#academic pseudoscience

By: Heather Mac Donald

Published: June 21, 2021

Physicists at MIT and SUNY Stony Brook recently announced findings that the total surface area of two black holes was maintained after the two entities merged. While this research was a welcome confirmation of both Stephen Hawking’s work and the theory of general relativity, it failed to address a crucial matter: what were its racial implications?

That is a lacuna that an astronomy course at Cornell University aims to prevent. “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” asks the question, “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” Anyone familiar with academia’s racial monomania knows the answer: of course there is! Though “conventional wisdom,” according to the catalog description of “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” holds that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.

Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the “conventional wisdom” by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes “Newton’s laws of motion and gravity” and “theoretical particle physics” to “subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.” The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

In 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal published a paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in one of high theory’s holiest of shrines: Social Text. Sokal’s article drew on efforts among comparative literature and American studies professors to deploy scientific concepts toward a postmodern end: showing science to be a mere power play designed to silence “dissident or marginalized communities,” in Sokal’s words. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” cited such postmodern giants as Andrew Ross and Luce Irigaray on topics like “oppositional discourses in post-quantum science” and “gender encoding in fluid mechanics.” The paper itself proposed a new theory of quantum gravity that could serve as the basis for a “postmodern and liberatory science.”

Sokal’s paper was a hoax. Like the high-theory sources it cited, it mauled the underlying science while obscuring its scientific illiteracy with vast clouds of theorese. Yet it was accepted for publication, apparently without raising a scintilla of doubt among Social Text’s editors.

To the outside world, Sokal appeared to have dealt a lethal blow to academic nonsense. Yet postmodern theory continued to spread unopposed through every last humanities department and many a social sciences department, breeding generations of ignorant but self-righteous armchair revolutionaries.

In 2017, three academics, including Portland State University philosopher Peter Boghossian, again tried to shame the humanities sector into serious scholarship. They submitted 20 theory-drenched fake articles to various cultural studies, gender studies, and social science journals. Four were published and three accepted for publication before the hoax was exposed. “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued for understanding the penis not as “an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.” Climate change is one of the most damaging effects of the conceptual penis, argued the article. Another published work analyzed the rape culture of dog parks.

This time, the academic world fought back. Portland State University declared Boghossian guilty of violating ethical guidelines for conducting research on human subjects. Boghossian should have notified the editors of the target journals that he was going to submit to them a deliberately nonsensical paper, according to the university. Under threat of firing for noncompliance, Boghossian was ordered to undergo training in how to do such research.

The humanities and much of the social sciences have been beyond parody and beyond shame for a long time. What’s different about “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” is its co-listing in an actual science department. The course fulfills Cornell’s science distribution requirement, touching as it does on such concepts as the electromagnetic spectrum. It is not surprising that astronomy would be an early adopter of race theory, and that Cornell would lead the way. Many astronomy departments have been on the forefront of campus identity politics, eliminating the physics GRE as a requirement for graduate study, for example, on the ground that it has a disparate impact on female, black, and Hispanic students. Cornell’s astronomy department will not even allow prospective graduate students to submit the general GRE or the physics GRE. Cornell’s engineering department accepts female undergraduates at over two and a half times the rate of male students, to yield an engineering class that is majority female. This is hardly an accident. Twice as many male as female intending engineering students apply for admission; the average male math SAT score is significantly higher than the average female score, and males predominate at the upper reaches of the curve.

Today’s academic charlatanism consists in part in mistaking rhetoric for knowledge and words for things. This sleight of hand is particularly prevalent in matters relating to race. Hunter College professor Philip Ewell argues that the concept of tonal and harmonic hierarchies in music theory is a stand-in for pernicious racial hierarchies. (See the forthcoming article on race in classical music in the summer issue of City Journal.) Black business school students at USC protested in 2020 that hearing a professor use the Mandarin phrase for “that”—“nèi ge”—constituted racial harassment, since the Mandarin phrase can sound like the dread “N-word.” The professor was sent on leave for “marginalizing, hurting and harming the psychological safety” of USC’s students, in the words of the business school dean.

Seeing specters of racism everywhere, the racial avengers are tearing down every institution associated with Western civilization, simply because of its “whiteness.” Science had stood as a guard against such metaphorical, magical thinking. Bit by bit, it is succumbing.

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Many astronomy departments have been on the forefront of campus identity politics, eliminating the physics GRE as a requirement for graduate study,

Astronomy without knowing physics is like performing surgery without knowing anything about biology.

“Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

When homeopathy isn’t pseudoscientific enough for you...

astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.

The paper itself proposed a new theory of quantum gravity that could serve as the basis for a “postmodern and liberatory science.”

The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

... invent, wholesale, an entire “field” of astronomy that has literally nothing to do with astronomy.

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Of note, the authors of the Grievance Studies probe wrote a paper titled “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework For A Feminist Astronomy.” It begins:

Abstract

Understood broadly as the scientific study of the “stars,” astronomy ranks among the oldest of human fascinations, studies, and knowledges. Still, the relationships among science, gender, and astronomy, however, have gone under-investigated. Masculinist approaches to epistemology, science, and astronomy, as well as gendered and colonialist systems of knowledge production and verification, have excluded and marginalized knowledges, narratives, and ways of knowing from women, indigenous people, and other sources outside the Western-centric, androcentric scientific paradigm. To remedy this problem, this paper proposes a framework for feminist astronomy that (1) critically examines knowledge production in astronomy and the sciences, (2) recognizes gendered and colonialist approaches to astronomical knowledge, (3) challenges these systems of scientific domination, and (4) provides alternative knowledge sources and research methods for astronomy. Feminist astronomy draws upon feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and feminist political ecology to analyze while challenging and disrupting masculinist hegemony within astronomy and the natural sciences, leading to more inclusive, diverse, and equitable astronomy more focused upon human relationships to the stars.

They’re now plundering the hoax papers for activism ideas.

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By way of illustration of the point James is making, the above is a real, published, cited paper, titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”

While one might have reasonably thought otherwise, it’s actually not a parody or hoax paper. You can verify this yourself. Download it in PDF from here. You’ll find the “sexual and intimate” encounter with glacier water on page 17.

The artwork described that the paper’s authors argue should be considered glacier knowledge comparable with ”Western science” can be found on the artist’s website.

The paper did, however, inspire the Grievance Studies paper titled “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy” which makes pretty much the same argument about including feminist and queer astrology into the astronomical sciences.

Although it was not published prior to the reveal of the Grievance Studies probe, the authors claim the journal had been still pressing them for their revisions.

Science uses rigorous, highly structured methodologies for a reason. The arts do not, also for a reason. Because they serve different purposes to society.

The frustration about not getting random touchy-feely projects acknowledged by the scientific community as scientific knowledge indicates a severe lack of understanding of what the scientific process is intended to achieve.

The call to change STEM into STEAM or STREAM is a call to corrupt, dilute and make incoherent the most successful process we’ve ever used to understand our natural world, gain advantage over diseases, disasters and other things that will kill us, and improve quality of life.

Humans have both emotional and logical aspects to how they think. They need both. Society is the same. Art and science can work together (e.g. the design and technology of Apple products), but they still need to be their own thing, and they absolutely need to retain the integrity of how they work.

Aka “Word Salad as Surrogate Substance During Authorship of Annals Relevant to Indulgence in Nonsensical Pseudoscience as Perfunctory Pseudointellectual Fulfilment of Annual Remuneratory Vocational Obligations.”

This is an actual published, and cited, paper. And is therefore regarded, academically at least, as “knowledge.”

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-autoethnography/

“Autoethnography” refers to a form of research (if we must) in which one’s own reflections upon life, often written in autobiographical form, are treated as authoritative analyses of broader society. More specifically, these self-reflective observations are utilized to do an ethnographic study of the culture in which one finds oneself. The approach has therefore been, for rather good reasons, referred to by its critics as “me-search.”

I hope I don’t have to explain why this “research” isn’t knowledge. It should bother people that this sort of self-indulgent, unevidenced nonsense leaks into the world as citable, insightful knowledge, which can then influence policy and those making it, as much as it bothers us when the unevidenced self-indulgence of “my bible says that my god...” influences policy and those making it.

“A study says....”

Yes, it’s a real paper, cited in 32 other works. No, it’s not one of the hoax papers. No, they don’t seem to be bothered or self-conscious at all that this is what passes for “knowledge production” from academia.

None of it based on empirical evidence, none of it rigorously tested, none of it subjected to hostile review.

Instead, asserted and interpreted and changed and re-interpreted, justifying itself only through the previous interpretations. Just like the bible. Critical theory is true because critical theory says that critical theory is true.

And likewise, regarded as “truth” based on the same mechanism as religious belief: faith verified by feeling “it in my heart.”