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.
Question: what’s an example of satire that doesn’t establish its conclusion in a non-question begging way?
I agree that the presence of funny words, the presence of falsified data, and that fact that the journals didn’t do an identity check on the authors aren’t embarrassing for the journals. It’s embarrassing that they published midwit, borderline incoherent writing—the sort of stuff a clear-minded critical thinker never would’ve written.
Like I said in my post, I agree the authors are dumb/bad actors (with caveat that I’ve never looked into Pluckrose—but the friends you keep, etc.)
I approvingly hyperlinked the Cole paper at the end of my article!
I agree it’s not a well designed study—insofar as the hoaxers are saying it was, they’re being silly. That doesn’t mean it didn’t show anything! The papers they got published were the intellectual equivalent of me shitting on a piece of paper.
People who have Jstor won’t have learned anything from the prank, but people who aren’t aquatinted with Humanities academia did.
Question: if I shat on a piece of paper and it was published in the Philosophical Quarterly, would that show nothing about the quality of philosophy academia, given that I didn’t establish a control?
__Question: what’s an example of satire that doesn’t establish its conclusion in a non-question begging way?__
I don't think that there is one. What I take issue with is the authors misrepresentation of what they achieved and overstatement/misdiagnosis (from some horrendous political perspectives) of the issues in academia.
I acknowledge that Lindsay at least says the sentence "it's satire and has limitations" if pressed, but that doesn't stop him from going on to new podcasts with more sympathetic/untrained guests and not presenting it in this way. And I have never seen Peter accept this.
__Question: if I shat on a piece of paper and it was published in the Philosophical Quarterly, would that show nothing about the quality of philosophy academia, given that I didn’t establish a control?__
I honestly have no idea what this would mean or show, like seriously. Are bits of the poo put on reprints or what?
Going with a more realistic satirification...
I think this is similar to a dispute we do have about analytic philosophy. For example, I could write an article posing as Hichael Muemer where I argue a priori for an actual infinity of people existing and the non-physicality of minds based on intuitions I have and conceivability arguments. To me, that is radically flawed, hilariously bad, insert whatever pejorative the Grievance studies authors used (no offence Muemer, you're a nice guy, or anyone else who believes these things). I think you would agree with me that if I published a paper in analytic philosophy, using the jargon of analytic philosophy and the accepted methods of analytic philosophy, in this way, that it wouldn't provide you with evidence analytic philosophy was flawed. You would probably just go: "wow I didn't know that douchebag naturalist guy was actually a based and qualia pilled anthropic reasoner" (as you are known to talk).
If the goal is to establish that philosophers will publish something so long as it aligns with their values even if it's nonsense I have to do something else.
If I want to criticise the methodology of intuition use and a priori argumentation, I have to do something else too.
With respect to whether or not I think anything in those papers is as bad as shitting on a piece of paper I genuinely dont think so. Maybe you can show me examples, but the things I read I think are defensible (particularly within a contested field Im not familiar with). But maybe Im only saying that because Im so insanely open to new experiences!
I was intrigued by his analysis of 'woke' along those lines, but he ended up being so hyperfixated on them that it broke down. In a way, everything he doesn't like is gnostic/hermetic wizardry just as oppression is for the woke. And everything is now a 'psyop' to him too.
I find that when Lindsay speaks of 'gnosticism' among critical theorists, he is really talking about "claims of special epistemic access". When he talks about 'hermeticism' he seems to specifically refer to a spiritualized justification for mass collectivism. When he says "Hegelian dialectic" he seems to identify it with ANYTHING that involves "Two things become a third".
But special epistemic claims are found in many places, as are collectivist theories that acquire a spiritual component, and if "two things make a third when they interact" is Hegelan so is....well, everything. Hegel seemed to apply this to a very narrow project, but Lindsay sees it everywhere. I suspect he uses gnosticism and hermeticism to appeal to Christian audiences, as he speaks to them often. Lately he's added 'occult' and 'theosophy' to the list of spiritual foundations of woke. Yet there's not much of a connection without massive caveating until your terms are useless, unless you count the hippies. Maybe.
