism This kind of view is on its face progressive but is in fact most commonly heard today from moderate conservatives and members of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.” The argument is that today’s activists including some of the most prominent #MeToo and Black Lives Matter advocates are alienating white men through their confrontational language and tactics Boghossian told me this was because the two of them have “congruent beliefs about metaphysics” — not believing in God or the supernatural specifically — and that they disagreed on politics But this isn’t the full picture. In one video Boghossian and Molyneux take turns attacking modern feminists and social justice advocates more broadly “The left are the new racists,” Boghossian says 13 minutes into the conversation: This all goes to show that the ideological battle lines in modern politics are shifting Conflict does not fall so neatly along policy lines where people who agree on tax levels or same-sex marriage agree with each other This is the way things mostly were for the past decade of American politics and something we’ve gotten pretty used to things are looking a bit more like the 1990s Our rhetorical battles today are over how people identify themselves and how they feel about particular movements for social justice You can be all for same-sex marriage as a legal institution and still be deeply opposed to the way the modern social justice left thinks and talks That puts you on the same side of the argument as the right even if you frame yourself as a liberal in doing so Lindsay rejected this argument in our conversation “About being a tool for the right: Have you seen me go on Tucker Carlson yet Do you think he hasn’t asked?” he told me Fair enough: He’s self-conscious enough to know what doing that particular television show would entail But the fact that this is the type of audience that’s excited about the Grievance Studies hoax says a lot about whose work the project is actually doing Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day An exhausting — if not exhaustive — timeline of J.K Trump’s tariffs might actually be good for Ukraine Explain It to MeApr 5Why are car headlights so blindingly bright now?Bright headlights can make it easier for drivers to see the road. 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Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoax (Mike Nayna)October 5 and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process a professor of physics at New York University began a soon-to-be-infamous article by setting out some of his core beliefs: whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method Sokal went on to “disprove” his credo in fashionable jargon “Feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity,’” he claimed “It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” Further reading: It’s surprisingly easy to get a fake paper published in an academic journal Next, Sokal sent off this jabber to Social Text, an academic journal that was, at the time, a leading intellectual forum for famous scholars including Edward Said, Oskar Negt, Nancy Fraser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière.* It was published what came to be known as the Sokal Hoax seemed to prove the most damning charges that critics of postmodernism had long leveled against it that not even “experts” can distinguish between people who make sincere claims and those who compose deliberate gibberish But its influence—and that of the larger “deconstructivist” mode of inquiry it propagated—continued to grow many academic departments that devote themselves to the study of particular ethnic and sexual groups are deeply inflected by some of Social Text’s core beliefs including the radical subjectivity of knowledge and Boghossian set out to rerun the original hoax the journals that fell for Sokal Squared publish respected scholars from respected programs has in the past months published work from professors at UCLA Further reading: The research pirates of the dark web The sheer craziness of the papers the authors concocted makes this fact all the more shocking One of their papers reads like a straightforward riff on the Sokal Hoax Dismissing “western astronomy” as sexist and imperialist it makes a case for physics departments to study feminist astrology—or practice interpretative dance—instead: Other means superior to the natural sciences exist to extract alternative knowledges about stars and enriching astronomy including ethnography and other social science methodologies careful examination of the intersection of extant astrologies from around the globe incorporation of mythological narratives and modern feminist analysis of them feminist interpretative dance (especially with regard to the movements of the stars and their astrological significance) and direct application of feminist and postcolonial discourses concerning alternative knowledges and cultural narratives “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland Oregon” claims to be based on in situ observation of canine rape culture in a Portland dog park “Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?” the paper asks Yet another paper has a rather more sinister hue In “Rubbing One Out: Defining Metasexual Violence of Objectification Through Nonconsensual Masturbation,” the fictitious author argues that men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are perpetrators of sexual violence: By drawing upon empirical studies of psychological harms of