Leftist Pseudo-Intellectuals Peer-Review and Publish Hoax Study

This is almost the plotline of the Producers: The pro-antagonists figured a musical about Hitler would suck, and everyone loved it. Likewise, despite the intention of making a hoax, there is actually a fairly good case to view the penis as a social construct: If you know what's going on when you're in the womb, you that every baby has a clitoris. Men just get a really beefed-up one.

 

My hope for humanity hinges on this being sarcasm.

 

The whole situation is stupid. Some guys gave some of their own money to some other guys to do a thing, and when it was done they claimed victory.

The journal was probably delighted to get paid and a submission of what looks like high quality satire.

 

If this were sarcasm, it wouldn't be an example of 'reality being funnier than the real-thing'. No seriously.

 

Cogent Social Sciences has an approval rate of 39%, so I don't think it's accurate to say they will take anything to get paid.

 

Honesty this sort of crap isn't surprising or all that disturbing to me. Of course silly echo chambers exist.

It doesn't excuse 'grab them by the pussy' or any of the other retrograde nonsense you're implicitly defending.

Feel free to tilt at windmills all you like, but you can be solidly on the left and still not give a crap about this kind of extreme social science silliness. This is akin to calling Ken Ham a moron and thinking you've defeated the entire edifice of religious thought.

 

I'd like to point out a few things
- we know peer review isn't perfect, but it's also going to be one of the better filter systems that you can find.
- pay-to-publish isn't necessarily a bad thing, there are some high quality free-access journals out there; but it can create bad incentives for editorial boards. Incentives matter.

It's not a perfect system of filtering research and information, but I will say that there are oodles and oodles of worse systems of information transfer out there. This isn't tu quoque, it's a warning to be even more critical of them.

 

It's not indexed in any reputable social sciences index. And I suspect this 39% number is derived from the number of people who make an initial inquiry, but then balk at paying the $1250 the journal wants to post your article online.

 

That would be a very... liberal interpretation of the phrase "rejection rate".