In case you haven’t seen them yet, I want to call your attention to the latest attack on the scientific method: positionality statements, in which authors attach totally irrelevant personal information to their scientific manuscripts.
For too long have we relied on the likes of Gauss and Einstein, Newton and Noether. It's time to let the alternatively gifted shine. People should not be discriminated against on their inability to solve a 2nd order partial differential equation, or whether they can't tell the difference between a matrix and a dominatrix.
It's important that we allow the alternatively-smart to have their say.
We need more papers discussing things like the "Feminist Theory of Glaciation" in order to establish more justice in human-ice interactions - and who better to do that than those who identify as a glacier?
Or if you don't have quite enough whiteness in your life you can always top it up a bit by reading "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness" and getting the number of l's in your alhamdulillah's correct.
It's important when discussing the social justice of interpretive Lego that one actually has lived experience in building things with little plastic bricks.
Yikes! You actually had me going until "Feminist Theory of Glaciation". What you wrote up to that point sounded exactly like what a PS advocate would propose. Though given the current state of academia, the advancement of such a theory is entirely and depressingly possible.
When you wake up you will probably need to de-colonize your food which, incidentally, was the subject of a paper at an Anthropology conference last year. I probably got the meaning of de-colonization wrong though.
I am certain that can be claimed as a disability so that you can join the gleeful race to the bottom. (Nescience Syndrome?-proposed with gratitude to another poster here.)
I try my best. This stuff is actually serious, but I just can't take it seriously. I'm a retired theoretical physicist and what passes for "scholarship" in some fields is quite extraordinary. The "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness", for example, was an actual paper. Yes, someone spent time writing that.
I don't know how to even take a lot of it seriously, despite the serious impacts this nonsense is having. I feel like trying to have a serious discussion would be a bit like writing a paper called "Semiotic Cisheteronormative Refrigeration and the Temporal Juxtaposition of Whiteness Inducing Microwave Meals as a Colonialist Tool of Oppression".
Not only do these statements go against universal norms of political neutrality in science, they also indicate a corrupt, conformist type of personality. What kind of scientist can one be, what can one discover and judge if one is so conformist and thinks of the world in clichés? The end of meritocracy is the end of America.
Nice. And I would add, "and thinks of the world in terms of how it amplifies the self." I just don't think people understand the concept of disinterestedness--or its value.
As I think about positionality statements a bit more, I think I can discern a few more problems with them.
(1) Allowing these might encourage a sort of "one-upmanship" phenomenon, where people are inventing all sorts of nonsense to get themselves extra social justice or victimhood points. It is unseemly, at the least.
(2) Is there any review or control on these PS? Can there be?
We already have a burgeoning problem with fraud and cheating in STEM. Does one think that the positionality statements cannot be gamed? That they will not eventually be full of lies and nonsense? Who judges their validity? On what basis? Will people have to submit DNA tests and all kinds of other information to "certify" that their PS is accurate? Someone will still find a way to cheat, even then, if the stakes are high enough.
(3) If this information is floating out there, how long before assorted bureaucrats and managers will use it to put their thumbs on the scales? This is highly likely, I suspect.
(4) Encouraging PS by allowing PS can create opportunities for personal attacks and identity theft and all kinds of other similar problems. How much information should we be forcing into the public domain? Should we be encouraging this kind of behavior?
(5) Social justice and woke and victimhood criteria are not static. Groups that are preferred can swiftly be reclassified as oppressors. And once this information is out there, it is too late. For example, Jews were long thought to be somewhat protected. However, after October 7th, this was revealed to be completely false, and many Jews were shocked by what happened to them. If you are the eldest child in a large family, do you get extra victimhood points or fewer? This is sort of arbitrary and can change in a flash. Being an only child can be good, or bad, from a victimhood standpoint, and this can also change rapidly. We have the emergence of "white adjacent" groups like East and South Asians, who are supposed to be discriminated against now because they do too well on exams. So their "diversity" is no longer welcome, according to emerging and evolving social justice standards. These things change constantly, and will continue to change. What is currently judged as impressive might be the opposite in a few short years. But if you create PS, and publish them, you have boxed yourself into a corner. And the PS could be used later to attack you.