objectification and exploring severel veins of theoretical literature on nonphysical forms of sexual violence this articles seeks to situate non-concensual male autoerotic fantasizing about women as a form of metasexual violence that depersonalizes her contributes to consequent harms of objectification and rape culture and can appropriate her identity for the purpose of male sexual gratification Sokal Squared doesn’t just expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals This tendency becomes most evident in an article that advocates extreme measures to redress the “privilege” of white students Exhorting college professors to enact forms of “experiential reparations,” the paper suggests telling privileged students to stay silent or even binding them to the floor in chains take considerable care not to validate privilege recenter the needs of privileged groups at the expense of marginalized ones 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 and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee Further reading: How scholars hack the world of academic publishing These attacks are empirically incorrect and intellectually dishonest There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race they have not penetrated the leading journals of more traditional disciplines As a number of academics pointed out on Twitter all of the papers submitted to sociology journals were rejected it remains unlikely that the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review would have fallen for anything resembling “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” a paper modeled on the infamous book with a similar title many leftists are willing to grasp at straws to defend journals and fields of inquiry that they regard as morally righteous Some have dismissed Sokal Squared by pointing out that many disciplines have in the past years also faced crises of confidence Others have simply cited the conservative instrumentalization of Sokal Squared as a reason to ignore it “Academics,” Alison Phipps wrote on Twitter “please stand by colleagues in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas targeted by this journal article hoax This is a coordinated attack from the right.” Pluckrose and Boghossian describe themselves as left-leaning liberals it is nonsensical to insist that nonsense scholarship doesn’t matter because you don’t like the motives of the people who exposed it or because some other forms of scholarship may also contain nonsense If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon they are worsening the problems they purport to address be all too easy to draw the wrong inferences from Sokal Squared The lesson is neither that all fields of academia should be mistrusted nor that the study of race their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance But if we are to be serious about remedying discrimination we can’t ignore the uncomfortable truth these hoaxers have revealed: Some academic emperors—the ones who supposedly have the most to say about these crucial topics—have no clothes * This article originally stated that Social Text was a peer-reviewed journal this also implies postmodern writers should be far more modest and careful when criticizing the virtues of science and reason since it is not clear that they fully appreciate what it is that scientists actually do and believe.” Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science they certainly did not abet the production of post-modern scholarship—including about the sciences One of the motivations behind the recent Sokal Squared hoax was to take another jab at the ascendancy of academic post-modernism It naturally generated a tremendous amount of press This conjured up many of the old debates about Sokal’s tactics and ambitions with many of the familiar battle lines being drawn I thought it would be an ideal time to reexamine Sokal’s own extended discussion on these issues These were presented most thoroughly in his book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science which was co-authored with Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont and published in English in 1998 This well-written and frequently-hilarious book presents a more sustained examination of the relationship between post-modern scholarship and science Sokal and Bricmont discuss the reasons behind their critiques examine the use of scientific terminology and concepts by several major post-modern authors and conclude with some philosophical and political arguments for abandoning post-modern skepticism and leftism Sokal and Bricmont’s book remains the best popular argument along these lines yet put forward The Parameters of Sokal and Bricmont’s Critique Unlike so many modern critics of post-modernism, from Jordan Peterson to Stephen Hicks Sokal and Bricmont’s critique has genuine intellectual bite to it The first is that Sokal and Bricmont have read a substantial number of texts by major post-modern authors right down to the secondary literature on the subject they are keen to interpret these figures in good faith They readily acknowledge when Lacan might actually present plausible arguments about mathematics—or that they have some sympathy for the purely “political” opinions of Paul Virillio This liberal approach towards interpreting one’s ideological opponents extends to the generous quotations provided throughout the book Sokal and Bricmont will provide entire pages of text by post-modern authors accompanied and followed by footnotes and explanations as