We Must be Doing Something Right

Propaganda Scholar Denounces Us on X for Developing a Method to Reveal Propaganda Scholarship

This is a followup to my last post:

Using AI to Reveal Bad, Biased, and Bullshit Published Scholarship

It is based on the Epilogue and footnote 3 to that post — but: 1. Because I added that a couple of days after posting, some of you might have missed it; 2. This is so delicious it deserved to be a stand-alone post. I have also added some context and a few bells and whistles here that do not appear in the prior post.

Denounced and Mocked by a Propaganda Sociologist On X

I posted the AI essay on X a couple of days ago. It is three linked tweets, which you can see in full by clicking here.

Jesse Smith, a sociologist at The¹ Ohio State University, retweeted it, expressing some reservations about AI (that are common but which I argued in this tweet-response were irrelevant to the post).² There was also this response to Jesse’s tweet, regarding our post on using AI to reveal bullshit scholarship:

“Who is Dylan Riley?” I asked myself. As it turns out, he is a sociologist. And, I should have guessed. His work is just the type of propaganda masquerading as “sociological” scholarship³ (more on this later) that has gotten the academy in so much trouble, not just with Republicans, but with other academics and many other Americans (he is a sociologist at … can you guess? … wait for it … Berkeley!). His work is exactly the type of thing some of us have been warning about for decades:

We Tried to Warn You

And, duh! Academic promoting propaganda masquerading as scholarship objects to … methods for revealing propaganda masquerading as scholarship! This is exactly the type of academic I hope to be denounced, insulted and ridiculed by. Strongly indicates we got it right. Kinda reminds me of this:

My Finest Hour

From that essay:

I have had many accomplishments, awards and honors over the years. I have chaired three different programs at Rutgers, founded a professional society, and advised grad students who have gone on to superb careers inside and outside of academia, and undergraduates who themselves have received awards for their research.

But perhaps the thing I am most proud of, my finest hour, happened about two weeks ago. My (and my collaborators’) research was denounced by the Communist Party of China (hence, CCP) last week.

Then I added a shorter version of the present post as an epilogue to my post on enlisting AI to reveal bullshit. After doing so, I was ready to reply to dearest Dylan.

(Don’t worry about going back and reading footnote 3; I have integrated it into this essay, so its coming…).

This is how I saw it: His comment was nothing but insulting (“idiotic,” “foolish”). No substance. I responded substantively. Even if you want to believe that referring to his work as “propaganda” is an insult (which I could see but it has the great benefit of being actually true, and, in science, if someone feels insulted by the truth, that’s on them), I’d still argue that “propaganda!” is a less insulting insult than “idiotic” or “foolish.” At most, I responded in (insulting) kind but (also) with substance to Dylan’s mere insults.

But he continued in the same vacuously insulting vein, replying to my “Thanks!” tweet with this:

So, nothing but insults. Not even a defense of his work or a critique of mine. Just insults. “Ok, baby,” I thought, “game on. I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn.”

To understand my next reply, you need a little context. Riley is some sort of neo-Marxist sociologist with most of his “publications” appearing in neo-Marxist/New Left “journals” — like, literally, he has a slew of papers in outlets like “New Left Review,” “Historical Materialism” and “Jacobin Magazine” (his vita is here). No one reads these things outside of a very small insular group of neo-Marxists. So…

AI art courtesy of The Apollonic, who you can follow on X.

It was a good shot, but not a knockout blow:

Brooklyn would have been proud of me (literally, trading insults was one of the things we did for fun). I replied:

I knew that was a good one (in a muddied pig-wrestling sort of way), but did not expect it to be a full on knockout blow. But it was.

Before he blocked me, he tried to bully Ashley Rubin into silence. “Who is Ashley Rubin?” you ask. She is a sociologist working hard to save sociology from its worst actors (I would say, “like Dylan”).

Anyway, he failed to silence her. And that exchange will appear again in an upcoming post. Here is a taste from a draft of that post:

Peer Review Mafia

A peer review mafia occurs when some research theory/method/perspective ingroup captures an area within a discipline…

• and of course it is also in their interests to prevent publication, especially by outsiders (i.e., those not in the mafia) of skeptical vetting of their key claims, failed replications, statistical and methodological criticisms, or alternative explanations for their main conclusions.

“I am not saying you shouldn’t try to publish that broadside critique of [microaggressions, implicit bias, fill in the blank…]. I just wouldn’t want anything to happen to your career…”

And just in case you think I am going over the top here, I recently found this exchange between two sociologists on X:

Between his awful behavior on X and his propaganda scholarship, I have now concluded that Professor Dylan Riley is emblematic of much of what is wrong with academia. And speaking of propaganda scholarship …

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Riley’s Propaganda Scholarship

I looked up some of Professor Riley’s “scholarship.”

Ahh, yes. Marxist/neo-Marxist academics love to think of themselves as revolutionaries. Especially those whose fat salaries (doubly especially at elite state U’s like Berkeley) paid for by other people’s taxes⁴ that allow them to go to $100/person swank San Francisco restaurants where they can validate each others’ views that we are in collapsing “late stage capitalism” (Marxists and their intellectual descendants have been declaring the coming collapse of capitalism since … Marx).

Collapse looks imminent.

From Riley’s paper:

Bourdieu’s sociology, however, offers something more than a generalization of the “professorial” experience. It also offers an identity, one with certain parallels to what Lenin called the “professional revolutionary.” Bourdieusian sociologists are a vanguard. They possess insights into the workings of the social world that derive from their social theory but are denied to the laity mired in the swamp of common sense and everyday understandings.

I know. I’ve used this before. Its just that it so regularly applies to so many things in academia.

