3 Quarks Daily

People (perhaps you too) seem to have the idea that only social sciences are vulnerable to publishing stings like the one Boghossian and his friends pulled off, but that's not true[0][3]. Next, all the places the "hoax" papers were [mostly] submitted to were of low prestige (i.e poor ranked)[1]. The paper they wrote as a summary of their conclusions does not even rigorously define what field(s) in the social sciences they have issues with, instead they collect it under the nebulous term "grievance studies" - which is a term they made up themselves to deride academics (so much for the scientific spirit of camaraderie[4]).

The "hoax" they pulled off doesn't seem to be showing what they say it does, at least not to the degree they suggest; from here[2]:

>Let’s analyze the hoax a bit more carefully. The team wrote up 21 bogus papers altogether. (The essay starts by saying there were only 20; according to Lindsay, that’s because two of the papers were largely similar to one another.) Of those 21, two-thirds never were accepted for publication. The Areo essay dwells on several papers that had been rejected outright, including one suggesting that white students should be enchained for the sake of pedagogy, and another proposing that self-pleasure could be a form of violence against women. They take it as a sign of intellectual decay that such papers managed to elicit respectful feedback from reviewers, even short of publication.

Academics warn against doing what Boghossian and…

I am not a very smart person so I looked up the definition of sociopath.

> Hare also provides his own definitions: he describes psychopathy as not having a sense of empathy or morality, but sociopathy as only differing in sense of right and wrong from the average person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy

Well, I might be a sociopath. Don't get me wrong. I think babies are very cute and would go out of my way to save an infant's life. However, I cannot command others to imperil their own lives to maybe not kill an infant.

Not to derail the topic too much but it bothers me that people think the collateral deaths of "innocent women and children" in an extrajudicial drone strike are worse than the death of the target. The collateral damage would not have happened if we didn't shoot in the first place. I am not saying we should be isolationist or even that we should not exercise restraint in use of force (even in self defense), far from it. I am just asking that we approach the topic as rationally as we can.

Now, we should be clear as to why we try to save infants and small children first in an emergency. Here is the article that made me think about this http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-are-special-but-not-particularly-important.html but it makes sense what I read a while back. It is not because they are more important (far from it, society has much more invested in growing up a working adult) but because the infants and children…

> What bothers me is not that the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich. That's pretty much the history of the world, and it's unlikely to change any time soon.[1] What bothers me is how people rationalize the very imperfect world we live in.

A very poignant observation. This is exactly where the root of improving the human condition lies. The HN crowd doesn't seem to care much for ideas and critiques from a Marxist perspective, but there's some seriously important truth about this state of affairs that are always under the Marxist microscope, so to speak. To quote from a recent article on "Karl Marx's Guiding Idea"[1]:

> "One of the strangest features of human existence is that we are oppressed by things that we have created; but anything that is created by humans can ultimately be transformed by us, once we see through its apparently alien character and recognize it as a human creation, so as to be liberating rather than oppressive."

Marx followed and extended a rather lengthy philosophical tradition that was directly critiquing the bizarre notion--which seems to always remain near-universal across different societies--that the material conditions in which people live and either thrive or wither are the product of socioeconomic laws that most believe and argue are as immutable as the laws of nature. Social notions before and since Marx's time have remained replete with this widespread assumption that things are the way they are for reasons that are not our fault and,…

July is hotter than January, even though the planet is closer to the sun in January, because there is more land in the northern hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere.

There was a submission ~3 months ago regarding this phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012565

I’m certain there’s a submarine agenda behind most of these “hottest month EVAR” stories. /methinks it’d be much more productive to focus on making human society more resilient, than to focus on a single variable (“carbon”).

I followed /u/RickJWagner’s comment’s link to accuweather, and saw a story expressing concern about this year’s coming harvest [0].

Instead of focusing on immediate problems, the NY Times and others fixate on the one variable the experts have been collecting data for, and say “see this confirms the one-variable model is right!”

>> [...] Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

>> So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is.

- https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/03/the-streetlight-effect-a-metaphor-for-knowledge-and-ignorance.html

The problems of a fragile climate are always with us.

[0]…

Poor Grant in this article was always against the law but now has to talk as if it's a good idea.

I looked into who was pushing for this law; a personality on a Murdoch owned radio station, along with Murdoch's News corp, a TV advertising company owner, and Jonathan Haidt as mentioned in the article, who is an anti-woke anti-academia hack https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/why-academics-are-annoyed-with-jonathan-haidt-again.html

Feels weird and gross to me that legacy media / advertising companies are crying over kids's mental health when they've been targeting teenagers with impossible standards and negatively influencing their self image for decades.

My personal conspiracy theory is that it was done to avoid scrutiny of advertising practices. A few months before academics started publishing findings on how problematic social media ads are; unhealthy foods, gambling, alcohol, and just plain scams. https://www.admscentre.org.au/adobservatory/

With 'kids' removed from social media, advertisers can better get away with less savoury stuff.

It is a veil, but not for what you think - see this interview: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/immersion-in-propaganda-racebased-nationalism-and-the-unfigureoutable-vortex-of-juche-thought-colin-.html

Essentially, despite being thought of as a communist country, in reality North Korea is (by ideology) traces its ideological roots to the race-based nationalism of the early-20th-century Japanese colonization. In the book written by the interviewee, he describes how the main ideologues of North Korea were not pre-war communists, but rather pre-war collaborators with the Japanese, who picked up the official line that Koreans were an innocent, childlike sub-branch of the Japanese master race (post-war, they just excised the Japanese from this picture). Hence the North Korean propaganda emphasis on intermarriage with foreigners in South Korea, the effort put in (in the parent article) to eugenicist approaches to disability, etc.