to where these post-modern authors went wrong when using or discussing scientific terminology and concepts This indirectly benefits Sokal and Bricmont’s overall argument Wading through page after page of dense post-modern prose becomes extremely frustrating when accompanied by solid evidence that many of these efforts result in learning little of substance about the scientific topics post-modern authors aspire to discuss The second reason why Sokal and Bricmont’s critique hits hard is its comparatively modest parameters Many contemporary critiques of post-modernism are prone to both sloppy generalizations and flat errors Authors like Hicks will present their work as both a takedown of post-modern theory an account of the philosophical discourse of modernity an indirect defense of a very particular interpretation of reason or morality and a takedown of left-wing politics and political tactics Sokal and Bricmont’s ambitions are far more limited They openly state in their introduction that they are not concerned with analyzing the philosophical and political arguments of post-modern authors except to the extent these draw on scientific terminology and concepts This might disappoint those looking for a more knock down argument against post-modern philosophy or who want to read a thorough critique of left wing critical theory But this works in Sokal and Bricmont’s favor since what they lose in breadth they gain in depth they are primarily concerned with arguing for three points in descending order of priority The first is that many post-modern authors abuse or simply don’t understand scientific terminology and concepts The second is to argue that the skepticism of reason and science shown by many post-modern authors is unwarranted And the third—and least important objective from their point of view—is indicating that the political left has little to gain from such skepticism towards reason and science I will discuss each of these points in turn the book’s primary objective is demonstrating how many post-modern authors abuse scientific terminology and concepts This was partially demonstrated by Sokal’s initial hoax where an academic paper filled with scientific nonsense or banalities was published by the well-known post-modern journal Social Text Since one parody in a single journal is not in itself conclusive evidence of this Sokal and Bricmont’s book discusses a number of major post-modern theorists’ and their approach to scientific terminology and concepts Each of these thinkers is given a full chapter to analyze their respective slights There are also “intermezzos,” which discuss different but related topical concerns including relativism in the philosophy of science and the misuse of chaos theory and Godelian incompleteness theorems by post-modern authors it is hard to deny Sokal and Bricmont’s conclusion that many post-modern authors are prone to abusing or misusing scientific terminology and concepts They readily acknowledge that some of the offenders are worse than others Sokal and Bricmont also go out of their way to recognize when post-modern theorists get something right—or where they happen to agree with a given interpretation they demonstrate convincingly that many of post-modern authors would do well with adopting a far more modest and careful approach to the terminology and concepts they use this also implies they should be far more modest and careful when criticizing the virtues of science and reason since it is not clear that they fully appreciate what it is that scientists actually do and believe There are innumerable examples provided throughout the book—far too many to discuss even a fraction of them here Perhaps the most glaring include a scathing takedown of Bruno Latour’s claim that he can “teach Einstein” something about the theory of relativity their observation that Julia Kristeva not only got Godel’s incompleteness theorem wrong but that is says “exactly the opposite” of what Kristeva claims and a truly amusing critique of a monumentally-opaque quotation in Felix Guattari’s Chaosmosis Sokal and Bricmont observe that Latour confuses Einstein’s references to “observers” with the sociological concept of observer that he attributes to Einstein arguments the latter never made and that he arrogantly dismisses such concerns by saying “the vision we develop of science does not have to resemble what scientists think about science.”  With regard to Kristeva they note that she argues that Godel provided a proof that one could never establish a mathematical system’s inconsistency when in fact the proof establishes the opposite Godel’s proof established that one could never establish a mathematical systems consistency Such an elementary mistake seriously belies claims that Kristeva understood Godelian logic and its implications enough to claim it has anything to tell us about semiotics Sokal and Bricmont observe that Guattari’s immensely dense comment in Chaosmosis contains “the most brilliant mélange of scientific and philosophical jargon” they have ever encountered.” In two brief pages it includes reference to linguistic theory The point is well made: one immediately becomes deeply suspicious that this actually can all fit together in any logical fashion Sokal and Bricmont’s point about post-modern author’s abuse of scientific terminology and concepts is well-taken Indeed it is a sharp reminder to those (including myself at times) who are prone to deploying these terms without sufficiently researching them Is there really that much to be