The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > The Windschuttle hoax - replete with irony > Comments

The Windschuttle hoax - replete with irony : Comments

By Graham Young, published 12/1/2009

The irony is that so many of the intellectual class fail to see that Windschuttle and 'Quadrant’s' predicament is their own: the joke is on them.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. ...
  8. 21
  9. 22
  10. 23
  11. All
Yep, I got the details of the Sokal hoax wrong, and you'll find a correction in the text now. Mark Bahnisch pointed it out to me first, so I've linked to his comment. I should have been more careful.
Posted by GrahamY, Monday, 12 January 2009 1:35:07 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Graham, a little typo; read this again: "I should have been more careful, this the detail is incorrect".

On the whole this thing is a bit of a storm in a teacup. I don't much care the for Windschuttle world view, but a hoax of this style seems to me silly and a waste of effort all round. Save it for 1 April.

Mally_p asks "When I make a reference in an assignment at university, I trust the editor/publisher of the information to be reliable and accurate. Does this mean I would be irresponsible to reference any work from Quadrant?"

You shouldn't ever be so trusting. You should check for follow-up work to make sure the previous result wasn't overturned, and check through the details most critical to supporting your work. Despite the diligence of peer review and academic editors, mistakes slip through, or results get superseded by improved technique. That's why I find it sad that commercial pressures are increasingly forcing science to be done in secret. That's also why people with a narrow agenda can use science to push their case: choose the published result that supports you, and ignore the follow-up that pointed out the error.
Posted by PhilipM, Monday, 12 January 2009 1:52:54 PM
Find out more about this user Visit this user's webpage Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Peer reviewed Science journals very occassionally also let fraudulent articles through due to the complexity of the experiments and particularly if one of the authors has been knowingly misrepresenting or indeed manipulated the primary data.

There is a heavy responsibility on the senior author to check and double check the work performed by graduate student/co-author.

And it falls upon him/her and the other authors to defend that most valuable commodity in all scientific endeavours, integrity and reputation.

If part of an article or the whole article is found to be based on falsified data usually the whole article is retracted and removed from the scienctific litterature. This is typically done in an retraction staqement published in the same journal.

To me this seems to be the only way to avoid erroneous research findings to be published. That is also why I as a scientist usually approach any article found on the internet or in any non=peer review journal with a healthy deal of skepticism. Because its in the public domain ( news papers, opinion pieces, etc) doesn't mean it is true.

The problem I have with activist journalists is that they inherently have an agenda and a bias in their reporting which colour their selection of sources. Katherine Wilson is an activist journalist with a bias against GM technologies. For her to masquerade as a Dr in Biotech and to misrepresent real scientists to score a point in the culture wars is the real issue in this sorry saga.
Posted by sten, Monday, 12 January 2009 2:10:54 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
You are right to distinguish between the obligations of an author and of an editor.

An editor obviously cannot guarantee the bona fides of an author, or that all factual claims are true. Otherwise no letters page and few opinion pages in our newspapers would survive.

An author who is a historian has an obligation to be diligent in reporting sources; that is elementary.

Keith Windschuttle was always justified in revealing egregious breaches of this obligation. In fact he had a duty to society so to do. He has performed nothing less than a public service in doing this.

Keith Windschuttle’s obligations as an editor are of course entirely different.

His responsibility there is in selection of material appropriate to the journal.

He is entitled to assume that contributors are as they reasonably seem and indeed hold out, and they do not to make representations which they know to be blatant lies.

The editor is like an auditor – he will make certain checks but in such a magazine can never check everything.

To criticise Keith Windschuttle for this fraud is like criticising a law abiding citizen for opening their door to an assumed charity collector who turns out to be a violent criminal.

This was not a hoax; it was a calculated fraud obviously perpetrated to punish Keith Windschuttle as an author, a quid pro quo for showing up the serious deficiencies of established historians who had misled the public.


If Margaret Simons were aware of the fraud prior to publication, the minimum she should have done was to decline to be involved.

This was not the ethical protection of a confidential source, a whistleblower, it was the protection of a publishing fraud about to be achieved.

It would be like a neighbour hiding the fact that that charity collector knocking on your door is in fact a violent criminal.

To have kept this secret and then to have benefited by revealing it protecting the perpetrator’s original anonymity makes her, and anyone else involved , an accessory to a contrived and eventually pointless publishing fraud.
Posted by David Flint, Monday, 12 January 2009 2:16:54 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
The point of the hoax was the glass house that Windschuttle constructed around himself with his fetish over footnotes and "sources". These were/are his weapons of choice in the culture wars.
As with all arch hypocrites he is guilty of expecting everyone else to do as he says not as he does.
Posted by shal, Monday, 12 January 2009 2:26:58 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I'm not all that interested in beat-ups by David Maher and the fan club who think it important to find petty material on those who disagree with their liberalism.

Childish tit for tats say to me that those engaged in petty points scoring have taken their minds off of more substantial issues that affect the community.
Posted by Uncle Pete, Monday, 12 January 2009 2:27:54 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. ...
  8. 21
  9. 22
  10. 23
  11. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy