The “grievance studies” hoax conducted by Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay is now so well known that it has its own Wikipedia page. I’m sure most of you know some details: the trio wrote and submitted 20 papers to journals dealing with what they call academic “grievance studies”: cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies. At least seven of the papers were published, including the famous “dog park rape culture” paper, and one even won a prize. And one of the accepted papers was larded with extensive quotations from Mein Kampf.
Just this week Boghossian, the only hoaxer who has a formal academic position, was disciplined by Portland State University, which, although it didn’t fire him, ordered him to take training in “protection of human subjects.” Until he does that and then convinces the University he understands the rules, he cannot do sponsored research, work on human subjects, or apply for grants. (I have no idea whether he’ll comply.) He had earlier been found guilty of not protecting human subjects—not the bogus subject in the hoax papers, but the reviewers and editors who were deceived by the trio’s papers. That’s a pretty lame accusation.
My own take on this is that while the hoax was duplicitous and deliberately so, it did expose the rot in some parts of the humanities in a way that would have been hard to do by other means. I can write critiques of papers on feminist glaciology or the othering, gendering, and fat-shaming of urban squirrels, but these paper-by-paper critiques showed only that an occasional howler slips through the cracks. (These papers are, however, seen as serious scholarship.) It’s another thing entirely to confect bogus papers that align with Regressive Leftist ideology, and then get these risible “studies” published in decent journals. (One remembers Alan Sokal’s famous Social Text hoax.) In other words, Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology. Were it up to me, I would not have punished Peter.
But academics went wild with rage, for, unable to stand the idea that the humanities has been infected with tendentious pomo junk scholarship, they performed what animal behaviorists call “displacement behavior”: they ignored the message and tried to kill the messengers. And you’ll see some of that in a discussion in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the meaning of the Grievance Studies hoaxes. There are seven pieces involving eight scholars on both sides of the issue.
Click on the screenshot to read the pieces, and of course give us your own take in the comments. Below I list the authors and a snippet of their conclusions:
Quotes from the named scholars are indented; my few comments are flush left:
Yascha Mounk. a lecturer on government at Harvard University:
. . . after all, it is possible to glean valuable information from the immoral actions of evil people. And even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact: Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit.
. . one thing remains incontestable in my mind: Any academic who is not at least a little troubled by the ease with which the hoaxers passed satire off as wisdom has fallen foul to the same kind of motivated reasoning and naked partisanship that is currently engulfing the country as a whole.
Carl T. Bergstrom, professor of biology at the University of Washington:
Peer review is simply not designed to detect fraud. It doesn’t need to be. Fraud is uncovered in due course, and severe professional consequences deter almost all such behavior. Nor is the peer-review process designed to weed out every crazy idea. Given the self-correcting nature of scholarship, it is far better to let through a few bad ideas than to publish only those that are so self-evident as to be without controversy.
. . . Attacking a field with satirical nonsense is ineffectual — and just plain lazy. If a field is intellectually vacuous, it is so because its central papers and most exciting conclusions are unjustified or even absurd. To effectively criticize a field, one must engage with its central tenets, its core assumptions, its accepted methods, and its primary conclusions. And then one must show where these are mistaken, incoherent, or preposterous. Sadly, the hoaxers chose a different path. They may have created a media splash, but their stunt is a hollow exercise in mean-spirited mockery rather than a substantive critique of the field.
I disagree—it does constitute a substantive critique of standards of scholarship in several fields.
Justin E.H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris Diderot:
Quite apart from whether “Sokal Squared” has accomplished what its authors claim, I confess I am astounded, though I really should not be by now, by the moralism and the piety toward rules and procedures that so many academics are expressing, as if hoaxing were always unethical and lacking in any potential salutary effects. These academics seem entirely unaware of the distinguished history of hoaxing, and to assume that it dates back no earlier than Sokal.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, associate professor of history at the New School:
In targeting journals that focus on women and minorities, they also channeled their ire at groups still struggling for representation in the academy, from faculty hiring to footnote citations, a quantitative reality that challenges the core assumption of the “Grievance Studies” crowd: that lockstep obeisance to social-justice orthodoxy is corrupting academia. This suggests more about the hoaxers’ arrogance and the limits of their intellectual vision than it does about any inherent flaw in, say, taking seriously feminist spirituality.
. . . And that’s because the greatest crisis in academia is not the peer-review process of some small, specialized journals, but the defunding and devaluing of the humanities — including not just feminist and ethnic studies, but also history, philosophy, literature, and other fields these pranksters would likely deem worthy of continued existence. It is a sad fact that this process will only accelerate, thanks in part to a new rhetorical weapon: “grievance studies.”