I actually met Lindsay briefly and chatted him up (assuring him that ancient Egypt was more life-affirming than what he thinks gnosticism or hermeticism are). Then I got a reveal: he told me he really thinks the problem is Plato! Yet Plato too has so many interpretations and schools of thought diffused throughout western civilization that you can't really blame him for any one ideology.
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".
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.
You're not selling me on the book being bad. It doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but I think you need to relax your resistance if you're going to engage with it properly. If these are the very worst of the quotes, it doesn't sound so bad:
“This book raises a challenge to Eurocentric scholarship, which is by definition knowledge supported by unsound philosophical commitments.”
-Eurocentric scholarship is unsound by definition because it is by definition eurocentric, and Eurocentrism is unsound because it ignores or marginalizes other useful and potentially critical contributions. Perhaps your thought is that this is wrong because of the use of the phrase "by definition". It would be wrong to say that it is analytic that Eurocentrism is unsound, but it is analytic that Eurocentric scholarship depends on Eurocentrism, and it is a synthetic truth that Eurocentrism is unsound, and I think the combination of these claims justifies the claim that eurocentric scholarship is "definitional" unsound because it is definitionally linked to eurocentrism which is unsound- although it's an awkward phrasing.
“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.”
-This seems broadly right to me, at its core or most perfect form, the dominant ideas of our day treat culture as a kind of choice analogous to a purchase, and made on grounds of absolute and inscrutable taste. Here the author is, I suspect, deliberately echoing Marx:
"It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade."
“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."
-As you say, a lot depends on what aspects of science we're talking about.
Take the selfish gene as an organizing narrative in biology- I'd say it's pretty fair to say that the emerging consensus is that multilevel selection is a better organizing narrative, and that the line of thinking Dawkins represented was simplistic vis a vis both the units and levels of selection. I'd also say that it's not wholly unfair to suggest that this discourse had (subtle) ideological elements. For all I know, Maori philosophy might have offered a critique of that framework. Certainly, I don't think that Dawkins himself made any mystery of the connection he saw between a certain Oxfordian liberalism and gene-level selection.
Finally, vis a vis knowledge. It's a standard usage in much of anthropology, social sciences and yes, parts of philosophy, to refer to the widely accepted ideas in a sub culture as "knowledge" or even "knowledges". People will talk about "critically challenging "knowledges"". About how "knowledges" are constructed etc. I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's a widely accepted use of the word.
Since you say you don’t know much about her, and later imply that she is likely a braindead victim of the anti-woke mind virus, let me just say that Helen Pluckrose is great, a very nuanced and principled thinker, and a kind person. She also defended Dr Louks: https://open.substack.com/pub/helenpluckrose/p/understanding-the-anti-woke-backlash.
One thing that was frustrating about the "grievance studies affair" was that it pretended that the rest of academic publishing is fine. And it is not fine. And I say that as someone who was a reviewer for 3 years on the top-rated journal in its field.
The "public or perish" mantra has led to a lot of mediocre articles and a lot of dodgy journals. We have endemic fraud in certain fields (e.g. pharmaceutical research, and now, thanks to Francesca Gino, fraud studies) and a "replication crisis" in social psychology.
Above all, we have academics more concerned with reaching a readership smaller than most WhatsApp chats rather than building the collective knowledge of humanity.
Almost always people want to use this hoax to claim that the humanities are somehow fake, unlike the hard sciences.
But in the hard sciences there are cases of egregiously fraudulent articles being published by scientific luminaries in top journals. (Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Eliezer Masliah, Ranga Dias, Jan Hendrik Schön are four clear examples.)
These seem much worse than either this or the Sokal hoax in terms of the prestige of the journals, and the consequences of the fraud. There's also no political angle to any of the fraudulent work.
