We're all screwed. And academia is leading the way to hell

Anti-PC Writers Tricked Seven Academic Journals Into Accepting Hoax Papers on Dog Rape, Fat Phobia, and More
Surprise: If you work very, very hard at fooling people, you will often succeed.
Robby Soave|Oct. 3, 2018 12:15 pm

A trio of writers who describe themselves as left-leaning but decry the academic influence of political correctness, identity politics, and what they call "grievance studies" conducted an experiment: Could they fool scholarly journals into publishing hoax papers masquerading as legitimate scholarship?

The answer, it turns out, was yes. Seven journals accepted the fake papers, which were written by James Lindsay, a mathematician; Helen Pluckrose, editor of Areo; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.



In addition to the papers on fat studies, feminism spirituality, and neoliberal choice feminism, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian also found a home for a fourth paper, "Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks."

This paper, which was published in Gender, Place and Culture, attracted my attention in June. While the title sounded absurd on its face, its author, the fictitious "Helen Wilson," purported to have compiled an impressive amount of data regarding her observations of canine sexual aggression at dog parks. Wilson claimed to be affiliated with the Portland Ungendering Research Initiative, which had a domain name but no operating website. As I wrote at the time, many of Wilson's conclusions were unwarranted, and the whole thing was written in incomprehensible social-justice gobbledygook, but the underlying data seemed to have some potential meaning, even if the author was applying it poorly:



At Areo, the authors claim that the dog park study's shortcomings should have been glaringly obvious because the statistics were "improbable," and advanced "highly dubious ethics including training men like dogs." The statistics may have been improbable enough that the journal should have asked for raw data, but it's not unthinkable that a very determined researcher obsessed with this topic could have done what Wilson claimed. As for the ethics involved, we-should-train-men-like-dogs is indeed a silly proposition, but researchers should feel comfortable exploring and testing crazy premises. Now who's being too P.C.?

My point is that I'm not sure this proves what Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsay think it proves. They seem to believe they have shown that academic journals will accept complete garbage as long as it's intersectional progressive garbage. But at least in the case of the dog park study, this was well-disguised garbage.

This is not the first time Boghossian and Lindsay have declared victory after finding a home for shoddy scholarship. In 2017, they succeed in publishing a nonsense paper, "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." But the chosen venue was essentially an academic vanity press that would only take their work if they paid a fee. Ultimately, this said more about the quality of pay-to-publish journals than it did about the gullibility of academic publishers.

The new scam is a lot more impressive: Seven hoax papers accepted for publication is a lot. This raises legitimate concerns about the academic publishing process, and much of the ridicule the "grievance studies" attract is deserved.

But it's also true more generally that if you work very, very hard at fooling people, you will often succeed—and not just in academia.