Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:

    Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that’s when it got real weird… So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:

    Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.

    But the search result I got was a bit different…

    Here’s the paper I found online:

    Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.

    Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this…

    And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn’t appear, but somwhow on Nelli’s it does and … and … omg, IT’S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone…

    Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?..

    I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn’t make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.