So to me it seems far from clear what lessons can be drawn from this or the earlier Sokal hoax about the humanities vs. hard sciences.
I think the main lesson to be drawn is that peer review in all disciplines assumes good faith on the part of the authors.
I agree that this specifically targets humanities and left coded thought. Your point that this hits all of the sciences is true. Academia has this problem in general.
I would challenge hand waving it though. Peer review *should* be skeptical if not hostile. That is how you get an advancing and trustworthy academy. Peer review assuming the best and loosening standards is a black mark on the system. Academics doing research *should* be rigorous in their work and passing those bars that ensure anyone engaging with published work is engaging with conclusions that have met real scrutiny.
Without that, the scientific method falls apart. Without that, I cannot trust what academia publishes because I don’t know if it was actually challenged by their peers. All I know is that an academic wrote it up and submitted it to a group that published it. I don’t know if it followed the scientific method.
This is having a rippling effect with broader society as people are trusting these institutions less. Most easily seen in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, but also within the aforementioned humanities, psychology, environmental science, economics, and various other social sciences. I know people will trust them like they do any authority, but they are eroding their mandate as an authority by doing this.
I use to write these types of article for fun around 1984-85 in Usenet, for friends. Some made “all time hits” of Usenet and are searchable by Google, fortunately the most notorious “Candy Pink” which was a disquisition on structural racism, dildo preferences and dishwashers doesn’t seem to be indexed or easily findable. I’m surprised people pay attention to them anymore, sadly they are utterly obvious.
I generated and typeset a dozen 250-page test books recently by “Judith Butler” refuting Judith Butler’s own views of gender, in the writing style of variously Alcott, Nabokov, Dickens, Mishima, Allende, (Nancy) Drew, (Edward) Gorey, Foucault.
I proposed in discussion with English Lit and Information Theory ideas, that there’s a mathematical principle that high entropy writing (which can assume high levels of multiple meanings (nonsense)) is very easy to generate using Markov models, whereas low entropy writing (high specific meaning) always emerges fairly intact. Shakespeare survives well, newspapers not so well, porn the least. These abstruse writings have the same sort of information content had hardcore porn - highly repetitive permitted rearrangements not conveying much of anything.
Butler’s writings are so much jibberjabber you can arrange her phrases to mean anything.
I aligned the Foucault version to write in Pepe le Pew style but the AI flipped into pure French on and off through the full text.
These are 100% AI generated, a prompt “Write a book refuting Judith Butler’s concept of gender in her own language” iterated through a matrix of OpenAI prompts, then funneled into Python program written by an AI which drives a commercial typesetting program from Adobe.
I have around 65,000 books generated (and many illustrated) I generated to learn how contemporary AI tools work.
I ignored this business at the time. But as I am procrastinating on an approaching deadline, i thought I would take a look at one of the articles in question entitled "Pretty Good for a Girl': Feminist Physicality and Women's Bodybuilding" It was supposedly written by a 70-year old male bodybuilder, critiquing the culture. I found it a bit dull, but not an obvious hoax (unlike the Sokal paper, for example). As it happens, it was rejected. Taking cases like this, along with tricking referees with faked data, i don't think the hoaxers are worth defending.
Helen Pluckrose also wrote about the response to Dr. Louks, I think very much in the same vein as you did. She’s a liberal in the truest, not-progressive sense, and one of the most reasonable people on the internet.
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.
Commenting as I read:
Question: what’s an example of satire that doesn’t establish its conclusion in a non-question begging way?
I agree that the presence of funny words, the presence of falsified data, and that fact that the journals didn’t do an identity check on the authors aren’t embarrassing for the journals. It’s embarrassing that they published midwit, borderline incoherent writing—the sort of stuff a clear-minded critical thinker never would’ve written.
