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Imagine for a moment the most obscurantist, jargon-filled, po-mo article the politically correct academy might produce. Pure SJW nonsense. Got it? Chances are you're imagining something like the infamous "Feminist Glaciology" article from a few years back.
https://t.co/NRaWNREBvR
I'm dredging this article up now because for many people, it is the ne plus ultra of bad humanities writing, the archetypal example of "Grievance Studies" scholarship that adds nothing of value to human knowledge, and in fact may actively detract from it.
They're wrong.
Warning: This thread is going to be long and extremely insider baseball. You may want to mute. However, @Inframethod asked me to do this some time ago, so here we go.
First, some contemporary coverage:
"In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up pile today comes word of an academic paper that ponders the notion of gender as it relates to … blocks of ice." ~ The College Fix
"Academic gibberish" ~ Powerline
"A new low in climate 'science'" ~ NYPost
And here's how Robby Soave concluded his analysis over at Reason. Grim stuff!
https://t.co/rhhKpzBO7O
https://t.co/NRaWNREBvR
I'm dredging this article up now because for many people, it is the ne plus ultra of bad humanities writing, the archetypal example of "Grievance Studies" scholarship that adds nothing of value to human knowledge, and in fact may actively detract from it.
They're wrong.
Warning: This thread is going to be long and extremely insider baseball. You may want to mute. However, @Inframethod asked me to do this some time ago, so here we go.
First, some contemporary coverage:
"In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up pile today comes word of an academic paper that ponders the notion of gender as it relates to … blocks of ice." ~ The College Fix
"Academic gibberish" ~ Powerline
"A new low in climate 'science'" ~ NYPost
And here's how Robby Soave concluded his analysis over at Reason. Grim stuff!
https://t.co/rhhKpzBO7O
I have to say, of all the responses to my defense of the Feminist Glaciology piece, this one (and the others along the same lines) is not what I was expecting.
The core complaint is that the original article doesn't supply any evidence to back up its claims -- claims about colonialism, about public attitudes toward scientific expertise, about mountaineering and expeditions. That lack of evidence strikes this critic as surprising.
It shouldn't. As I noted in the original thread, the article is explicitly NOT an empirical piece. It is a review article designed to link together the empirical work of others. And there's no shame in that. On the
Review articles like this are both very valuable and extremely common. Common in all fields and disciplines, including in the hard sciences. I mean, there's an entire series in the social sciences devoted to just this: reviews. And it
Here's a review article just published earlier this month. Not a whiff of original empirical evidence in it, but the authors (no doubt handsome and brilliant chaps the both of them) certainly seem confident they have something valuable to
This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right". https://t.co/hWFA6p9Ln0
— Simon DeDeo (@SimonDeDeo) October 19, 2018
The core complaint is that the original article doesn't supply any evidence to back up its claims -- claims about colonialism, about public attitudes toward scientific expertise, about mountaineering and expeditions. That lack of evidence strikes this critic as surprising.
It shouldn't. As I noted in the original thread, the article is explicitly NOT an empirical piece. It is a review article designed to link together the empirical work of others. And there's no shame in that. On the
What can we say about the article in general? Well, it doesn't break any new empirical ground, but rather synthesizes the work of others and organizes them together around the concept of gender. The article is quite clear about this at the outset. pic.twitter.com/6d4JTpnD29
— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) October 13, 2018
Review articles like this are both very valuable and extremely common. Common in all fields and disciplines, including in the hard sciences. I mean, there's an entire series in the social sciences devoted to just this: reviews. And it
Here's a review article just published earlier this month. Not a whiff of original empirical evidence in it, but the authors (no doubt handsome and brilliant chaps the both of them) certainly seem confident they have something valuable to