Riley is also a co-author on this paper:

In it, you will find this statement:

Multiple studies have systematically documented bias in every aspect of academia … including … hiring decisions (Nielsen, 2016) …

So, this means Nielsen (2016) found biases against women in hiring, right? I mean, that’s what Riley (et al) are claiming the paper found right? I tracked down Nielsen (2016) and Nielsen’s rhetoric is indeed, all about biases against women. But let’s look at Nielsen’s actual findings. Patterns of hiring by sex are reported in two tables. Table 4 is for all full and associate professor hires.

Table 4, above, is all full and associate professor hires, including both temporary and permanent ones (the study was conducted in Denmark, and, as far as I can tell, a “temporary” position is kinda like the U.S.’s untenured position, and “permanent” is kinda like our tenured positions). So Nielsen reports the results for “permanent” positions (only full professors) separately in Table 5:

Nielsen reported no statistical tests for sex bias, so I performed 3 chi-square tests for 2 x 2 contingency tables:

1. Male v. Female by Applicants v. Hired for all Full professors, Table 4;

2. Male v. Female by Applicants v. Hired for all Associate professors, Table 4;

3. Male v. Female by Applicants v. Hired for all Full professors, Table 5.

Tests 1 and 3 were nonsignificant, meaning there was no evidence of bias. Test 2 was significant (p<.01), but look at the table numbers! It means there was bias … against men! So mostly Nielsen had no evidence of hiring discrimination and the little evidence he had, favored women.

Here is Dylan Riley’s statement again:

Multiple studies have systematically documented bias in every aspect of academia … including … hiring decisions (Nielsen, 2016) …

Now, it does not say “bias against women” but this is obvious from context. And in case you have any doubt, here is a section header summing up later in the paper:

Academic hiring, tenure decisions, and promotions favor men

They don’t of course. Their conclusion comes from a very selective citation of studies that do show biases favoring men and completely ignoring those that show biases favoring women. Well, not counting that at least one of the studies they cited as evidence of hiring biases against women actually found no bias (in 2 of 3 analyses) and biases favoring women (in 1 of 3). Anyway, a fuller list can be found here⁵:

More Evidence of Biases Against Men than Against Women in Faculty Hiring

CONCLUSION

OF COURSE, as a master practitioner of propaganda scholarship, Dylan Riley will denounce any method capable of exposing propaganda masquerading as scholarship. It tells you we are on the right track in our attempts to enlist AI to rigorously, accurately and efficiently distinguish between scholarship that is heavily distorted by propaganda and scholarship that is not.

And here is the thing, a big thing. This essay? No AI. Took me good hunks of two days to write. I had to track down Riley, track down his scholarship, read some of it, read some of the stuff his gender bias paper cited … and that was all before I could begin writing. I had to track down and screenshot all those tweets. Then I had to actually write. And tweak and revise. And add some art, some humor, and some data. And do those damn chi-squares. A good hunk of 2 days.

I bet Claude could have done 90% of this, and done it as well or better, in 10 minutes.

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Commenting

Before commenting, please review my commenting guidelines. They will prevent your comments from being deleted. Here are the core ideas:

1. Don’t attack or insult the author or other commenters.

2. Stay relevant to the post.

3. Keep it short.

4. Do not dominate a comment thread.

5. Do not mindread, its a loser’s game.

6. Don’t tell me how to run Unsafe Science or what to post. (Guest essays are welcome and inquiries about doing one should be submitted by email).

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Footnotes

1. The Ohio State University. That really is its name. You need the The.

2. Backnforth with Jesse Smith. Contra the moronic denunciation, which is sorta the cost of doing business on X, this sort of serious conversation is one of the things I value on X. He was critical but substantively critical in a way that itself could be considered and evaluated. Hell, I would never have even run across Jesse (who I think is brillant but that’s beyond the scope of this essay) but for X. Functional academics (as opposed to the idiots there to mob and denounce) also often post their own or others’ papers, essays, podcast appearances, etc., some of which I also find invaluable.

3. Sociological scholarship masquerading as propaganda. There is plenty. This footnote is my attempt to pre-bunk comments dunking on sociology as “nothing but” propaganda. That goes way too far. There is some excellent social science being conducted by sociologists. Although documenting this is beyond the scope of this essay, go here for a recent example. And the entire point of my prior essay was to see if we could develop AI methods for distinguishing propaganda scholarship from serious social science, ideally, en masse. Although that essay only did it with a single article, I am hoping it is a sort of “proof of concept” that can be scaled up … but we will have to see about that.

4. Fat salaries paid for by other people’s taxes. To be clear, I do not object to this in principle because I am a merit kind of guy. I am fine with people who perform highly getting paid highly. Its the juxtaposing of someone being paid well with Marxist/neo-Marxist calls for revolution that strikes me as a bit rich. Of course, I don’t know how much Riley is actually paid, but “highly” is a reasonable guess for any full professor at Berkeley. Thanks to Last Moderate, who posted a most up to date and complete link to Riley’s salary in the comments. The good people of California are paying him just under $250k/yr to produce what he produces.

1928 Soviet propaganda poster. Starts off with “Against the Kulaks…”

5. Fuller list of sex bias in academic hiring studies. My focus there was on experimental studies, and Nielsen (2016) is not experimental. But I may put it in the shorter and not-intended-to-be comprehensive section on nonexperimental studies, because it is such a great example of an academic spinning the result to fit the narrative, even though any half-conscious person can see the result that disconfirms the narrative right in the paper.

So I got something constructive out of this bizarre exchange — I learned about yet another study finding more hiring biases favoring women than men, one that I had not previously known about! This is good to know about!