Canadian Politics Today

Oh I have no doubt that that occurs with foreign/immigrant students, but a bit of a contrasting personal story also comes to mind. When I was a young feller in school there were two Native born Canadian brothers, (yes I capitalized Native, not to be racist, just the facts) who missed a lot of classes because they used to get busted for drunk driving fairly regularly. Then there was a German girl whom I became friends with, the daughter of recent immigrants, who did struggle initially with English, but who also went on to graduate with honors. I guess my point here is that place of birth is not the most accurate forecaster of how someone will do in the world.

The thing is, according to my GS this was a rich kid sent by his parents who wasn't particularly interested. Engineering has very high acceptance standards for Canadian kids and this guy ended up denying one of them a slot that year because he had foreign money. No doubt he represents a minority among foreign students but I'm also convinced foreign money does talk in our system.

The lesson is that even if something is published in a humanities academic journal, it is still a subjective opinion, and so just because an opinion argument is published in an academic journal doesn't mean that opinion is correct.  It's still subject to an "appeal to authority" fallacy.  The bigger lesson here is for students & everyone to think for themselves, and be critical.

This statement is true for all fields that develop ideas that cannot be proven false by a real experiment. For example, a scientist that claims a set of tree rings are a proxy for temperature and develops models for past temperatures never has to be worried about being proven wrong because no one can go back into the past an prove that temperatures were different than claimed. The most he has to worry about is someone finds a different proxy that says something different but since no one can be definitively be "proven wrong" he/she can always find reasons to argue that his/her proxies are "better". IOW, any field without falsibility is nothing but subjective opinion driven by the biases of researchers.

This statement is true for all fields that develop ideas that cannot be proven false by a real experiment. For example, a scientist that claims a set of tree rings are a proxy for temperature and develops models for past temperatures never has to be worried about being proven wrong because no one can go back into the past an prove that temperatures were different than claimed. The most he has to worry about is someone finds a different proxy that says something different but since no one can be definitively be "proven wrong" he/she can always find reasons to argue that his/her proxies are "better". IOW, any field without falsibility is nothing but subjective opinion driven by the biases of researchers.

The past investigation was simply an attempt to understand if/why there was a warming period in the middle ages.  There were other ways to determine that but the real test of climate theory is whether temperatures continue to go up as CO2 levels do.  They do.

Have always said each claim has to be evaluated independently based on its merits. The basic premise that CO2 is a GHG that causes is warming is something that can be tested and therefore see that science as reliable. OTOH, claiming that the current warming is unusual is a key part of the alarmist narrative so they have spent a lot of effort carefully selecting proxies that tell the story they want while rejecting those that cast doubt on it. They can get away with this subjectivity because they can't be proven wrong with real experiments.

So do you suggest that the vast majority (~97%) of the trained and peer reviewed climate scientists are "proxies", or do you simply not understand the actual meaning of the word. Or are you suggesting that NASA is a "proxy", and for whom? Do you think the well established scientific groups below are all "proxies"?

https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

Waldo does have a point though.  If you make up things in a humanities/social science journal essay, and to a journal reviewer they seem to add up even though they unknowingly aren't real, things can easily slip through a review process, even if the conclusions seem wacky.

The lesson is that even if something is published in a humanities academic journal, it is still a subjective opinion, and so just because an opinion argument is published in an academic journal doesn't mean that opinion is correct.  It's still subject to an "appeal to authority" fallacy.  The bigger lesson here is for students & everyone to think for themselves, and be critical.

Everyone of every ideological stripe has confirmation bias, we want to believe that which confirms our beliefs,  and are much more critical on opinions that oppose it.  We're all players in the great information war that's been going on basically the entirety of human history, and sometimes the best ideas don't win, only the loudest.

notwithstanding the underlying principles of good faith & honesty, of course, just because something gets published, it does not necessarily add to or move the subject knowledge factor forward. That is the crux of peer-review... and related peer response to these questionable papers... any papers for that matter. Do any... would any... of these hoax-intended papers meet the threshold of interest and profile that they become impacting to the point that they would warrant academic/scientific interest to formally question/challenge the findings of these hoax-intended papers? Or rather, would serious academics/scientists simply choose to ignore them as meaningless, non-impacting papers?

Try it. You don't need institutional backing. See how far you get.

But if you do have a PhD and a university beside your name, you can get a lot of BS published, that's the point here.

But if you do have a PhD and a university beside your name, you can get a lot of BS published, that's the point here.

no - the point is one that shows that scamming persons fabricating data/research may manage to get their dishonest "studies" published... more likely in fringe journals of lower credibility/respectability, less likely in more mainstream credible/respectable journals.

oh my! Blowback Against a Hoax - Author of a recent academic scam faces disciplinary action

“The ‘hoaxes’ are simply lies peddled to journals, masquerading as articles,” wrote the group of about a dozen professors. “They are designed not to critique, educate or inspire change in flawed systems, but rather to humiliate entire fields while the authors gin up publicity for themselves without having made any scholarly contributions whatsoever. Chronic and pathological, unscholarly behavior inside an institution of higher education brings negative publicity to the institution as well as the honest scholars who work there. Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued.”