03 Oct 2018

Deep Thoughts on Hoax Publications

Deep Thoughts 19 Comments

Please do not misinterpret this blog post. I totally get THAT the revelations about a round of hoax publications are hilarious and serve to discredit the journals/disciplines involved. But I want to think more about WHY they have this effect.

The quickest way to get my perspective across is to use a thought experiment. Consider the following articles:

1) Claims the legal system and even military defense should be privatized.

2) Argues in favor of selling kidneys to the highest bidder.

3) Argues that the US suffered from a housing undersupply in 2006.

4) Makes the case that Ben Bernanke had the tightest monetary policy since the 1930s.

5) Uses economics to develop a model in which human sacrifice is a rational practice.

I submit that any normal red-blooded American would think all five of the above were parodies. (Indeed, I myself am still waiting for Sumner to jump out and yell, “Surprise! You suckers, Murphy was the only one onto me all these years. I was kicking him under the table.”)

Does that affect the quality of their arguments or make us skeptical of the outlets that published these ideas?

19 Responses to “Deep Thoughts on Hoax Publications”

  1. Dan says:

    I think it’s because the people running them couldn’t tell they were being mocked, and now that they know they are unlikely to defend the arguments in those papers. If someone started submitting articles to Lew Rockwell, that were meant to mock libertarianism, and he posted them it’d look bad. Unless the articles had consisted of arguments libertarians would stand behind even after knowing it was meant to mock us.

    For example, someone could attempt to mock libertarians by arguing that the military should be privatized, but be unaware that we support that idea. So as long as the argument was sound based on libertarian theory, it would embarrass us if it got posted even though it was an attempt to humiliate us.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Dan you wrote at the end: “So as long as the argument was sound based on libertarian theory, it would embarrass us if it got posted even though it was an attempt to humiliate us.”

      Did you mean “it would NOT embarrass us”?

      More generally, I don’t think your reasoning will hold up. Suppose the guy who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem suddenly announced that it had been a hoax, that he doesn’t think we can ever really know anything. Would mathematicians suddenly think Fermat’s Last Theorem was an open question? Of course not.

      Likewise, even if I did suddenly announce, “You fools, I’m a pacifist! You thought I was serious when I said a private military would be more effective than a State-monopolized one?!” that wouldn’t affect the article I wrote. The editor of that journal could plausibly say, “Well whether it was a tongue-in-cheek submission or not, Murphy made some good points.”

      Let me put it this way, Dan. Suppose the people who read the one journal said, “These hoaxers thought they were going to embarrass us, but they didn’t realize we actually DO believe white male students should sit in chains.” Would that make the problem disappear?

      • Dan says:

        Yes, I meant would not.

        And the rest of your response was the exact point I was making. I was saying it is only embarrassing if the group you are trying to mock doesn’t agree with the paper after they know what happened.

        • Bob Murphy says:

          Dan wrote: “I was saying it is only embarrassing if the group you are trying to mock doesn’t agree with the paper after they know what happened.”

          OK I guess that’s consistent then, but I think most of the people LOL’ing at this incident don’t care what the journal editors say. In fact, I remember with the Sokal hoax that somebody (not sure if it was the editor or just a fan of that journal) said, “Regardless of intent, it was a good paper” and the faculty at the Hillsdale lunch table thought that was independently hilarious. (I was a prof at Hillsdale when that one broke.)

          • Dan says:

            To be honest, I think it is hilarious on its own terms just by the topics the papers. I’d find it even more hilarious if they defended them. The embarrassment part or the integrity of the journals would only applies if they themselves don’t defend what they put in their own journals.

            I mean if you came out and said, “Tricked you, I’m actually a secret Krugmanite and have been mocking you all these years.” I’m sure some people would find it hilarious, and then laugh even harder when we defended your arguments even after your announcement, but I don’t think we’d have any need to be embarrassed or feel like our integrity had been tarnished.

            Actually, Callahan is probably a good case study. Libertarians still recommend his book even though he’s abandoned it. I can see why someone would think that’s funny from the outside, but it still doesn’t embarrass us or impugn our integrity.