Like I said in my post, I agree the authors are dumb/bad actors (with caveat that I’ve never looked into Pluckrose—but the friends you keep, etc.)
I approvingly hyperlinked the Cole paper at the end of my article!
I agree it’s not a well designed study—insofar as the hoaxers are saying it was, they’re being silly. That doesn’t mean it didn’t show anything! The papers they got published were the intellectual equivalent of me shitting on a piece of paper.
People who have Jstor won’t have learned anything from the prank, but people who aren’t aquatinted with Humanities academia did.
Question: if I shat on a piece of paper and it was published in the Philosophical Quarterly, would that show nothing about the quality of philosophy academia, given that I didn’t establish a control?
__Question: what’s an example of satire that doesn’t establish its conclusion in a non-question begging way?__
I don't think that there is one. What I take issue with is the authors misrepresentation of what they achieved and overstatement/misdiagnosis (from some horrendous political perspectives) of the issues in academia.
I acknowledge that Lindsay at least says the sentence "it's satire and has limitations" if pressed, but that doesn't stop him from going on to new podcasts with more sympathetic/untrained guests and not presenting it in this way. And I have never seen Peter accept this.
__Question: if I shat on a piece of paper and it was published in the Philosophical Quarterly, would that show nothing about the quality of philosophy academia, given that I didn’t establish a control?__
I honestly have no idea what this would mean or show, like seriously. Are bits of the poo put on reprints or what?
Going with a more realistic satirification...
I think this is similar to a dispute we do have about analytic philosophy. For example, I could write an article posing as Hichael Muemer where I argue a priori for an actual infinity of people existing and the non-physicality of minds based on intuitions I have and conceivability arguments. To me, that is radically flawed, hilariously bad, insert whatever pejorative the Grievance studies authors used (no offence Muemer, you're a nice guy, or anyone else who believes these things). I think you would agree with me that if I published a paper in analytic philosophy, using the jargon of analytic philosophy and the accepted methods of analytic philosophy, in this way, that it wouldn't provide you with evidence analytic philosophy was flawed. You would probably just go: "wow I didn't know that douchebag naturalist guy was actually a based and qualia pilled anthropic reasoner" (as you are known to talk).
If the goal is to establish that philosophers will publish something so long as it aligns with their values even if it's nonsense I have to do something else.
If I want to criticise the methodology of intuition use and a priori argumentation, I have to do something else too.
With respect to whether or not I think anything in those papers is as bad as shitting on a piece of paper I genuinely dont think so. Maybe you can show me examples, but the things I read I think are defensible (particularly within a contested field Im not familiar with). But maybe Im only saying that because Im so insanely open to new experiences!
Based on your substack name, do you think Lindsay missed the plot by calling critical theory a variant of gnosticism?
Yes, I think Lindsays beliefs about “gnosticism”, “hegelianism” and “marxism” are legitimately insane (and wildly anachronistic)
I was intrigued by his analysis of 'woke' along those lines, but he ended up being so hyperfixated on them that it broke down. In a way, everything he doesn't like is gnostic/hermetic wizardry just as oppression is for the woke. And everything is now a 'psyop' to him too.
I find that when Lindsay speaks of 'gnosticism' among critical theorists, he is really talking about "claims of special epistemic access". When he talks about 'hermeticism' he seems to specifically refer to a spiritualized justification for mass collectivism. When he says "Hegelian dialectic" he seems to identify it with ANYTHING that involves "Two things become a third".
But special epistemic claims are found in many places, as are collectivist theories that acquire a spiritual component, and if "two things make a third when they interact" is Hegelan so is....well, everything. Hegel seemed to apply this to a very narrow project, but Lindsay sees it everywhere. I suspect he uses gnosticism and hermeticism to appeal to Christian audiences, as he speaks to them often. Lately he's added 'occult' and 'theosophy' to the list of spiritual foundations of woke. Yet there's not much of a connection without massive caveating until your terms are useless, unless you count the hippies. Maybe.