gained by demonstrating that a number of academics in the humanities occasionally overreach in their ambitions and are capable of writing some truly grotesque sentences This brings me to their two other points in this book: to argue against unwarranted skepticism towards science and reason and to caution the political left about embracing this skepticism These are obviously immense philosophical and political issues and Fashionable Nonsense wisely refrains from discussing them in any depth I will only briefly add my interpretation and analysis here in order to theoretically provoke future discussion on these issues Sokal and Bricmont observe that there are many potent arguments one could make about the absolute objectivity of science they run through some of the more rigorous philosophical arguments made by Popper and Feyerabend which they find reasonably convincing And they concede that there are many problems with flatly claiming that any given scientific proposition simply describes the world as it is as though there is a one to one correspondence between the propositional content and the empirical reality it aspires to describe But they also observe that many scientists are aware of these difficulties or at least they do not pretend that scientific propositions accurately describe more than they purport to They point out that radicalizing these philosophical problems into claims that all propositions are relative is going too far it has significant consequences in the real world if these radicalizations are taken seriously Sokal and Bricmont point out that in many circumstances such as the guilt or innocence of a person under criminal investigation claiming that there is no factual way to make such a determination amounts to saying anything goes The same is true in many development contexts where many efforts at improving medicine depend on gradually mitigating the practical influence of medically-dangerous cultural practices in favor of a scientific approach to the body and its functions (female genital mutilation comes to mind) This claim has the most bearing on their third point about skepticism and left wing politics Sokal and Bricmont observe that for a long time the goal of the left was to “speak truth to power.” Those on the Left believed that reason ultimately would demonstrate the salience of their progressive opinions-whether about the liberal equality of women or the debilitating impact of racist policies on human psychology while undermining the position of their adversaries Sokal and Bricmont express confusion as to why so many on the Left increasingly turn to opaque and jargon ridden forms of skepticism in their efforts to establish a more equal and fair society It is a good question that goes beyond the purview of this essay But Sokal and Bricmont’s book certainly makes one ponder it more seriously You have /5 articles left.Sign up for a free account or log in and conservative voices have lauded it as illuminating the nonsense and cultural rot that characterizes the intellectual labor and politics of the left wing of the academy Yet most voices in the mainstream press have either not noticed or failed to point out that race is central to their project and that they specifically discredit and insult scholars who call attention to the social and cultural factors behind racism remain popular in certain political circles The authors’ invocation of DiAngelo’s work constitutes neither a sustained interrogation nor even a cursory examination: it is a cloying and underhanded condemnation by association with their own patent nonsense And these values are also often characterized as “Western.” Many white nationalists and their allies assail postmodernism as their academic foe just as their less intellectually inclined peers attack diversity So when we see that the authors of this hoax repeatedly and deceptively attack the scholarship that explains concepts like white privilege and that they position postmodernism as their own personal bogeyman it is not surprising that one of them is also a regular collaborator of an avowed white nationalist Part of the hoax of this hoax is that many journalists and a wide-reading audience have accepted that its authors are disaffected liberals who have learned the bitter truth of the lie of their fields That may be the case -- but we have encountered many white nationalists who claim they used to be liberal until they learned about “reverse racism” (or something like that) they are feeling the deep disappointment and rage created by their own privilege When confronted with a complex world where their expected success and accolades never materialize some of our white peers fail to look to themselves for explanations The strategy this trio has executed is one that has become increasingly common: adopt the language and form of critical theory in a reductio ad absurdum and then clap your hands together and claim it is all wizardry and nonsense to begin with That is not valid argumentation or scholarship but it does make for good headlines and high click counts It is why provocateurs continue to get space online and in print: they attract controversy and help struggling publications But just because they attract attention does not mean they have anything substantive to say It is bitterly disappointing that publications that focus on higher education are either so easily hoodwinked or eagerly in on the fix It is crucial to call out the racial aspects of this hoax and its put-down of academics who study and are