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 friends did for their own good[5].

>The hoax was cruel; it sought to discredit targeted journals by setting a trap that exploited the scholarly predispositions of their editors and reviewers. Moreover, because of the anonymous review system, once the tricksters revealed their intent, only the editors whose names appear on the journal’s masthead suffered the sting of adverse public scrutiny. More finessed responses by the disgruntled threesome would have employed tactics such as persuasion, insight, engagement with the actual scholarship, and good sportsmanship (Bergstrom, 2018).[6]

Most importantly, the researchers didn't include a control group for their study. How can they claim to be outing "bad science" when their own methodology is so poor and fails to prove anything other than anecdota and suspicion?

One of the reviewers subject to the hoax wrote:

>"Anyways, I guess I could be more critical in the future, but I assumed a grad student had written a confusing paper and I tried to be constructive. I'm embarrassed that I took it as seriously as I did, I'm annoyed I wasted time writing a review, and I'm glad I rejected it."[8]

P.Z. Meyers put the situation best[7]:

>If you can find a bad article accepted for publication in a feminist journal, please do jump on it and tear it apart. That contributes to the strength of the discipline. Don’t write a bunch of bad articles of your own, which are clearly intended only to weaken the whole discipline and provide a set of easy, straw-man arguments that you can use to pretend you’re a smart guy.

And for the icing on the cake: Sokal himself isn't all that impressed with Boghossian's efforts[9]. A good thread discussing the hoax is on the social sciences subreddit[10].

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17288-crap-paper-acce...

[1] https://i.redd.it/qsi6i5rbv3q11.png

[2] https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-...

[3] https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/an-embarrassi...

[4] https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2018/10/bad-argume...

[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03783...

[6] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14733250198338...

[7] https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/03/give-it-a...

[8] https://twitter.com/dwschieber/status/1047497301021798400

[9] https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-the-Conceptual/240344

[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/9noxmp/is...