JFreese shreds Catherine Bliss Book
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Bliss owns this, but I'm a bit surprised that the Stanford University Press editor let this go to press. Even someone with no social science training should catch some of the errors Freese points out, including the incorrect institutional affiliation of a Stanford professor. And, didn't SUP think to ask Freese to review it?
Maybe SUP just saw that Bliss won an ASA award for her first book, and decided the second would also win awards. The Matthew effect lives.
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This. Not to mention that a lot of these tweets make him look petty af and a bully too. If these are the only real points of critique then her overall thesis remains untouched. Bliss is going to #metoo the hell out of him and he has only himself to blame. The optics are terrible here.
Why didn't he tag her in the tweets? Why didn't he address her directly? Instead of engaging her professionally, he fired off a one sided mean spirited attack. I don't see what he accomplished other than shaming her.
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ITT, Grad Student Scholars dislike Freese enough not to care about a qually researcher totally failing to get basic, easily-checkable details right, and obviously not understanding the errors in the interview transcriptions she probably paid someone else to do ("Non-Hypothesis testing", "estimate existence equations"). If a researcher fails on such basic points as when E.O. Wilson was born, whether Chris Ellison was Matt Bradshaw's student or his advisor, or where someone works, and "Igon Values" the hell out of people's interviews ... why bother taking the "overall thesis" seriously?
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ITT, Grad Student Scholars dislike Freese enough not to care about a qually researcher totally failing to get basic, easily-checkable details right, and obviously not understanding the errors in the interview transcriptions she probably paid someone else to do ("Non-Hypothesis testing", "estimate existence equations"). If a researcher fails on such basic points as when E.O. Wilson was born, whether Chris Ellison was Matt Bradshaw's student or his advisor, or where someone works, and "Igon Values" the hell out of people's interviews ... why bother taking the "overall thesis" seriously?
It's sociology; why bother taking any of it seriously?
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If you make a lot of "small" factual errors, there's no reason for a reader to trust anything you write. It's a sign of sloppiness, carelessness, or cluelessness.
Besides, misrepresenting your interviewee's statements to fit your narrative isn't a "trivial" or "small" error.
This isn't elementary school. There are no prizes just for showing up, and the audience doesn't have to clap even if you sing off key.
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This is death by a thousand cuts. If Bliss couldn't get these details right, and if she wasn't careful enough to remedy obvious transcription errors, her larger conclusion is devoid of any and all credibility. SUP comes out looking pretty bad here too. Did they even bother to have this book reviewed or edited?
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It's not a binary, folks.
That in an evening someone can find 20+ mundane factual errors in a scholarly book makes the author look incredibly sloppy and untrustworthy as a scholar.
AND
Someone spending an entire evening subtweeting out mundane mistakes that seem really tangential to whatever the entirely unstated argument of the book is also comes off as really dickish and ultimately without much purpose beyond public flogging.
Both of those things can be true.