And I suspect that there are a lot of other issues involved with PS. These PS are a very bad idea.
Well to me, the term "nonbinary" never had any credibility. And positionality statements seem like sort of a bad joke.
But for some segment of the population, both the term "nonbinary" (as well as the names describing 'several thousand and growing' other genders), and the "positionality statements" are held sacred. And unfortunately, this segment of the population, seemingly in some sort of cult or infected with the "woke mind virus", seems to be in control of society now, to a large extent. They seem to "own" or control the grade school system and the courts and the politicians and the media and Hollywood and the medical system and the university administrations and the government bureaucracy and the FBI and a lot of large corporations and the Humanities and HR departments and large segments of the military and the State Department and so on.
If you do a Google Search for "positionality statements", you will find almost 3 million articles giving all kinds of advice on how to write them. This is sort of amazing for something that I did not even know existed.
So it does not really matter what *I* think, or what you think or maybe what most people on Heterodox STEM think. It does not matter what most conservatives think or most engineers think. Sure, they have zero credibility with a segment of the population. But the people running things seem to love this sort of stuff and want to push more of it.
So it does not matter if the positionality statements are full of lies, does it? It does not matter if the people creating them look like clowns, does it? Full of lies or not, credible or not, the existence of positionality statements is a very bad sign, I am afraid.
Positionality statements are generally bad. But automatically rejecting papers that have them is even more of a violation of scientific standards. That goes too far, and amounts to an ideological ban. We must evaluate scientific work based on the work itself, by discouraging and disregarding personal statements, but not by retaliating against anyone who makes them.
No. Any paper that opens with a personal statement is no longer about a scientific problem. It's about the author of the paper. Perhaps people should read Nabokov's "Pale Fire" for the literary take on such egotism.
What about all the employers who have said that any job applicant who includes preferred pronouns in their resume and/or c.v. immediately has their application discarded? This is incredibly common now. It is a way to "fight back" against this woke foolishness. And we desperately need to fight back, or it will continue, and get even worse.
This woke mind virus will ONLY stop when there are consequences. For example, many applications for positions and for grants and contracts are automatically rejected now for "inadequate" diversity statements. A friend has had numerous proposals rejected even though he had a team of "diversity professionals" write his required diversity statements. The situation WILL deteriorate if we do not start pushing back, I promise you.
I could write a diversity statement that would make your hair stand on end. I have been harassed at work for being the "wrong" ethnicity. I am BIPOC and an immigrant and disabled and the grandson of an indentured servant, one step up from a slave. I got my first paid employment at five years of age. I worked steadily from five years of age, and often for less than the legal minimum wage. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; I could go on and on and on.
But does this nonsense really matter? What about the quality of my work? Should that not stand on its own?
I just want an equal chance, an equal opportunity on a level playing field. Is that too much to ask? Does everything have to turn into a victimhood competition and virtue signaling?
We will destroy STEM If we continue down this path. I guarantee it.
And take it from me; I have way more victimhood points than anyone else here, so by the rules of wokeness, no one is "allowed" to disagree with me.
I disagree. It is wrong for any employer to reject a job applicant because they list (or don't list) preferred pronouns. People should be evaluated based on merit, not politics. We must not use repression in the fight against "woke foolishness." Repression is wrong in itself, and it doesn't cure wokeness.
Is rejecting an applicant for grammatical errors on their resume an instance of repression? Bc as far as I’m concerned the inclusion of pronouns in your resume is a similar error. There is nothing sacred, hallowed or venerable around your “personal pronouns” and you don’t get extra merit points for including them. (That would be unfair to people who don’t use preferred pronouns.)
Furthermore there are many instances of personal pronoun people using repressive techniques to force others to adhere to their personal pronoun preferences. No employer wants the siphoning of time and energy away from the primary mission of the business.
Exactly. This is a brutal fight for the culture and the future of STEM and civilization. The people pushing pronouns are dead-set on the destruction of everything; they are effectively anarchists. They say they have to use "any means necessary". If we do not fight fire with fire, we will lose. We might lose anyway, but at least we will make it painful for them to "win".