Perhaps these areas of the humanities have devalued themselves. In fact, I suspect that’s the case.
David Schieber, doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles [Schieber reviewed and rejected one of the hoax papers, on masturbation as a form of violence.]
In their article announcing the hoax, the writers used selected quotes from my review to argue that I supported this paper (despite recommending a rejection). This selective use of my comments seemed disingenuous. They were turning my attempt to help the authors of a rejected paper into an indictment of my field and the journal I reviewed for, even though we rejected the paper.
Heather E. Heying, former professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen State College:
Consider what led you into academia in the first place. If you have anything of the creator or discoverer within you, remember those drives and recognize that the rising quasi-religious zealotry from those in Grievance Studies has liberty, creativity, and discovery in its cross hairs. For the practitioners of Grievance Studies, the scientific method is a tool of the patriarchy, while beliefs outside of the narrow band of conformity required by the authoritarian left are evidence of fascist, alt-right leanings. This will sound like hyperbole to those without direct experience, but I and many others have observed it firsthand.
. . . Projects like the hoax reveal character, both good and bad. Whether out of error or expedience, many in the academy will dig in on behalf of Grievance Studies. Others will be driven by fear into silence. But if you share a deep commitment to rigorous inquiry, be one of the people who stand up and say: “This is wrong. It must stop. I will help.” Speak up in faculty meetings and in hallways. Join Heterodox Academy. Support FIRE. And when you encounter this distorted pseudo-scholarship delivered as insight, proclaim as loudly as you dare: #TheyDontSpeakForMe.
Laurie Essig, professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College and Sujata Moorti, director and a professor in the gender, sexuality, and feminist studies program at Middlebury College:
Finally, even a cursory reading of the hoaxers’ work shows that much of what they’re claiming as proof doesn’t in fact implicate the field in anything but collegiality. Their claim that their article on the pedagogy of chaining white students received positive feedback? That’s just untrue. It was rejected. Perhaps the reviewers were simply trying to be helpful. That point gets lost in the media coverage and academic trolling from outside the field.
This “Grievance Studies” hoax belongs in a larger political and historical context. Feminist and gender studies are under attack, in Hungary, Russia, and right here in the U.S. As scholars working in the field, we should know. Our own program was attacked by the right for “causing riots” when Charles Murray came to give a talk on campus — which was untrue. This allegation was then used to bring a broader attack on the field, demanding it be shut down.
Many of us in the field receive death threats, rape threats, and calls for our non-existence. The “Sokol Squared” attack sits squarely within this larger assault, whatever the hoaxers profess of their political views or goals.
This is the ultimate displacement behavior: an attack on the hoaxers for participating in an attack on the humanities, and, of course, a victimization narrative that professors in gender and feminist studies receive death and rape threats. The latter is unfortunate, but in this case besides the point. How often do we see people cite their death threats as a substitute for defending their ideas? Of course these scholars are in feminist and gender studies, and of course they’re at Middlebury College, aka Woke University.
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
When you look at the talk page, you see one highly motivated editor named “Hjhornbeck” who very likely is a contributor to Freethought Blogs of the same name. Why would he write there? He’s a highly ideological opponent.
Wikipedia is generally quite good, but cases like this, or the infamous “Elevatorgate” are prime examples of a bug, where highly motivated agenda pushers rig the articles, and often spread nonsense that can persist for years (the extreme example of this problem is RationalWiki).
The Freethought Blog merry gang has traditionally used their journalist friends (especially Amanda Marcotte) to wash their opinions, making their preferred version quotable on Wikipedia.
Yep, I just checked Wikipedia and while it seems reasonable it completely avoided mentioning the key component that got he whole Elevatorgate ball rolling.
That was Watson, from a position of keynote speaker at a CFI conference, harshly calling out and denigrating Stef McGraw, who had dared to have a slightly different opinion.
Indeed, but it has little to do with the truth, since the inciting incidents are missing. Once that’s put into perspective, Watson already escalates straight to “rape” (!) and accuses not just McGraw. This incited everyone, but the CFI video wasn’t released, making it seem as if people were angry at the “guys don’t do that” remark of an earlier video. Dawkins then comments on the strange juxtaposition of extreme anger with the coffee invite.
Yes, exactly.
