[Motti]

You have got to read this to believe some of the crap drowning the academia these days.

This episode shows how generations of kids are paying good money to study pure, unmitigated, mind-warping drivel.

It ought to go without saying that the paper, ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’, was a spoof. Yet it was peer-reviewed by two supposed experts in gender studies, one of whom praised the way it captured ‘the issue of hypermasculinity through a multidimensional and nonlinear process’, and the other of whom marked it ‘outstanding’ in every applicable category.

Read more here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/do- ... e-discuss/

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

It appears that the paper was actually rejected by humans the first time around:

Cogent Social Sciences said the paper ended up in its peer review system after initially being denied by the journal's parent company Taylor and Francis, an international academic publisher.

Taylor and Francis found the article unsuitable and intended to "reject it outright as unsound," but the paper was "inadvertently referred" to Cogent Social Sciences through an electronic article-sharing program.

Somehow through a tech snafu it was referred to an editor for review:

"The article was received by a Senior Editor and sent out for peer review as is standard," Cogent Social Sciences said. "Two reviewers agreed to review the paper and it was accepted with no changes by one reviewer, and with minor amends by the other."

Cogent Social Sciences said the mistake occurred because the two reviewers' "expertise did not fully align with this subject matter," although they had "relevant research interests."

The paper was filed under the subjects of gender studies, "Postmodernism of Cultural Theory," and feminism, and listed the key words "penis; feminism; machismo braggadocio; masculinity; [and] climate change" on the first page.

"We do not believe that they were the right choice to review this paper," Cogent Social Sciences said of its reviewers.

It looks like there was basically no peer review at all: it looks fairly obvious that it was approved with minimal analysis, with the "minor edits" being thrown in at random by people who were too lazy to do their jobs. The praiseworthy comments probably cherry-picked passages from the paper to make it, again, look like the two peer reviewers did their jobs when in reality they were lazy and most likely didn't read it.

[Suntzu]

The pecker bomb. . .
. . . will ultimately destroy the world.