As a potential STEM employer, I would do the same. There is NO WAY I want to hire someone disruptive like that.
As some employers have pointed out, the person with preferred pronouns in their application is signaling to everyone that work is not important to them, and that they are just interested in mindless activism. Many note that someone with preferred pronouns is self-identifying as a person likely to bring lawsuits. So why does one need characters like that around to create turmoil?
Harvard Business School studies show that DEI programs result in less profits and less productivity and lower morale and even less diversity. It is just a weapon to use to attack others and to get everyone to hate each other.
One young person I was using as a sounding board, who was brilliant with an eidetic memory, decided to "prove" to me that Jordan Peterson is the worst of the worst and the lowest of the low. So this kid wrote me hundreds of pages of documents (maybe even over 2000 pages) attempting to "argue" that all women have a penis, or something. I refused to read this crap. And he quit in disgust, furious.
These papers cannot be rejected for ideology unless you concede these are products of ideology. And yet you ask that they be evaluated by scientific standards. Adding PS introduces the problematic question of whether these are political papers or science papers. They can’t be both. You give the PS boosters the benefit of the doubt in both directions and force detractors to take the loss.
What are you talking about? There’s no standard of science which says all papers, even those which flagrantly subvert the scientific method, must be considered.
No one is entitled to have a paper reviewed. If you want to participate in science, then you must follow the scientific method.
A positionality statement is not a violation of scientific standards. It's just irrelevant information. We must judge papers by scientific standards, not by irrelevant personal issues. That means a PS should cause no benefit and no harm.
Again, there's an argument PS are indeed harmful and do violate scientific standards. We wrote a paper explaining why. Buncha people seem to agree. Sounds like you don't accept those arguments. Here's excerpt from abstract:
However, there are at least three reasons why they should be avoided in scholarship. First, it is impossible to construct credible positionality statements because they are constrained by the very positionality they seek to address. Second, positionality statements are unnecessary because reducing bias—positional or otherwise—in scientific literatures does not hinge on the biographical details of individual scholars but on the integrity of the collective process of truth-seeking. Third, by asking scholars to disclose information about themselves, positionality statements undermine the very norms and practices that safeguard the impartiality of research. Instead of asking individual scholars to issue subjective declarations about their positionalities, scholarly communities should focus on improving the rules of intersubjective competition at the heart of scientific progress. In our view, the most productive path to increasing representation and reducing positional bias in research is to protect the freedom of scholarly inputs while insisting on methodological transparency and rigor.
There are three steps here: 1) PS "should be avoided in scholarship" by discouraging people from making them; 2) PS should be removed from scholarship by journals editing out these statements (which I agree with); 3) scholars should be punished for making a PS by having scientific work automatically rejected and (it seems to follow logically) by being disciplined for violating academic standards.
It's the third step that I think is clearly wrong. We should persuade scholars not to make them, we should persuade journals not to publish them. But we do not ban or punish anyone for having a different view about PS. This is a fundamental issue of academic freedom.
The examples cited are not positionality statements. That’s a made up word to hide the fact that they are political statements and oaths of allegiance. They don’t belong in a science journal. They are free to take their positionality papers and have them published elsewhere. If they are published in a STEM journal, then those journals should be vulnerable to accusations of bait and switch, false advertising, deceptive marketing etc.
Expertise is, by definition, the rejection of some perspectives. If you aren’t willing to exclude some perspectives from science, by establishing and enforcing norms, then you’re forfeiting science’s claim to expertise.
Nobody is talking about punishment in any conventional sense. If I hold the view that coefficients are statistically significant at p<.30 should I be allowed to publish my research as such? Can I come up with my own norms? Is it punishment if such a manuscript gets desk rejected? I don't think so.
What makes this even more tragic is that these individuals probably are not nearly as embarrassed as are others with a greater knowledge and understanding of science. Worse yet, these are the faculty members who will be "enlightening" their students with this sad, pseudo self-aggrandizing drivel.
