What Did The Grievance Studies Hoax Show? A Seven Year Retrospective.
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Right now, at this very moment, I’m reading a particularly galling introduction to Māori Philosophy. (The typing is being done by a monkey called Chuckles, as he orbits Earth with his typewriter.)
The book isn’t galling because it talks about Māori Philosophy. Admittedly, I have no deep or independent interest in the subject. I’m only reading about Māori Philosophy because I recently bought Jordan Peterson’s latest car crash of a book in order to review it, but was too embarrassed to plonk a Jordan Peterson book by itself in front of the Blackwell’s cashier and say “just this, please.” I needed something woke to balance the purchase.
The book is galling because of lines like these:
“This book raises a challenge to Eurocentric scholarship, which is by definition knowledge supported by unsound philosophical commitments.”1
“In the framework of ideas that underpins the global economy today, all cultural difference is reduced to choices in the market place: all human values are brought into the ambit of the global profit machine.”2
“In my experience, Māori people generally do not claim literally to believe the the ancient Indigenous nature narratives rather than modern science. On the other hand, in some big central ideas the Māori accounts of the world make more sense than science or modern capitalist ideas.”3 [I don’t think we’re ever told explicitly which Māori ideas “make more sense than science”, though it’s sort of implied, later on, that Māori philosophy is a helpful corrective to “misuses of evolutionary theory” such as “‘selfish gene’ theories”4, which I’m sure the author understands is a descriptive, gene’s-eye model of evolution, not a normative claim about how community is bad and social atomism is good or whatever.]
Some of the book’s pathologies are probably unique to it, or at least to its genre. (For example, the chapter on “Māori Knowledge” assumes — without argument — that the Māori beliefs are known, as opposed to falsely believed, or believed without justification. This isn’t something I’ve encountered before.) But many of its pathologies — the refusal to argue for things in a way that would convince a reasonable sceptic, the employment of fluffy, tortured prose, hidden behind a mist of Theory, the constant insertion of progressive beliefs that are (a) never argued for, and (b) orthogonal to what the book it about, etc. — are pretty widespread in the Humanities.
Unlike some people, I don’t think this is the end of the world. Still, while a lot of this kind of research is published in low-ranking journals that no one reads, some of it gets published in prestigious journals that no one reads. Some of it, moreover, trickles down into progressive political activism, making the Left more annoying and less able to do good things politically.
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It’s been seven-ish years since the Grievance Studies Affair of 2017 to 2018. Here’s a quick recap, for those who need a refresher.
James Lindsay (a deranged, anti-woke mathematician), Peter Boghossian (a philosopher; not be confused with Paul Boghossian, a much better philosopher), and Helen Pluckrose (don’t know much about her tbh), submitted a volley of farcical, left-coded papers to Humanities journals that publish papers on queer theory, gender studies, etc. These included:
“Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park”: This paper gathered evidence for ‘dog rape culture’, and asked whether ‘dogs suffer oppression based on their (perceived) gender?’. It was published in Gender, Place, & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.
“Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use.”: This paper made an empirical case — with made-up data — that straight men should anally penetrate themselves with dildos to decrease transphobia and increase feminist values. The introduction closes with: “This paper seeks to fill that gap.” It was published in Sexuality and Culture.
“Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism”: This paper re-wrote a section of Mein Kampf as feminist theory. It was published in Affilia.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with a journal publishing data on whether, say, anal self-penetration reduces transphobia. If it did, that would be an interesting empirical finding!
But if you skim the papers themselves, it’s just obvious they shouldn’t have been published in an academic journal, for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject matter. They are all literally incomprehensible. Each paper is vomit pool of jargon, and the arguments are clearly expressing gibberish.
One criticism of the hoax, which is fair to my mind, is that the first journal they targeted was the sort of “open access” journal that charges eye-watering fees to publish with them, ostensibly so that the paper can be read by the general public for free. But it’s established lore that these Open Access journals have lower scholarly standards than regular academic journals, since authors are effectively paying to publish.
In 2014, a prank paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” was accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology. The journal’s ‘anonymous reviewer’ declared it “excellent”, and the authors — two computer scientists, pissed off by all the spam emails they were getting from predatory journals — were asked to pay a $150 fee to finalise publication.
The open access journal Lindsay and his cohorts published in definitely wasn’t that predatory. (It seems like they genuinely employ peer-review.) But the fact that it’s open access makes the fact that their paper was accepted in it less funny. (Still funny though—the paper argued that penises are socially constructed.) That’s an L for Lindsay and co. Still, not all the journals they got published in were pay-to-publish. So the hoax still had something going for it.