concerned with racial issues Either the authors do not understand the rhetoric they are engaging in and the harm it can have on others they are naïve and need to be engaged in deeper conversations then they should have to acknowledge the full implications of their aims Anoshua Chaudhuri and Jennifer Trainor offer a framework for curricular decisions Aja Martinez and Robert Smith say in a new book that the roots of CRT show that the academic discipline is uniquely A Torbjørn Netland argues that peer review could potentially be improved by giving reviewers more cho Lo writes that a shift from perpetual licenses to subscription-based models demands a strategic response Subscribe for free to Inside Higher Ed’s newsletters opinion and great new careers in higher education — delivered to your inbox View Newsletters Copyright © 2025 Inside Higher Ed All rights reserved. | Website designed by nclud You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience Rachel Cockerell and Lili Anolik in conversation Online Only Greg Afinogenov three self-described liberal scholars (Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian) went public with an account of a hoax against a range of scholarly journals from obscure paper mills to field-leading publications What their targets had in common was membership in a group of humanistic interdisciplinary social-science fields the hoaxers call “grievance studies”—in other words and other scholarly communities that emerged from the post-’68 “long march through the institutions.” The avowed purpose of these fields is to promote critical engagement with marginalized viewpoints and to advance a general project of social change (I will use the term “grievance studies” here though I recognize that it is inaccurate and harmful—under erasure as it were.) By assembling articles that appeared to share this political impetus while being in some way ridiculous or absurd (for instance rewrites of parts of Mein Kampf) and getting them published the three scholars aimed to reveal that these fields have become intellectually bankrupt as a result of poor peer review practices and tolerance of sloppy methodology And is what they offer in place of these practices any better triggered by long-dormant Sokal Hoax antibodies was to become outraged at the political motivations and damaging anti-academic effects of the project But of course this only plays into the hands of the hoaxers to whom indignation and charges of unethical conduct from the targets only reveal how effective the hoax actually was In an article published two years before the Sokal Hoax the decidedly unpostmodern science writer Jim Schnabel surveyed a range of historical scientific hoaxes (that is those specifically intended to expose putatively fraudulent methodology) and concluded that they all unfold in roughly the same order The hoax is perpetrated; the target replies that the hoax did not in fact challenge their competence and was ethically dubious; the hoaxer ridicules the target for their defensiveness; and the educated public makes a decision based not on the scientific merits of the hoax but on the relative orthodoxy of the hoaxer and hoaxee the result of the trick is decided in advance by the power relations of the field—which In the current case the situation appears at first glance to be more complicated The researchers do not seem to represent establishment scholarship: one is an untenured philosophy professor and the others have no formal academic posts The obscure venue of choice for their account of the hoax models itself on the magazine Aeon but in fact contains low-grade content obviously too petty or pedestrian even for Quillette (“Not All Men is Not a Fallacy Yet what generated the Areo article’s viral lift were strong endorsements from the usual suspects—Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson both senior psychology professors—and the budding reactionary Yascha Mounk a Harvard lecturer in government but also head of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change The orthodoxy these men represent is not an orthodoxy of scientific legitimacy but rather the emerging consensus of tech bros Each of these groups has its own reasons to hate feminist and other critical scholarship—whether for ideological reasons or the perception that they are uncommodifiable and hence worthless It has thus been easy for them to find common cause in fighting the old Sokal specter of academic postmodernism that supposedly still dominates academia is precisely the question of whether it is “grievance studies” that is Goliath and methodological “common sense” that is David fields like gender studies are less institutionalized and funding compared to mainline counterparts like psychology—doubly disadvantaged in the case of even newer fields like fat studies whose individual marginalization is compounded by the structure of academic institutions The low impact factor of most of the journals that published the hoaxers’ papers testifies not just to the barrel-scraping to which they were reduced when more prestigious journals rejected them but also to the struggle their fields face in the broader academic community for these fields do in fact produce valuable and effective scholarship “White fragility,” a concept developed by critical discourse analysis scholar Robin DiAngelo is singled out for special scrutiny by the hoaxers—yet without it one would find it difficult to understand anything about American political discourse since the murder of Michael