Have the kid become an electrician or, even better, a welder. They make tons of money and don't have to put up with this nonsense as there is a shortage of competent electricians and welders and anyone who is reasonably competent will get a good job. If I had a kid, I'd sure steer him or her into such a profession. I am deadly serious, by the way. In fact, I counseled a parent whose daughter did not want to go to college but become a welder. He wanted to know what I (a college professor, or I was at the time) thought about that. I was enthusiastically supportive of her goals, much to his surprise. She's now doing extremely well and is happy, as is her father.
I can't even tell you how much I agree. Having a very concrete skill set is not only a means to making a living, but psychologically satisfying as well.
My child said her science class was taught by a prof who got their PhD in the education of that subject. Lots of material offered on e-modules. Thankfully my student is highly motivated but lots of peers struggling. Went in to ask a conceptual question during office hours and got counseled as to how to take the test and presumption of anxiety. Lol. Said I wouldn’t have gotten into this school if tests caused me anxiety! What a waste of precious time.
I am shocked that such nonsense is permitted. I had no idea that positionality statements were common now. This is ridiculous.
I could write a positionality statement that would put all others to shame. However, as I have mentioned before, I reject this stupid pandering. Judge me on my competence and the merits of what I produce. That is it.
Luckily, I haven't come across these Positionality Statements in my field. I'm sorry for anyone in this blog who must deal with such ridiculous absurdities.
Real Science knows not the race and gender of its authors. Real Scientists are not judged by the color of their cloth but by the content of their work.
I totally agree. I am almost starting to wonder if our work should be totally anonymous, or associated with a coded reference number, or something, to avoid or reduce this sort of nonsense.
The work should stand on its own. If it doesn't, then there is a problem.
With insipid DEI running so called colleges, I would not send my child to one of these ding dong schools run by tenured professors who in real life, can't find their way out of a paper bag. Instead I would send them to a good trade school where they will graduate pretty quickly and be making LOTS of money before your dipshtt kid is even through one year, wasting your money and his/her (yes, only two sexes) time. I have little to no respect for anyone "teaching" at a college today unless they are at a medical school and I do think there are a few good doctor/teachers left but with DEI, it could be dying also.
Ideological test are now becoming common to submit manuscripts in STEM. Besides the positionality statements well discussed here, many journals require filling of forms that require affirmation of gender ideology and DEI concepts in order to submit a manuscript. This is wrong, there should be no ideological litmus tests to submit manuscripts. Is their science not valuable enough on its own that they need to instead be requiring ideological conformity in political and social ideologies?
If that ever happens to me, I won't do it. It will be interesting to see what happens then. I have along publication record and have had a very successful career. They will either have to blatantly reject the paper on non-scientific grounds or back down. I almost relish someone trying to pull that with me. I've already refused to put my pronouns on conference name tags, so far with no consequences.
Wondering if these statements were proactively offered by the authors, or required by the journal. Either way they are a terrible trend. Are all university researchers infected by this virus? Where should parents who don’t want their kids infected send them to college?
For Thriller and SciFi fans amongst you: the intersectionality approach to all aspects of life has been most fully developed in Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull novels. The result are Privilege Levels 1-10. A white male cis catholic Irish able-bodied conservative would be a 1, a POC female trans genderqueer neurodiverse otherkin antifa sympathiser would be at least an 8.
I disagree.
For too long have we relied on the likes of Gauss and Einstein, Newton and Noether. It's time to let the alternatively gifted shine. People should not be discriminated against on their inability to solve a 2nd order partial differential equation, or whether they can't tell the difference between a matrix and a dominatrix.
It's important that we allow the alternatively-smart to have their say.
We need more papers discussing things like the "Feminist Theory of Glaciation" in order to establish more justice in human-ice interactions - and who better to do that than those who identify as a glacier?
Or if you don't have quite enough whiteness in your life you can always top it up a bit by reading "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness" and getting the number of l's in your alhamdulillah's correct.
It's important when discussing the social justice of interpretive Lego that one actually has lived experience in building things with little plastic bricks.
This new theory of glaciation should be about “just ice” - we will call it the “justice” theory!