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I’m writing about the grievance studies affair because of some comments from
, the writer of a very philosophically confused Substack that I don’t not recommend subscribing to.On Sunday, I wrote in defence of a Cambridge academic who got pilloried online for writing an interesting looking thesis on themes of smell in modern and contemporary literature.
Basically, a bunch of right-wingers criticised her for being a woman/writing an English Lit thesis that used words like “intersectional”.
On this, I said:
It’s true that ‘wokeness’ is very often bad, that many academics are rent-seekers, that PhDs are overproduced, etc. But not every use of the word ‘intersectional’ heralds a Marxist takeover. ‘Intersectionality’ is a self-evidently useful concept; it helps us describe certain social phenomena that would be harder to describe without it. This is good.
The grievance studies affair showed that ridiculous non-contributions can get past peer-review, simply by being left-coded. But not all left-coded work that passes peer-review is a ridiculous non-contribution. Scholars of English literature study themes in English literature. Smell is a theme in English literature. Ally Louks studied it.
In the comments (by the way, thank you for always being so chill and civil in the comments! You all seem like cool people, and I’m sorry for not replying all the time.),
expressed skepticism that the grievance studies hoax “showed” anything, contrary to what I claimed.It’s true that Lindsay et al. didn’t submit a bunch of far right articles, so it’s possible that these journals would’ve published Stephen Kershnar-esque papers on why it’s good to discriminate against women in hiring, etc. But… come on. The Midwest Journal of Queer Black Phenomenology & Joy Studies obviously isn’t going to publish bad, jargon-filled papers if they’re right-coded. It’ll only publish bad, jargon-filled papers if they argue for things like penises being social constructs.
You might also object that hoax didn't show anything, since if you keep flinging publication spaghetti at the journal wall, something will eventually stick and get published, even if it’s really bad. But like… if I shat on 1,000 sheets of paper and sent them to reputable journals, I wouldn’t get any acceptances. As the grievance studies hoax revealed, there are reputable humanities journals that will publish silly non-contributions to human knowledge, simply because they’re left-coded. Contra Ormond, this is a significant result.
At the end of the day, the force of the grievance studies hoax lay in its role as satire. In that sense, the papers could just as well have been published in The Onion or The Babylon Bee. But even though the Lindsay et al. are mostly (and probably all) braindead victims of the anti-woke mind virus, and even though in a frenzy of anti-woke excitement the cohort made several exaggerations about how crazy the articles they got published were, their hoax didn’t show nothing.
Heyyo! :) If you want to support me—a lowly, lowly student dressed in sackcloth and ashes, tears in my eyes, etc.—consider upgrading your subscription and growing Awol’s Army! It means I can write more nonsense, and I’ll make it well worth your while (wink, wink). Now, on with the show…
Stewart, Georgina Tuari. (2021). Māori Philosophy: Indigenous Thinking from Aotearoa. London: Bloomsbury Academic: p. 131.
Ibid., p. 43.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 88.
Thanks for engaging with my comment from the other day (and thank you for correctly identifying my immense philosophical confusion). After reading this, Im still not sure that in their role as satire these papers show anything valuable.
The biggest problem is that the authors don't establish what counts as absurd in a non-question begging way. One purported goal of the study was to establish that these fields would publish nonsense just so long as it expressed political values the fields agree with. The problem is that the "nonsense" they use is the specialist jargon of the field which, unsurprisingly, passes the papers off as legitimate. All the work is supposed to be done by us finding words like "penis" or "fat" funny or shocking, but (as you know) these words, and jokes, and wordplay can feature in the titles and theories of papers in legitimate fields too. It seems that whether or not one considers these topics "absurd" and inappropriate is independent of the grievance studies study, but the result of ones pre-theoretical views about critical theory; this is certainly the case with the authors ( I can cite video evidence of their confirmation bias on request ).
You're right that one issue is the confound introduced by publishing in predatory journal. Another issue is that when papers are rejected by journals that isn't considered disconfirmation of their hypothesis, which it rightly should be.
Another issue is the falsification of data. One of their papers lied about an n=1000 study on pet owners views about their pets gender identity. That is a substantial number of people which could potentially power research into various effects. I also happen to think that approaches like "discourse analysis" in order to empirically discover power relations in language through observational studies of language use sound prima facie useful and interesting (though would need to look further into methods used for any given study). It just isn't the peer reviewers job to check that the authors aren't using pseudonyms and havent falsified data. As such, If this is a problem, it can't be said that this is a problem for subjects that use critical theory any more than any other subject that uses peer review.
