Time for another roll up of relevant links!
Yes, what follows are all quick reads that I should have posted as I saw them, but let’s admit it: keeping this pace up when there is no expectation it can be used is pretty depressing. I started this site to (in part) seed a small repository with articles my students might use as examples of topics of interest to scholars in this field. Honors seminars, leadership development classes and more are places where we offer not just content but also practices and temperaments of scholars in our field. How better to show deliver these than by sharing notes on what I follow?
What a shame that neither the CS department nor Honors College actually want seminars, leadership development classes or more variety in our courses – not unless they are taught by one of the ‘in crowd.’
Some of us may be cultural pariahs but that doesn’t mean we stop learning, thinking or critiquing, so without further ado, here are some recent examples of how to be a skeptical scholar.
The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of is a great narrative about the discipline, objectivity and passion that scholarship demands … and the advocacy value with which it is rewarded.
Bullshit is a commodity much in supply on this campus. Exercise for the students: see if you can apply tips below to sniff out which campus programs shovel bovine scatology as compared with offering you genuine value. The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking is timeless even if a bit lacking in specifics. Pocket Guide to Bullshit Prevention gives you another compact checklist. But in How to call bullshit on big data you can read about how scholars elsewhere teach ways to combat BS. (How interesting that that campus and ours treat the same topics so differently. One teaches methods that the other teaches must be sniffed out. Well.)
What’s the effect of sham scholarship? You publish papers like The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies. That paper is 100 percent USDA choice bullshit, and it made a splash as such on the internet when word of it recently came out. Then there is Dog of a dilemma: the rise of the predatory journal – more of the same essentially. You will see these periodically. (Save them when you do, and even think about posting them here!) The business model of scholarship is supposed to filter out material like that before it piles up and starts to smell up our fields. Yet … there they are linked. It is probably useful to ponder what equivocal assertions are populating our fields if even these blatantly silly works can appear. It is even more useful to ponder what scholarly practices will help you tell which are which.
Then there are the thorny examples. Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real is one. Figure that one out! There is in general a lot of valid discussion of just how well some fields conduct experiments too. Why we can’t trust academic journals to tell the scientific truth takes that up, but there are many other threads around the web too. Take for example Data, Truth and Null Results.
Let’s make sure our work will be cited in others’ blogs because it illustrates great qualities and positively influences the field … not because it is a teaching example of what other schools what students to know how to sniff out!