🤣
Yikes! You actually had me going until "Feminist Theory of Glaciation". What you wrote up to that point sounded exactly like what a PS advocate would propose. Though given the current state of academia, the advancement of such a theory is entirely and depressingly possible.
There really was a paper on a feminist theory of glaciation in 2016.
From the abstract
"However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers . . . remain understudied"
Understudied, you say? My God, how did THAT happen?
You could have at least ended that godawful revelation with a smiley emoji and "Have a nice day." I'm going back to bed now. Thanks.
Sweet dreams.
When you wake up you will probably need to de-colonize your food which, incidentally, was the subject of a paper at an Anthropology conference last year. I probably got the meaning of de-colonization wrong though.
I am certain that can be claimed as a disability so that you can join the gleeful race to the bottom. (Nescience Syndrome?-proposed with gratitude to another poster here.)
God, that was good.
Thanks Jocelynn, much appreciated.
I try my best. This stuff is actually serious, but I just can't take it seriously. I'm a retired theoretical physicist and what passes for "scholarship" in some fields is quite extraordinary. The "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness", for example, was an actual paper. Yes, someone spent time writing that.
I don't know how to even take a lot of it seriously, despite the serious impacts this nonsense is having. I feel like trying to have a serious discussion would be a bit like writing a paper called "Semiotic Cisheteronormative Refrigeration and the Temporal Juxtaposition of Whiteness Inducing Microwave Meals as a Colonialist Tool of Oppression".
Who knows? It might have already been written 🤣
Rudolph, you seem to have a talent for these titles. That may be a treatable condition.
Wonderful writing, sir! Many Thanks.
'can't tell the difference between a matrix and a dominatrix.' - best line ever.
Brilliant.
I am white, but vomit green, as seen after reading these positionality statements.
Not only do these statements go against universal norms of political neutrality in science, they also indicate a corrupt, conformist type of personality. What kind of scientist can one be, what can one discover and judge if one is so conformist and thinks of the world in clichés? The end of meritocracy is the end of America.
Nice. And I would add, "and thinks of the world in terms of how it amplifies the self." I just don't think people understand the concept of disinterestedness--or its value.
As I think about positionality statements a bit more, I think I can discern a few more problems with them.
(1) Allowing these might encourage a sort of "one-upmanship" phenomenon, where people are inventing all sorts of nonsense to get themselves extra social justice or victimhood points. It is unseemly, at the least.
(2) Is there any review or control on these PS? Can there be?
We already have a burgeoning problem with fraud and cheating in STEM. Does one think that the positionality statements cannot be gamed? That they will not eventually be full of lies and nonsense? Who judges their validity? On what basis? Will people have to submit DNA tests and all kinds of other information to "certify" that their PS is accurate? Someone will still find a way to cheat, even then, if the stakes are high enough.
(3) If this information is floating out there, how long before assorted bureaucrats and managers will use it to put their thumbs on the scales? This is highly likely, I suspect.
(4) Encouraging PS by allowing PS can create opportunities for personal attacks and identity theft and all kinds of other similar problems. How much information should we be forcing into the public domain? Should we be encouraging this kind of behavior?
(5) Social justice and woke and victimhood criteria are not static. Groups that are preferred can swiftly be reclassified as oppressors. And once this information is out there, it is too late. For example, Jews were long thought to be somewhat protected. However, after October 7th, this was revealed to be completely false, and many Jews were shocked by what happened to them. If you are the eldest child in a large family, do you get extra victimhood points or fewer? This is sort of arbitrary and can change in a flash. Being an only child can be good, or bad, from a victimhood standpoint, and this can also change rapidly. We have the emergence of "white adjacent" groups like East and South Asians, who are supposed to be discriminated against now because they do too well on exams. So their "diversity" is no longer welcome, according to emerging and evolving social justice standards. These things change constantly, and will continue to change. What is currently judged as impressive might be the opposite in a few short years. But if you create PS, and publish them, you have boxed yourself into a corner. And the PS could be used later to attack you.
And I suspect that there are a lot of other issues involved with PS. These PS are a very bad idea.