There's another issue with this whole thing, and thats what the relationship is supposed to be between the journals in question and the entire field. No argument is given or work done to establish how representative the chosen journals are and hence to clarify the scope of any findings.
There were no control groups, so we can't compare these findings to anything or any other fields so the findings are meaningless.
The authors go on to repeatedly claim on large podcasts like Joe Rogan's where they present their findings to the public for the first time that these studies establish a connection between subjects that teach critical theory and political violence. I can't see how the failure of the peer review process to screen out these papers even coul in principle establish that claim.
You can add to this the authors continues misrepresentation of the quality of the evidence they produced. Boghossian regularly claims on podcasts that their papers are the most cited in critical theory fields ( I can produce the source if you like but Im busy right now and typing off the cuff ), this is simply false and many of the citations their papers have received are from journals commenting on breaches of ethics in academic practice and things like the spread of misinformation and disinformation (hardly an endorsement). Additionally the authors regularly outright lie in their presentation of the affair, sometimes minutes apart, for example in ( https://youtu.be/OlqU_JMTzd4?si=QzxGPYZBOs3dM81R ) :
(7:05) Boghossian: "We gave them [the journals] bogus statistics"
(8:18) Boghossian: "So they [the journals] would claim, incorrectly, that we gave them fabricated statistics"
Further examples of the intellectual dishonesty and lack of intellectual integrity of the authors in their public presentation of the affair can be found in Cole (2023, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/12/5/116 ):
"journalists, bloggers, and authors of peer-reviewed articles all took the story, as told by the project’s authors, at face value. None (except Spruce et al. 2018) seem to have read the original articles themselves to see whether they matched with the description given by Lindsay et al. Had they done so, they would have discovered that there was no advocacy of being morbidly obese, no chaining students to the floor, no stacking them against their will, no suggestion that men should be electrocuted and trained as one does a dog, no switching of “Jews” for “white men”, no problematizing male-to-female sexual attraction, and no paper productivity that would have led to tenure. When later describing their project, either in print or verbally, Lindsay et al. seemed to have misremembered what they had written in their papers. All the exaggerations were due to the promise of huge publicity together with a pressure to publish their own account of the project."
That whole paper is well worth a read if this is a subject you're interested in.
If you watch some of the content the authors put out around this it becomes obvious that they were sold on their conclusion from the start and set out to continue to prod, poke and dredge data until they found anything showing what they wanted - an incredibly biased and irresponsible way to conduct intellectual inquiry: ( https://youtu.be/kVk9a5Jcd1k?si=GEB1va4Tsc8nwBIT ) 00:08 "I just read my email we have our first win" -- additionally, in this video note the weird staged after-the-fact acting by the studies authors where they try to present themselves in a candid live-action way.
It's a shame that the authors did engage in such a politically motivated and scientifically poor way, because I think it is a missed opportunity to actually test the quality of these fields. For example, my friend James Fodor suggested:
"If you actually wanted to discredit these fields, there are ways you could go about trying to do this competently. One way would be to pay PhD students or postdocs in different fields to write 'spoof' articles and 'genuine' articles, then randomise them see if the same students could distinguish them. Do this for a few different fields, and see which fields have higher rates for distinguishing nonsense. As evidence for hte 'harm' of grevience studies, collect statistics or interviews about the majors of violent protestors on campus, or do a discourse analysis of manifestos to see what ideas they are appealing to and trace their intellectual origins. Lots of interesting work to be done. But that takes actual work, which he said he is 'too busy' to do."
Now, importantly, Im not saying that there aren't reasons to have scruples about the journals or subjects in question. However, I believe that the reasons to have those scruples are prior to and independent of anything done by the Grievence studies authors.
Overall, Im still not convinced that this "study" does show anything interesting over and above that people who thought critical theory did some silly and ridiculous things prior to the "study" could say the same afterwards and add in a snigger.
You'll be satisfied and/or amused to know that Lindsay just played the same prank on the right. He got actual (not the fake accusatory label) Christian Nationalist publication American Reform to accept a paper that was just the first section of the Communist Manifesto, only with bourgeoise replaced with various permutations of classical liberalism or the post-war consensus, and the proletariat swapped out with "New Christian Right".
Archive of it is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20241129221603/https://americanreformer.org/2024/11/the-liberal-consensus-and-the-new-christian-right/
The Grievance Studies affair reminded me of the Sokal Hoax. While they may have targeted specific journals (and as you point out they managed to get into some journals that were not pay to play), the general language they used were not out of place in more prestigious Humanities publications. It seemed less an experiment and more of a satirical "gotcha", one that academia may have needed regardless.