    • Matt M says:

      I think libertarians are well inoculated against this sort of thing because it’s already attempted so often. Straw man libertarians exist in every corner of the Internet and are often loud and prominent and sometimes covert. It’s usually fairly easy to identify who actually understands and is arguing the issues authentically and who is just trolling.

      I suspect that the mainstream/progressive/academic left has never quite had to deal with this sort of thing before, so they don’t have very good defense mechanisms against it.

  2. scineram says:

    “Does that affect the quality of their arguments or make us skeptical of the outlets that published these ideas?”

    Yes. Libertardianism is getting politically marginalized for a reason. Because it is bonkers.

    • skylien says:

      What a profound analysis.

    • Andrew says:

      . . . getting politically marginalized . . .

      Did I miss something?

      • Harold says:

        You mean there has never been time when it was not marginalised?

        • Andrew says:

          And that it is about as popular now as it has ever been.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      BOB: Hang on folks, before we chortle too much at this hoax stuff, consider that normal people think libertarian ideas are nutty.

      SCINERAM: Hey Murphy, libertarian ideas are nutty! I bet that hurts. My work is done here.

    • Bob Roddis says:

      As everyone knows, I’ve long considered a rigorous prohibition on the initiation of violence to be completely nuts.

  3. Andrew says:

    I totally get THAT the revelations about a round of hoax publications are hilarious and serve to discredit the journals/disciplines involved.

    Anyone that’s heard about this and hasn’t read the Areo Magazine article written by the authors of the “hoax” articles really should.

    They claim, and I believe them, that their purpose was not to embarrass the journals in question but to understand how such ludicrous articles make it through peer review and get published. Their original hypothesis, that these journals will publish anything that flatters their ideals, was proven false. Instead, they found that the peer review system did in fact require that certain standards were met, but that those standards actually serve to push the papers to be more ideologically driven more often than not. I can’t adequately summarize the whole article here but I highly recommend it. The authors seem to believe that these topics of inquiry could provide value but that the scientific journals in these fields are corrupt and broken.

    One more note from the Areo article: it seems that the authors believe that this phenomenon of poor peer review standards is limited to (or at least only severe enough to worry about in) the grievance studies. As I was reading it, I was thinking, “No, this is a problem that spans many scientific domains,” and I think Bob’s examples above serve to illustrate that.

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Andrew thanks, I’ll check it out. There was a sociologist on Twitter who claimed that of the 6 hoax submissions to sociology journals, all 6 were rejected. He summed it up by saying, “This isn’t a problem with social science, it’s a problem with fields ending in ‘studies.'”

  4. Andrew says:

    and I think Bob’s examples above serve to illustrate that.

    Maybe scratch that part…

    • Andrew says:

      Ugh. I meant for this to be a reply to my post above.

  5. Khodge says:

    1) The first is an argument in favor of arguments from authority. You should reject the conclusions that fail to provide premises/evidence.

    2) Argument from authority from sources who have proven proper rigor should, at least, be respected, though the premises/evidence ought not be passed on without evidence.

  6. Harold says:

    The studies were made up – it will always be very hard to filter out such stuff if done convincingly. The dog studies one invented one year’s worth of observations that had not taken place. The anal autoerotica one invented detailed interviews with 13 subjects.

    It is likely that a chemistry paper that was deliberately intended to deceive could also get through with enough made-up data. The reviewers cannot know if the author is telling the truth but can only see if the numbers and experiments seem reasonable and the results are discussed with proper reference to the established body of knowledge. If I invent a series of results of say, vapor pressure of a mixture if components there is no reason the fact that the numbers were all made up would be detected.

    The difference is that the chemistry paper would get found out eventually. If it were in an important and central topic it would be tested very quickly and negative results reported. If in a back-water it will either be ignored or eventually people will notice that the results do not fit with the rest of the subject. Eventually other studies will test the vapor pressure and they will be different from my made up results.

    With studies such as these hoax ones it is less likely to be shown to be false. The authors also say the data they invented was often obviously of poor quality.

    Bob is talking about the opposite – discussions which are based on real data but interpreted in a way that people find surprising or counter-intuitive, or just plain wrong.

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