If everybody bullshit and cheat in those statements they'll lose credibility pretty quickly no? It's like how nonbinary is a laughing stock now
Well to me, the term "nonbinary" never had any credibility. And positionality statements seem like sort of a bad joke.
But for some segment of the population, both the term "nonbinary" (as well as the names describing 'several thousand and growing' other genders), and the "positionality statements" are held sacred. And unfortunately, this segment of the population, seemingly in some sort of cult or infected with the "woke mind virus", seems to be in control of society now, to a large extent. They seem to "own" or control the grade school system and the courts and the politicians and the media and Hollywood and the medical system and the university administrations and the government bureaucracy and the FBI and a lot of large corporations and the Humanities and HR departments and large segments of the military and the State Department and so on.
If you do a Google Search for "positionality statements", you will find almost 3 million articles giving all kinds of advice on how to write them. This is sort of amazing for something that I did not even know existed.
So it does not really matter what *I* think, or what you think or maybe what most people on Heterodox STEM think. It does not matter what most conservatives think or most engineers think. Sure, they have zero credibility with a segment of the population. But the people running things seem to love this sort of stuff and want to push more of it.
So it does not matter if the positionality statements are full of lies, does it? It does not matter if the people creating them look like clowns, does it? Full of lies or not, credible or not, the existence of positionality statements is a very bad sign, I am afraid.
Positionality statements are generally bad. But automatically rejecting papers that have them is even more of a violation of scientific standards. That goes too far, and amounts to an ideological ban. We must evaluate scientific work based on the work itself, by discouraging and disregarding personal statements, but not by retaliating against anyone who makes them.
No. Any paper that opens with a personal statement is no longer about a scientific problem. It's about the author of the paper. Perhaps people should read Nabokov's "Pale Fire" for the literary take on such egotism.
What about all the employers who have said that any job applicant who includes preferred pronouns in their resume and/or c.v. immediately has their application discarded? This is incredibly common now. It is a way to "fight back" against this woke foolishness. And we desperately need to fight back, or it will continue, and get even worse.
This woke mind virus will ONLY stop when there are consequences. For example, many applications for positions and for grants and contracts are automatically rejected now for "inadequate" diversity statements. A friend has had numerous proposals rejected even though he had a team of "diversity professionals" write his required diversity statements. The situation WILL deteriorate if we do not start pushing back, I promise you.
I could write a diversity statement that would make your hair stand on end. I have been harassed at work for being the "wrong" ethnicity. I am BIPOC and an immigrant and disabled and the grandson of an indentured servant, one step up from a slave. I got my first paid employment at five years of age. I worked steadily from five years of age, and often for less than the legal minimum wage. And this is just the tip of the iceberg; I could go on and on and on.
But does this nonsense really matter? What about the quality of my work? Should that not stand on its own?
I just want an equal chance, an equal opportunity on a level playing field. Is that too much to ask? Does everything have to turn into a victimhood competition and virtue signaling?
We will destroy STEM If we continue down this path. I guarantee it.
And take it from me; I have way more victimhood points than anyone else here, so by the rules of wokeness, no one is "allowed" to disagree with me.
What a crock...
I disagree. It is wrong for any employer to reject a job applicant because they list (or don't list) preferred pronouns. People should be evaluated based on merit, not politics. We must not use repression in the fight against "woke foolishness." Repression is wrong in itself, and it doesn't cure wokeness.
Is rejecting an applicant for grammatical errors on their resume an instance of repression? Bc as far as I’m concerned the inclusion of pronouns in your resume is a similar error. There is nothing sacred, hallowed or venerable around your “personal pronouns” and you don’t get extra merit points for including them. (That would be unfair to people who don’t use preferred pronouns.)
Furthermore there are many instances of personal pronoun people using repressive techniques to force others to adhere to their personal pronoun preferences. No employer wants the siphoning of time and energy away from the primary mission of the business.
Exactly. This is a brutal fight for the culture and the future of STEM and civilization. The people pushing pronouns are dead-set on the destruction of everything; they are effectively anarchists. They say they have to use "any means necessary". If we do not fight fire with fire, we will lose. We might lose anyway, but at least we will make it painful for them to "win".
