Darrell Rowbottom

_Scientific Progress_ is now published, and available for free for two weeks. (You can even download the pdf and read it later.) doi.org/10.1017/978110…

@NetNym @yuanyi_z A lot of work in the field is poor. Indeed, my most cited paper was the first critique of threshold concepts (which are fashionable nonsense). That said, there’s still some good work there. Even most smart people elsewhere just do incremental stuff anyway.

@rowbott1 @yuanyi_z Talking of... have you ever seen this? russellwarne.com/2020/09/07/the…

Maybe we just need to shut down Education departments at this point and start from scratch.

@bingle_colin @drianpace Yeah, and it was double counted. 🤣

@drianpace 4* No doubt 🤡

Correction: Durham submitted just one of Arday's outputs for REF2021 Sociology: 'Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: Negotiating normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the Academy.'

@JimDMiller @Steve_Sailer Come now. Your lack of understanding of level 1 ASD is apparent. You’re smart enough to be able to look this up before posting, surely? Try reading the recent research on adults rather than children. Take this as an example. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10…

I doubt he is. A key element of being (>100 IQ) autistic is having a literal attachment to the truth. Rather than getting in trouble for making up lies, you get in trouble for pointing out the Emperor is indeed not wearing any clothes and thinking people will appreciate you pointing this out.

Is there any evidence that Prof Jason Arday is autistic? I mean not in the sense of his having a low IQ for a Cambridge prof, but in the sense of his having what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome: an intense, pedantic interest in detailed facts rather than feelings?

@ProfHall1955 I agree with the thrust about the legitimacy of different approaches to different problems, at least. Lazy overgeneralisation appears to be the order of the day. It's a sorry state of affairs.

OK. Danger ahead. Allow me to explain. The Arday affair at Cambridge has incited a swarm of neocon/neolib locusts like this one below to attack the crops of social science. There's no prize for noticing that since the 1990s the rapidly expanding marketised university system has in some cases lowered its standards and inflated its grades. In reality this isn't peculiar to any group - black, white, male, female, liberal or conservative. It has occured throughout the social sciences and humanities. The problem isn't lack of individual capabilities but the poorly aimed direction of intellectual trends and the slack administration of research and progression. Apprentice ideologues like Rubinstein quoted below are jumping on this opportunity to attack specific aspects such as qualitative sociology. Qualitative sociology isn't a discipline. It's a specific methodology. At its worst, it's simply a list of personal impressions. Indeed, the marketised university system has allowed too much of this low-grade stuff to pass through. However, at its best, it can penetrate into everyday life and reveal human practices, motivations and meanings in more depth and detail than any other methodology. Having just read some of Rubinstein's work, he's a budding mainstream historiographer. He simply commentates and imposes his derivative and worthless judgements on other writers' well-worn ideas and various intellectual trends selected for his own purposes. He ignores current reality, discovers nothing and, as Pierre Bourdieu once remarked, crosses the border with an empty suitcase - he has nothing to declare. In other words, he offers nothing more than a dressed-up version of the impressionistic commentary he's trying to cast out. Maybe worse, because it's about the murky past rather than the more pressing and transparent present. We'll put the apprentice Rubinstein to one side. There are many more like him operating in and filtering up through the mainstream system and depositing themselves in public and private institutions, especially rags like The Spectator and The Critic. The establishment swarm is targeting qualitative sociology, social history, heterodox economics, anthropology, criminology and other disciplines, methods and schools of thought that - I repeat, AT THEIR BEST - can empirically reveal and theoretically frame aspects of past and present realities with a degree of clarity that terrifies the neocon-neolib establishment. We must maintain high standards and raise them where they've slipped, otherwise the establishment swarm will yet again succeed, restore their dominance and continue to rewrite history as it has occurred and as it is occurring right now. They will lead us to disaster.

@DrRaquelAguilar @RichardDawkins With respect, many undergraduates are better than this; AI almost always is.

@RichardDawkins Reads like an undergraduate using AI.

The following little gems were not spewed out by The Postmodernism Generator, nor are they part of an Alan Sokal hoax. They are a representative selection from Jason Arday’s thesis, which earned him a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University. The University of Cambridge was mightily impressed, and they elected him to a professorship at the young age of 37. His thesis is now under suspicion of plagiarism, but plagiarism, if proved, would seem to be among that document’s lesser problems. “Throughout the process, at critical junctures the researcher was conscious that with regards to providing knowledge to the participants regarding reflection and mentoring, a contradictory position was being adopted, with regards to eliminating anything that may resemble a hierarchical structure.” “As the researcher, there was an awareness that the legitimacy of such suggestions regarding reliability are open to critique, however, this research study adopted these principles in attempting to maintain reliability through a qualitative research design.” “As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.” “As with other forms of discourse inquiry, narrative inquiry is underpinned by a social constructivist paradigm, in which behaviours and their meanings are socially situated and socially interpreted.” “This process allowed the researcher to immerse themself in the data collated.” “References were made with regards to the benefits that were gained from the peer-mentoring experience, with regards to developing pedagogically and working as part of a collegial environment to support each other during teacher training.” “An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

@Kramer_Thompson @RichardDawkins I hope this is a joke.