Yes, this is one of those things people don’t consider when it comes to the media largely leaning left: their articles, no matter how untruthful, can then be used as “sources” for what is nearly always the number one search result for an issue or subject: Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the same influencers within Wikipedia who run this little game have also managed to get conservative sources banned from the pages they most desperately want to keep scrubbed of any opposition. Even conservative-leaning sources like, say, The National Review often get banned from a page because enough of these people gang up. Sometimes, they’ll take the issue to the Arbitration Committee, which will then back them up because they have friends there.
Just researching how Wikipedia pages are contributed to and edited is a daunting task. The process can become so labyrinthine and esoteric that even the mightiest of us will tire of it. But there are these far-left cadres who have been contributing and editing for years, giving them both knowledge of how to get what they want on there (and what they don’t want removed) and gaining influence (the more and longer you’ve contributed, the more influence you have).
Like much information exchange that goes on through the internet, Wikipedia scares me. Like I said, it’s often the number one search result for an issue or subject. But people have been conditioned for years to trust Wikipedia as a completely neutral and unbiased source. Wikipedia may be a good source when it comes to, say, reading about string theory, but almost never for political issues or issues/events that have political implications, even on a small scale (in the scheme of things, Elevatorgate is small-scale, but it’s important to enough people that they’ve cleaned it up).
“But academics went wild with rage, for, unable to stand the idea that the humanities has been infected with tendentious pomo junk scholarship…..”
I don’t think that’s it. After all, these academics are the ones who have made scholarship “infected with tendentious pomo junk scholarship”. And not just the humanities anymore either. What makes them wild with rage is having it pointed out publicly and being ridiculed. After all we’re supposed to take them as seriously as they take themselves.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, associate professor of history at the New School:
I’m disappointed in myself that as soon as I read the above words, I presumed what this person would say on the issue.
And I hate the fact I was right.
She does seem to be one of the more reasonable ones among the supporters of grievance studies, though. Contrast with the ones who themselves come from gender studies.
-Ryan
The real hoax is the Grievance Studies industry. . . all the dogmatism of Scholastic Theology with half the IQ and none of the critical thinking skills.
Its like entering into a nutrition program and being only taught how to make fried butter sticks.
The discipline Portland State imposed on professor Peter Boghossian pretends that the journal editors who received the hoax papers were analagous to human subjects of medical experimentation—and so they should have received notices of Informed Consent to sign along with the submitted manuscripts.
We should all keep this in mind, when we submit our own papers to journals, along, of course, with accompanying Informed Consent letters. The academic Office of Research Integrity notes, by the way, that for some human subjects, “it may be difficult to convey the necessary information or to verify an understanding in people with reduced decisionmaking capacity– such as subjects with some developmental disabilities, some psychiatric disorders, or advanced dementia.” Editors of the particular journals which received the “Sokal Squared” manuscripts presumably fall into this category, and so they should also have been provided with special help to understand their Informed Consent documents. I wonder whether Portland State has advised those journals to retain that sort of special help for their editorial staffs.
The Emperor doesn’t like when you point out he has no clothes.
… and tiny hands, still sufficient to cover his embarrassment.
Sub
Petrzela’s comment strikes me as a defense of the offense of others. The humanities have it bad but women and minorities have it especially bad? Women and minorities are considerably OVERrepresented in the humanities. Sure.
Heather Heying nails it.
Hooray for Boghossian et al. They are doing science and humanity a great service at risk to themselves. Good for them.
On the gripping hand, the publicity is doing their academic reputations no harm what so ever if they decide to move from America to the civilized world.
Civilized world. I suppose you mean outside the United States of America. Ya, I get it.
The rot is well into the joists. Just getting rid of a few planks isn’t going to cut it.
😂
I agree. And to extend the metaphor slightly, I think the floorboards need to be torn up, preferably using some kind of series-E, Windhammer-brand jackhammer(the brand leader in my opinion), and then replaced with Hanson polyurethane convex-shell boardings(the kind with the dramamine coating, to prevent skein deterioration due to oxidisation of the platinum-grist moulding fibres).
Only then will the humanities regain any genuine respect.
Seriously, I used to wonder how I could bluff my way through my education with such ease, never reading any of the books I was meant to study, never putting in any effort outside of classes…and then I did psychology at university, which was an actual science degree, and I realised that the reason I was able to bluff and bullshit my way through everything before then is because I had been exclusively studying the humanities ever since I’d been given the opportunity to choose.
Once I had to face up to a subject that was genuinely rigorous I didn’t really know how to deal with it – it was like a brick wall. It called for actual studying and hard work, and scrupulous statistical inferences, none of which I was familiar with…so I quit. Which I regret.