Brown The hoaxers themselves give ample evidence of this The comments they so lovingly pluck out from the peer reviews they’ve received (thus committing the scientific sin of only reproducing the data that apparently fits one’s predetermined conclusion) do not show that all of the reviewers took the papers as God’s word they are a record of the careful emotional labor the journals’ unpaid reviewers performed on behalf of someone they assumed was a struggling junior colleague one of the reviewers revealed himself to be a graduate student who spent hours crafting suggestions about what he thought was a master’s thesis in the process of being revised.) At their best “grievance studies” fields tend to emphasize a duty of care for authors their shared political impetus and institutional marginality providing the basis for a scholarly community rather than a field of bitter and often unfair competition But perhaps these fields would be more rigorous if their peer-reviewing tradition was more like political science or other mainline white cis male-dominated ones Anyone with personal experience of “reviewer 2,” with all his gatekeeping and citation-policing that peer review alone is manifestly incapable of serving the purpose the hoaxers expect of it which is to present the “gold standard” of scholarship The highest-ranked journal they hoaxed accepted their paper in part on the basis of a fraudulent ethnography; as numerous hoax scandals in computer science and a wide range of other fields testify no peer reviewer (let alone an unpaid or untenured one) is capable of reliably detecting fraudulent data and accepted entirely in good faith is vulnerable to being discredited by methodological shifts like the “replication crisis” in psychology (many of whose culprits were unaware that they were juking their own stats) the point of peer review is to impose conformity within the parameters of a particular academic field Many a political-science paper has been torn to shreds by quantitative economists who share different assumptions is to the politics: a field less deliberately politicized would not have let these papers slip through We lack explicit examples of such fields here (for some reason sociology is not recognized in the article as a successful field though all of its journals rejected the proffered hoaxes) But we can conclude from the authors’ stated alliances here and elsewhere that Pinker and Mounk represent their scholarly ideal—or and Mounk represent that ideal for themselves which is why they shared the article to begin with and money that immunize a would-be scholar from criticism and disincentivize any revisions to their views These extra-academic factors have a much greater effect on shaping our own daily lives than the private politics of most fat studies scholars for they spread incorrect conclusions to a very wide audience and give it the imprimatur of elite academic institutions Its blatant manipulation of its own “data,” the lack of meaningful controls and the disconnect between its methods and what it claims to prove are a remarkably poor model for nonpoliticized scholarship even if it were true (as it clearly is not) that the hoaxers were any less driven by ideology than their targets As historians and philosophers of science have long recognized claims that good science is apolitical are routinely deployed in the service of very political ends fields like disability studies give a frame to scholarly inquiry That such inquiry sometimes brings with it dross will not be news to anyone who has ever read a few journal issues cover to cover But the political goals of these fields are worthy They are a credible contribution to social justice in a way that the hollow pieties of celebrity pseudoscientists will never be and Boghossian have once more reenacted Schnabel’s old drama about hoaxes reinforcing the existing orthodoxy yet the orthodoxy they endorse is more powerful It is a resolutely prescientific consensus that assigned gender is immutable and that attempts to think critically about these phenomena should be driven out of the academy These denials are squarely out of line with the most direct evidence of our own senses I don’t need to get bogged down in debates about the nature of truth to say that to cede the ground of truth to these people is stupid Jim Schnabel, “Puck in the Laboratory: The Construction and Deconstruction of Hoaxlike Deception in Science,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 19, no. 4 (1994): 459–92. ↩ http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.001.0001/acprof-9780199858996-chapter-7 ↩ We have an elite with a “study abroad” worldview the Russian political system had taken the shape that made Putinism possible n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature We also post new online-only work several times each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the magazine Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy The creator of the cult adventure game series was 66 Benoît Sokal, Belgian comic book artist and creator of the adventure game series Syberia, has died at the age of 66. According to a statement from publisher Microïds Sokal died on May 28 of an unspecified long-term illness Sokal began creating comics about an anthropomorphic duck detective named Inspector Canardo for Franco-Belgian magazine À Suivre ("To Be Continued") in the 1970s He repurposed a storyline from those comics as the basis for his first adventure game Amerzone in which a journalist travels to South America to prove the existence of a mysterious species of white bird not seen since 1932.  