The woke will only stop when they start to suffer. Period.
As a potential STEM employer, I would do the same. There is NO WAY I want to hire someone disruptive like that.
As some employers have pointed out, the person with preferred pronouns in their application is signaling to everyone that work is not important to them, and that they are just interested in mindless activism. Many note that someone with preferred pronouns is self-identifying as a person likely to bring lawsuits. So why does one need characters like that around to create turmoil?
Harvard Business School studies show that DEI programs result in less profits and less productivity and lower morale and even less diversity. It is just a weapon to use to attack others and to get everyone to hate each other.
One young person I was using as a sounding board, who was brilliant with an eidetic memory, decided to "prove" to me that Jordan Peterson is the worst of the worst and the lowest of the low. So this kid wrote me hundreds of pages of documents (maybe even over 2000 pages) attempting to "argue" that all women have a penis, or something. I refused to read this crap. And he quit in disgust, furious.
Employers who reject candidates who don't list their pronouns will miss out on hiring a lot of good people. That's a heavy penalty by itself.
Did I not hear the expression, "Go woke, go broke" a while back and then repeated every so often? There is some truth to that aphorism.
These papers cannot be rejected for ideology unless you concede these are products of ideology. And yet you ask that they be evaluated by scientific standards. Adding PS introduces the problematic question of whether these are political papers or science papers. They can’t be both. You give the PS boosters the benefit of the doubt in both directions and force detractors to take the loss.
What are you talking about? There’s no standard of science which says all papers, even those which flagrantly subvert the scientific method, must be considered.
No one is entitled to have a paper reviewed. If you want to participate in science, then you must follow the scientific method.
We should enforce that rule without apology.
Not really. If the paper violates scientific standards, it should be rejected for that reason. The argument is PS do just that.
A positionality statement is not a violation of scientific standards. It's just irrelevant information. We must judge papers by scientific standards, not by irrelevant personal issues. That means a PS should cause no benefit and no harm.
Again, there's an argument PS are indeed harmful and do violate scientific standards. We wrote a paper explaining why. Buncha people seem to agree. Sounds like you don't accept those arguments. Here's excerpt from abstract:
However, there are at least three reasons why they should be avoided in scholarship. First, it is impossible to construct credible positionality statements because they are constrained by the very positionality they seek to address. Second, positionality statements are unnecessary because reducing bias—positional or otherwise—in scientific literatures does not hinge on the biographical details of individual scholars but on the integrity of the collective process of truth-seeking. Third, by asking scholars to disclose information about themselves, positionality statements undermine the very norms and practices that safeguard the impartiality of research. Instead of asking individual scholars to issue subjective declarations about their positionalities, scholarly communities should focus on improving the rules of intersubjective competition at the heart of scientific progress. In our view, the most productive path to increasing representation and reducing positional bias in research is to protect the freedom of scholarly inputs while insisting on methodological transparency and rigor.
There are three steps here: 1) PS "should be avoided in scholarship" by discouraging people from making them; 2) PS should be removed from scholarship by journals editing out these statements (which I agree with); 3) scholars should be punished for making a PS by having scientific work automatically rejected and (it seems to follow logically) by being disciplined for violating academic standards.
It's the third step that I think is clearly wrong. We should persuade scholars not to make them, we should persuade journals not to publish them. But we do not ban or punish anyone for having a different view about PS. This is a fundamental issue of academic freedom.
The examples cited are not positionality statements. That’s a made up word to hide the fact that they are political statements and oaths of allegiance. They don’t belong in a science journal. They are free to take their positionality papers and have them published elsewhere. If they are published in a STEM journal, then those journals should be vulnerable to accusations of bait and switch, false advertising, deceptive marketing etc.
Expertise is, by definition, the rejection of some perspectives. If you aren’t willing to exclude some perspectives from science, by establishing and enforcing norms, then you’re forfeiting science’s claim to expertise.
Nobody is talking about punishment in any conventional sense. If I hold the view that coefficients are statistically significant at p<.30 should I be allowed to publish my research as such? Can I come up with my own norms? Is it punishment if such a manuscript gets desk rejected? I don't think so.