@RichardDawkins I'm not a fan of Arday's, and my academic work is nothing like this, but I don't see what's problematic about those excerpts - I can basically understand what he's saying. He's using concepts which (presumably) have a generally understood technical sense in his discipline.

@PhilosophyOnX @billmaher @joerogan What are yours, anyway? Just a load of trite quotations from what I can see.

@PhilosophyOnX @billmaher @joerogan I daresay that Boudry’s contributions to philosophy far outstrip yours.

This is the age we live in. No time for philosophy and art but plenty of time for complete bullshit from everyone from The View, @billmaher, @joerogan and now Maarten Boudry. Is it a surprise that Boudry didn't mention Memento which the New York Times gave a negative review?

@jjcharlesworth_ @ultra_wimp @jowilliams293 Over 9 out of 10 commentators (in publisher or unpublished papers I’ve seen) crudely misinterpret and misunderstand. Van Fraassen’s The Scientific Image, one of the most cited in my field, is a key example.

@jjcharlesworth_ @ultra_wimp @jowilliams293 Scholarship is also not what it once was, in my pretty decent experience. There’s a lot of writing and not a lot of careful reading (let alone charitable interpretation). Part of this is due to the pressure to publish, of course. But honestly, I can think of some books that…

The most revealing sentence in The Guardian's Jason Arday article is surely this: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. Makes absolutely clear how little he has ever been challenged by people in academia or the press before now. theguardian.com/education/ng-i…

@jjcharlesworth_ @jowilliams293 Granted, it’s more often an adequate appointment (with the right connections) who is clearly, nonetheless, inferior on a host of reasonable indicators taken in combination: h-index, grants obtained, editorial posts, prestige of journals published in, editorial posts, etc. (2/2)

@jjcharlesworth_ @jowilliams293 The work is poor. Sadly, however, this is not unusual in some fields, even at elite institutions. Appointments are far from meritocratic. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve seen curious appointments (knowing something about the applicant pool). (1/2)

Welcome to Sunday. Today we see another example of how not to play the Smith-Morra gambit. But better not to play it at all, folks! Conditions: 3+0. Opponent rating: 1700 Lichess blitz. #chess

Arday's (and his allies') rhetorical response is straight out of the Trump playbook. Clearly their goals are not aligned, but their tactics are. This strategy unfolds in three acts: Act 1: try to distract the public from legitimate questions Act 2: try to flip attention to the accusers Act 3: whip co-partisans into a frenzy ___________ Act 1: distract from legitimate questions In this step, you flood the world with misinformation. You put so many fantastical claims into the ether that it becomes impossible to dispute them all. (This is basically Brandolini's Law in action.) You reinforce your position by changing the subject. Move the conversation to process, to fairness, to tone policing. Anything else will do, really; you want attention to be anywhere but the specific, checkable, documented claims. Put a bow on this step by alleging a vast conspiracy. Instead of "fake news", call it a "coordinated campaign to unseat [you]." Act 2: turn it on the accusers. Focus on accusers' motives rather than on the content of their claims. The charge is never false; it's malicious. Team Trump calls it a "witch hunt." Team Arday calls it a "lynch mob." The words are different, but the strategy is the same. In this act, take a firm position that you are an oracle. You and only you--or, ok, maybe a few in-group members--are able to see through noise in a way that no one else can. Your piercing gaze cuts right through all the riffraff. You are a sage; others are ignoramuses. In this step, it is vital to discredit the institutional referees... but only to a point. Journalists, universities, and investigative bodies are deeply flawed ... unless it's convenient for them to suddenly not be so. When they investigate you and find that you have erred, they are deeply flawed. When they investigate you and find no errors, they are the arbiters of fairness and justice. Act 3: whip co-partisans into a frenzy Cast yourself as the persecuted, so the story becomes what's being done to you rather than what you did. Lead with narratives rather than rebuttals. After all, a story doesn't have to survive a fact-check the way a point-by-point does. Never, and I mean never, focus on the victims of your actions. All of your acts are victimless crimes. You are the true victim. Hence, a specific claim about your specific actions becomes an attack on an entire community. Defending yourself and defending your community collapse into the same act. Supporters are no longer being asked to weigh evidence. They're being asked to prove loyalty. What began as a narrow, answerable question about your conduct becomes a symbolic fight over ideology.

@JohnHolbein1 Ah, but in his defence: the fact that he has told multiple lies doesn’t make him a liar. 🤣

Plagiarism is a form of lying

I’ve changed my view on Arday. He is, in fact, an elite prankster. The pig’s head story, the installation of the panic alarm in his office, the invisible masked man… Fantastic stuff! Buy his book. theguardian.com/education/ng-i…

@bennettchess Even in London?!

@rowbott1 This is not a weird outfit.

My daughter seeks fashion advice. Is this indeed a ‘weird outfit’ which is ‘half farmer and half going to the gym’?

@PAHoyeck You are certainly a philosophist.

Did you know? The English word "philosophy" comes from the Greek words "philia," meaning "love," and "sophistry," meaning "terrible arguments." Thus, philosophy is the love of terrible arguments.