And the ‘two cultures’ gap is only getting bigger. You have two entirely different, oppositional epistemological approaches being taught side-by-side. It’s not good. Eventually the two disciplines might not be able to communicate in any meaningful way about reality.
On the other hand, coaching (different years of) psychology students through the Statistics 1.1.1 (Introductory, for Non-Scientists and humannities) coursework got me a girlfriend in first year and a dope supplier in second year.
That “Two Cultures” book is not so much still raining on the parade, as drifting snow.
“On the other hand, coaching … psychology students … got me a girlfriend in first year and a dope supplier in second year.”
That is probably the greatest single benefit the ‘humanities’ have ever conferred on society.
😎
cr
We shouldn’t be too harsh with the Humanities and Social Science.
After all, they cannot protect themselves with arguments because they have trouble identifying relevant facts and laws. In such climate it’s politics what decides on what’s true or not. This troubled Weber and Durkheim a while ago and not much has changed.
If a scientific community cannot figure out the difference between incredible nonsense and something at least potentially true, and even want to protect this nonsense-producing system, we probably should not take them very seriously.
On the bright side: it keeps a lot of people busy and may make their practitioners feel good about themselves because they might think they have higher status than f.i. a garbage man. This makes me feel a bit jealous.
On the dark side people who feel good about themselves without an adequate basis in reality pass on their ‘feelings’ to students as valid academic work.
It’s parasitism. Highjacking the academic world and forcing it to replicate your own memes.
I feel justified in my ‘default’ setting that anything coming from a ‘xyz-studies’ department should be considered nonsense until proven otherwise.
It looks like a particular “post-colonial” post-structural philosophy has fortified itself into a corner of academia, from where it tries to colonialise as many other areas as possible, which they unironically call “decolonialization”. Their scholarship rests on now obsolete early language philosophy and ideas like the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity), social constructionism, and the blank slate.
It does attack other sciences that are built on a realist foundation, and in a sense there are “Science Wars”. The parlour trick is to ceaselessly assert that they are “the left” and on the “right side of history”, while the natural sciences have it wrong, are now obsolete (this was the very point Sokal lampooned) — and “right wing”. The script hasn’t changed at all. It’s now just the “woke” who use this trick, and enough people fall for it. I urge again and again to be skeptical of such assertions. Today, it’s a “Civil Science Wars” as students and interested laypeople, as well as academics of opposing epistemological schools clash with one another on a shared social media sphere. And today as yesteryear, the primary trick is claiming the left, progressive high ground. Don’t let them.
Advances in “studies” fields are laughable. The newest findindings are called “intersectionality” which outside of the narrow legal context is characteristically trivially true and absurd. Look up what it means, and you’ll find the childish notion that people could be “privileged” in one way, but not privileged in another: how much “white male” privilege can a man with multiple sclerosis really muster? How is this measured? Some scholars suggest the big three privileges/oppressions, others count up to fourteen items (from able-bodied to employed to having a roof over the head).
In the meantime, since Rosch to Chomsky, Austin to Quine philosophy and cognitive sciences emerged. This has lead to a rival, altogether different empirically-grounded track, which in my view, makes “studies” subjects obsolete.
It’s customary for the physics-envious postmodernists (e.g. “gender spectrum”) and their woke intersectional children to tout their ideology as science or academical (as well as “very left”). Merriam-Webster notes: “People object to the technical nature of the term [intersectionality] and the concepts it addresses (it doesn’t hide its academic origins very well), and it’s been described by some as divisive.”
Even their dictionary entry sound like the pompous humblebragging you see from its advocates. The hoax was excellent, but can only shine spotlights on a much larger problem. Chomsky called it a “rot” from Paris, and following Sokal and Bricmont pointed out how it actually harms activism. We see the result plainly today in the Orange One in office. The wokest of times produced the most far right US President. It couldn’t be clearer.
I meant the same under 14, but you elaborate and formulate it beautifully.
You had me at “masturbation is a form of violence.”
Interestingly, that was taken from the piece by David Schrieber who did a good faith review of the “masturbation is a form of violence paper” and rejected it. The hoaxers then took quotes from his review out of context to “demonstrate” their point.
The way they treated his review suggests that they were not acting entirely in good faith.
It doesn’t matter though. If somebody exploits a security flaw to rob a bank, the bank’s owners don’t sit around deploring the dishonesty of the robbers, they fix the problem.