“A physicist, a philosopher, and a medievalist got together and decided to hoax cultural studies journals with a score of fake research papers.” (Link 1, Link 2)
“The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field.”
“… Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the ‘Dog Park’ paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the ‘Masturbation’ paper. ”
Long, related personal anecdote to follow …
Many years ago I accompanied a friend of mine, an oncologist, to a scholarly presentation he thought I would enjoy, about how somebody or another had hoaxed a medical journal into publishing a bullshit article that said nothing in fancy language. This was to be followed by an analysis and Q&A about what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The great thing about this was that the presentation itself, which purported to be a review of the literature full of dense language and abstruse statistics, as presented by an eminent professor from a top-tier university, was itself a hoax! Talk about meta!
In that room full of doctors and me, I was one who exposed it as a fake, but not because stats were my field. Nobody can really expose fake stats that are just spoken aloud or projected rapidly on a slide. One might suspect foul play, but to prove it takes the time and study necessary to consider and analyze the methodology. No, I saw through the hoax because my brain is full of useless crap. I recognized the “professor” who gave the lecture. At first I thought, “man, that guy seems kind of familiar,” but I didn’t give it any further thought until he started spewing some dubious statistics, and I was thinking “that doesn’t sound right.” Then, in my head, I started to hear the words “Dobie-doo,” and I realized they had hired Steve Franken, aka Chatsworth Osborne Jr from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, to play the learned professor. And he was good at it. He was a smart guy, an Ivy League man himself, and always carried himself with a haughty air, so he had no trouble acting the part. I guess nobody else recognized him because he looked different and was, by then, rarely in the public eye, It had been many decades since Dobie was on the air. I suppose many of the doctors in the room were too young to remember Dobie, or too smart to fill their heads with such crap, even if they were old enough.
And OK, I admit it, I love the underbelly of American pop culture, and have spent way too many hours watching bad movies and TV shows. I have seen The Chartreuse Caboose twice, often sing along with Mitch, and can recognize a picture of Victor Jory. I was, and still am, an unabashed Dobie fan, and Chatsworth was one of my favorite characters. Who would have thought that such an inconsequential concatenation of background elements would somehow, in one odd circumstance, prove to have some value in an academic setting.
The end of the story is not so flattering to me. As somebody with no medical training in a room full of doctors and professors, I was too chickenshit to stand up in the Q&A to expose the fraud, but I told my uninhibited friend about it, he realized I was right, and he exposed it! (Franken and his “associate” admitted that they would have confessed, once everyone in the room had a shot to expose them in Q&A.)
I guess the whole point was to urge a degree of skepticism about believing claims without due consideration. They wanted to demonstrate that it was not only medical journals, but also medical professionals and academics “in the flesh,” that could be fooled easily by professional grade bullshit. And they would have succeeded, too, if not for those meddling kids that meddling porn webmaster!