Actually, they're quite immature. Reading those examples above made me cringe with embarrassment for the dolt who authored them.
What makes this even more tragic is that these individuals probably are not nearly as embarrassed as are others with a greater knowledge and understanding of science. Worse yet, these are the faculty members who will be "enlightening" their students with this sad, pseudo self-aggrandizing drivel.
About to send a kid to college and terrified of exactly this.
Have the kid become an electrician or, even better, a welder. They make tons of money and don't have to put up with this nonsense as there is a shortage of competent electricians and welders and anyone who is reasonably competent will get a good job. If I had a kid, I'd sure steer him or her into such a profession. I am deadly serious, by the way. In fact, I counseled a parent whose daughter did not want to go to college but become a welder. He wanted to know what I (a college professor, or I was at the time) thought about that. I was enthusiastically supportive of her goals, much to his surprise. She's now doing extremely well and is happy, as is her father.
I can't even tell you how much I agree. Having a very concrete skill set is not only a means to making a living, but psychologically satisfying as well.
My child said her science class was taught by a prof who got their PhD in the education of that subject. Lots of material offered on e-modules. Thankfully my student is highly motivated but lots of peers struggling. Went in to ask a conceptual question during office hours and got counseled as to how to take the test and presumption of anxiety. Lol. Said I wouldn’t have gotten into this school if tests caused me anxiety! What a waste of precious time.
I am shocked that such nonsense is permitted. I had no idea that positionality statements were common now. This is ridiculous.
I could write a positionality statement that would put all others to shame. However, as I have mentioned before, I reject this stupid pandering. Judge me on my competence and the merits of what I produce. That is it.
PS=BS
Luckily, I haven't come across these Positionality Statements in my field. I'm sorry for anyone in this blog who must deal with such ridiculous absurdities.
Real Science knows not the race and gender of its authors. Real Scientists are not judged by the color of their cloth but by the content of their work.
I totally agree. I am almost starting to wonder if our work should be totally anonymous, or associated with a coded reference number, or something, to avoid or reduce this sort of nonsense.
The work should stand on its own. If it doesn't, then there is a problem.
With insipid DEI running so called colleges, I would not send my child to one of these ding dong schools run by tenured professors who in real life, can't find their way out of a paper bag. Instead I would send them to a good trade school where they will graduate pretty quickly and be making LOTS of money before your dipshtt kid is even through one year, wasting your money and his/her (yes, only two sexes) time. I have little to no respect for anyone "teaching" at a college today unless they are at a medical school and I do think there are a few good doctor/teachers left but with DEI, it could be dying also.
Ideological test are now becoming common to submit manuscripts in STEM. Besides the positionality statements well discussed here, many journals require filling of forms that require affirmation of gender ideology and DEI concepts in order to submit a manuscript. This is wrong, there should be no ideological litmus tests to submit manuscripts. Is their science not valuable enough on its own that they need to instead be requiring ideological conformity in political and social ideologies?
If that ever happens to me, I won't do it. It will be interesting to see what happens then. I have along publication record and have had a very successful career. They will either have to blatantly reject the paper on non-scientific grounds or back down. I almost relish someone trying to pull that with me. I've already refused to put my pronouns on conference name tags, so far with no consequences.
Excellent, that is the same way I think.
Wondering if these statements were proactively offered by the authors, or required by the journal. Either way they are a terrible trend. Are all university researchers infected by this virus? Where should parents who don’t want their kids infected send them to college?
It’s as bad as offering bribes.
Science is science (evidence based)...and nescience is nescience. (positionality based).
Just learned a new word, thank you!
Instead of calling these snippets of text "positionality statements", I think we should call them "biographical manifestos", or BMs.
For Thriller and SciFi fans amongst you: the intersectionality approach to all aspects of life has been most fully developed in Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull novels. The result are Privilege Levels 1-10. A white male cis catholic Irish able-bodied conservative would be a 1, a POC female trans genderqueer neurodiverse otherkin antifa sympathiser would be at least an 8.
Spoiler: It doesn't end well.