[asguy]

Focusing on "fabricating observational data" is a cope for the fact that Boghossian et al made the targets of their papers look like absolute fools. The problem with the paper "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" wasn't that the data was wrong.

Sokal and Boghossian's work intended (and succeeded?) to accomplish the same thing: they demonstrated the fact that these academic disciplines are full of bullshit producers and consumers.

[bondarchuk]

Quite like the poet Ern Malley, the authors would have inadvertently written a pretty nice (if a little over the top) paper on human behaviour around dogs' unwanted sexual and violent behaviour, if only they had used actual observational data. It seems quite common-sense to me that you can learn something about people's attitudes towards gay sex from how they react to their dogs having gay sex. I quote:

"In particular, regarding the interaction of human beings and animals both inside of and apart from physical space, humans project their moral beliefs and assumptions onto animals and yet also consider animals ‘outside’ the moral sphere. [...] In animals, we see this inconsistency when applying human moral values to dogs by calling them ‘loyal’ or ‘disobedient’ or when referring to cats as ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘arrogant’ and yet accepting behaviors like fighting and torturing small animals as value-free and ‘natural.’"

Yes! That's a good point and a good motivation for doing this research. The first research question:

"(1) How do human discourses of rape culture get mapped onto dogs’ sexual encounters at dog parks; particularly, how do companions manage, contribute, and respond to ‘dog rape culture’?"

If you are interested in human behaviour then I can see how this is an actually interesting RQ. I think rather too much of the gloating around this paper comes from people who simply don't think any (qualitative) science w.r.t. human behaviour is legitimate.

Their using fake data preempts anyone from biting this bullet which is why it diminishes the force of the hoax a lot, imho.

[asguy]

"We published what we thought was a valid paper on a fat man in red that lives on the north pole and gives presents to children at the end of December. Unfortunately we didn't realize that the aeronautical data on his flying reindeer was falsified. This was clearly data fraud, and has no impact on us being a trustworthy peer-reviewed journal." lol

[jfengel]

they demonstrated the fact that these academic disciplines are full of bullshit producers and consumers

That seems like an unwarranted conclusion. They found a gullible journal -- one that nobody has ever heard of except in connection to this hoax. Extending that to "the entire discipline is faulty" sounds like exactly the sort of faulty logic that we scientists are supposed to avoid.

If I wrote a journal article that consisted of one data point and drew a line from it I'd be blacklisted. Why on earth are we patting ourselves on the back for making precisely this mistake?

[asguy]

They found 7 gullible journals that accepted their papers. 4 of which got published before the project was discovered.