The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
Actually, the authors of this are professors from that university, lmao.
They were even given some grants and awards.
Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they’re still being reviewed by actual journals, so it’s possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.
Many papers published as pre prints in arxiv never make it out of there, there’s too much rubbish in the academic world, just like this article. And not only in the social sciences, I’ve seen plenty of bad papers in chemistry and biology there too.
ArXiv doesn’t filter anything afaik (or maybe they have policy against really egregious stuff). If you take a peek at their mathematics section, any nutjob who think he’s solved the collatz conjecture can export their microsoft word ramblings to PDF and publish it on ArXiv.
ArXiv does have value because journals overcharge authors for publishing, overcharge other researches for access to journals, hold strict opinions on what they will or will not publish or censor, among other complains. ArXiv levels the playing field a bit by being basically fancy PDF file hosting. Not every valuable piece of thought comes from a “prestigous university”, and restricting access to knowledge is overall a bad thing.