finding success years after adventure games had stopped being regular best-sellers the Syberia games were a journey across Europe and Russia that showed off Sokal's gift for unusual architecture and atmospheric backdrops.  and had apparently been in development for 18 months by that point Sokal continued working on it with Koalabs Studio in the months before his death "Benoît contributed hugely to advancing the video game medium internationally," Microïds wrote "through a varied and prolific output over the past 25 years." Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018 and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page To paraphrase the incipit of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (my apologies to Karl Marx) a specter is haunting America—the specter of wokeness But wokeness has intellectual feet of clay the news of the fake article published by Wiley’s academic journal Higher Education Quarterly will probably start hitting mainstream media and we should know more nowhere in [his article] is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority and bald assertions… I go on to suggest (once again without argument) that science … in order to be ‘liberatory,’ must be subordinated to political strategies a philosophy professor at Portland State University and co-authors James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose pulled a series of similar hoaxes (Sokal II as it were) by publishing postmodern and woke nonsense in small academic journals and the right conclusions seemed to matter Now, this past October, an article bearing the names of Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III, “Donor Money and the Academy: Perceptions of Undue Donor Pressure in Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy,” appeared on the website of the Higher Education Quarterly a journal in the portfolio of well-known publisher Wiley before appearing in a forthcoming printed issue of the journal (The link above is still live as I write this post on Wednesday night.) The authors argue in an academic tone slightly colored by an anti-classical-liberal bias that their survey provides strong statistical evidence that faculty and administrations of American colleges and universities feel constrained by their “right-wing” donors: Right-wing money has a strong overall effect on perceptions Faculty and staff generally feel pressure to hire and promote white candidates to avoiding hiring and promoting non-white candidates to hire and promote right-wing and moderate candidates Our study demonstrates that right-wing donations are strongly associated with feelings of undue influence and a lack of safety Right-wing money strongly appears to induce faculty and administrators—including those who self-identify as members of the right—to believe that they are pressured to hire and promote people they regard as inferior candidates and to suppress people and ideas they regard as superior The specter of Koch money appears often in the article along with code words such as “neoliberalization of higher education” or “market fundamentalism.” That might have been sufficient to have the article accepted despite fabricated data and obvious errors The identity of the two listed authors is still a mystery Somebody clever noted that the initials of their names Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III read “SOKAL III” Yesterday afternoon, I emailed the Wiley Newsroom about this article An anonymous person responded that the journal has issued the following statement—which Higher Education Quarterly takes research integrity incredibly seriously and is moving swiftly to retract the article given that the data has been identified as fabricated and the authors have not disclosed their true identities Writing nothing more than fasionable nonsense and getting it published is a damming critique of postmodern acaddemic journals Fabricating data that logically supports a conclusion even if that conclusion has a high degree of social desirability among readers of the target publication doesn’t approach the “emperor has no clothes” effect of the Sokal affair Higher Education Quarterly did a rotten job of reviewing the bogus statistical analysis That is neither the first or last time bad statistical analysis gets published If Higher Education Quarterly had rejected the paper and told the authors the reason for the rejection was because data collection and statistical analysis is a tool with which systemic racism opresses others Capt. J. Parker: You have a point. But rigor in engineering is clearly a means of oppression: see my previous Econlog post, ““Ice is not Ice” and the Limits of Conversation.” It’s not merely incorrect statistical analysis over-the-top nonsense that any competent social scientist should have seen through at a glance The retraction is agreed because data in the article has been identified as fabricated and the authors have not disclosed their true identities You got the journal name wrong in the first few sentences Enter your email address to subscribe to the Econlib monthly newsletter "\/heart-of-gold-and-bronze-and-light\/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=1hcaevfYay2Wl3Oe.MejYZWU5jto84eebRtHROf5qC4-1746538564-1.0.1.1-7adWCY3iszhbzJllUz6m0fHQ7hRvd58_PmDs4W9RV0Q" + window._cf_chl_opt.cOgUHash);cpo.onload = function() {history.replaceState(null Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.