Self-referentialism can happen when a small group of authors cite one another to establish legitimacy to an idea that has no foundation in what came before. It doesn't by default mean something is bullshit, but it greatly increases the likelihood that a small group of people is able to propagate bullshit.

Think of the foundation as all human knowledge and people keep building upon that knowledge. Legitimacy is conferred when you make references to prior knowledge in your effort to establish your new idea as legitimate.

More recently, citations in the earliest papers proposing an idea have expanded such that the references are often leaf nodes, much of those leaf nodes often have no citations and end up being "like, uh, your opinion, man", but you get enough of these papers with bullshit leaf nodes referencing one another and you end up with a cluster of papers with tenuous or possible no connection to any prior work in a field. It's a cluster of papers referring to one another and look legitimate because there are citations. They may only be a few hops deep before you get to the "like, uh, your opinion, man" nodes, but no one ever looks that deep and notices.

I'll give you one such example that I personally know the origin of on Wikipedia. The person who made this edit doesn't know when they originally heard it, but they said they once heard in passing that this-is-known-as-kebab-case. When someone questioned them about it they went to the wikipedia article and casing and it wasn't mentioned, so they looked around for prior references to this casing name. They said they found one reference but it wasn't a good reference, but it was a reference and so they edited Wikipedia to make the change. They change was accepted and stuck. Within the next year or two lo-dash or possibly underscore.js came on the scene and this person convinced them to add the casing conversion function and name it kebab case because that is what was in the wikipedia article because they added it. Getting this in a major library now made it a legitimate name. At that point, the wikipedia article was updated with another reference, this time to lo-dash.

And that is the story of how self-reference was used to make kebab-case a legitimate reference in wikipedia.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.kebabcase

One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own.

Some entire post-modernist fields like grievance studies are such bullshit that things like this well orchestrated hoax was wildly successful in getting multiple papers published:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-...

If you've never read about the James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian hoax papers, it's super interesting.

Everybody loves talking about hoaxes in social science publications, but there is no shortage of such hoaxes in other, more "empirical" disciplines as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s...

No, that list does not show that. The examples from physics and chemistry, at least, are of nonsense papers being published by "predatory journals", which will publish pretty much anything as long as the author pays their fee. They aren't examples of serious journals being hoaxed.

Both the sokal paper and the first paper by the Boghossian group were published in open-access journals, of the same standard as the other fields. The only papers to be published in peer-reviewed journals are the last few by the Boghossian group, and those don't really prove that it's a problem unique to social sciences, either. The Boghossian group didn't seek to establish a control study, so we don't know if a similarly motivated group couldn't get papers published in other fields.

What makes the predatory journals relatively non-serious? What merit is there in your distinction between a "hoaxed" journal and a journal that publishes faulty papers on purpose?

Please see the "Bogdanov affair", where "serious" peer-reviewed journals accepted bogus theoretical physics works. I already linked to the relevant Wikipedia page in a nearby comment.

I agree that the Bogdanov Affair is shameful! I tend to lump that in with string theory more generally, which looks like an embarrassment to me.

>One example of self-referential post-modernist garbage is critical race theory. It basically started as a cluster of self-referentialism completely detached from everything else and then took on a life of its own.

How much CRT have you actually read? It's a pretty interesting and uniquely placed discipline of critical theory.

I'm going to hazard a guess that defining or teaching critical theory on HN is like talking to a brick wall.

I commend you for trying, though.

Some quick notes:

* You seem to conflate citation rings with self-citation and confuse the latter with self-referentialism. It is interesting to think in what way could your comment thus be considered topical...

* Citation rings are, indeed, horrible.

* "post-modernist fields like grievance studies" - WTF?

* While I, too, abhor scientific misconduct, the Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian stunts/attacks were themselves unscientific and unethical to say the least. The thing most people fail to realize when exposed to these attacks on certain little-loved fields is that academia is just as people/relationship based as any other business, and maybe most of the scholarship does not contribute anything significant. What I am trying to say is that the fields the three targeted are not necessarily special. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair

>* "post-modernist fields like grievance studies" - WTF?

It's worth noting that the term "grievance studies" was invented by Boghossian et al. and intended to be used as nothing more than a pejorative for studies and topics of research that the authors didn't like.