Tuesday, February 28, 2017

New Real Peer Review: "Sport And the Territorial Anus"

People should be madder that taxes support a very large number of professors who are utterly, 100%, completely full of shit, and apparently not even making any effort whatsoever not to be.
   I'm not saying I have a solution. I'm not saying we interfere with academic freedom. I'm saying that it's a problem. Everybody writes some stupid stuff. But when so many academicians and, in fact, many whole disciplines are so utterly full of such complete shit...when it's so obvious...when the so-called scholarship emerging from these disciplines and produced by these "scholars" is not just wrong (which is excusable and inevitable from time to time) and not just stupid (ditto)...but is--pretty much as a matter of course--laughably pathetic and of no intellectual value whatsoever...  Well...people ought to be mad. It's not right. It's not right to take people's money to produce such shit and make their kids dumber. It's not right to take resources away from disciplines that might actually use them profitably. It's not right to use academic freedom as a cover for political proselytizing. It's not right to just spin out endless reams of fucking nonsense when even a modicum of intelligence and objectivity would reveal that that's what it is. 
   It's irresponsible. 
   Everybody makes mistakes. And when you're trying to figure out hard things, you are going to make a lot of them. But this kind of shit...you either have to be really, really stupid or really, really intellectually dishonest (inclusive 'or') to produce it. 
   We'd be a lot, lot better off if universities took the resources they spend supporting this shit and used it to support, say, alchemy departments. At least they wouldn't do much harm, and students might accidentally learn some chemistry while they were screwing around with it.

5 Comments:

Blogger Pete Mack said...

Well there's certainly an angus in the territory. Don't know about sport, though.

8:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The story of why they are called New Real Peer Review is interesting as well. A few academics who did not appreciate the world learning their idiocy decided to doxx the account.

9:23 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

A--
Yeah, and they were afraid their careers would be harmed...*just for posting actual abstracts of actual papers.* Well...there's the occasional snarky comment...but mostly they're just posting abstracts.

9:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

*just for posting actual abstracts of actual papers.*

Actual papers whose epistemic worth is presumably due to being open to falsification by rational criticism. I can't think of anything more scandalous for an intellectual enterprise. And it is interesting that this trend is happening when it is easier than ever technologically to disseminate scholarly work.

11:21 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

"Actual papers whose epistemic worth is presumably due to being open to falsification by rational criticism."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

good one

11:24 PM  

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