I actually met Lindsay briefly and chatted him up (assuring him that ancient Egypt was more life-affirming than what he thinks gnosticism or hermeticism are). Then I got a reveal: he told me he really thinks the problem is Plato! Yet Plato too has so many interpretations and schools of thought diffused throughout western civilization that you can't really blame him for any one ideology.
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.
You're not selling me on the book being bad. It doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but I think you need to relax your resistance if you're going to engage with it properly. If these are the very worst of the quotes, it doesn't sound so bad:
“This book raises a challenge to Eurocentric scholarship, which is by definition knowledge supported by unsound philosophical commitments.”
-Eurocentric scholarship is unsound by definition because it is by definition eurocentric, and Eurocentrism is unsound because it ignores or marginalizes other useful and potentially critical contributions. Perhaps your thought is that this is wrong because of the use of the phrase "by definition". It would be wrong to say that it is analytic that Eurocentrism is unsound, but it is analytic that Eurocentric scholarship depends on Eurocentrism, and it is a synthetic truth that Eurocentrism is unsound, and I think the combination of these claims justifies the claim that eurocentric scholarship is "definitional" unsound because it is definitionally linked to eurocentrism which is unsound- although it's an awkward phrasing.
“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.”
-This seems broadly right to me, at its core or most perfect form, the dominant ideas of our day treat culture as a kind of choice analogous to a purchase, and made on grounds of absolute and inscrutable taste. Here the author is, I suspect, deliberately echoing Marx:
"It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade."
“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."
-As you say, a lot depends on what aspects of science we're talking about.
Take the selfish gene as an organizing narrative in biology- I'd say it's pretty fair to say that the emerging consensus is that multilevel selection is a better organizing narrative, and that the line of thinking Dawkins represented was simplistic vis a vis both the units and levels of selection. I'd also say that it's not wholly unfair to suggest that this discourse had (subtle) ideological elements. For all I know, Maori philosophy might have offered a critique of that framework. Certainly, I don't think that Dawkins himself made any mystery of the connection he saw between a certain Oxfordian liberalism and gene-level selection.
Finally, vis a vis knowledge. It's a standard usage in much of anthropology, social sciences and yes, parts of philosophy, to refer to the widely accepted ideas in a sub culture as "knowledge" or even "knowledges". People will talk about "critically challenging "knowledges"". About how "knowledges" are constructed etc. I don't like it anymore than you do, but it's a widely accepted use of the word.
Since you say you don’t know much about her, and later imply that she is likely a braindead victim of the anti-woke mind virus, let me just say that Helen Pluckrose is great, a very nuanced and principled thinker, and a kind person. She also defended Dr Louks: https://open.substack.com/pub/helenpluckrose/p/understanding-the-anti-woke-backlash.
One thing that was frustrating about the "grievance studies affair" was that it pretended that the rest of academic publishing is fine. And it is not fine. And I say that as someone who was a reviewer for 3 years on the top-rated journal in its field.
The "public or perish" mantra has led to a lot of mediocre articles and a lot of dodgy journals. We have endemic fraud in certain fields (e.g. pharmaceutical research, and now, thanks to Francesca Gino, fraud studies) and a "replication crisis" in social psychology.
Above all, we have academics more concerned with reaching a readership smaller than most WhatsApp chats rather than building the collective knowledge of humanity.
“But like… if I shat on 1,000 sheets of paper and sent them to reputable journals, I wouldn’t get any acceptances.” Have you heard of Hypatia?
Lol
Almost always people want to use this hoax to claim that the humanities are somehow fake, unlike the hard sciences.
But in the hard sciences there are cases of egregiously fraudulent articles being published by scientific luminaries in top journals. (Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Eliezer Masliah, Ranga Dias, Jan Hendrik Schön are four clear examples.)
These seem much worse than either this or the Sokal hoax in terms of the prestige of the journals, and the consequences of the fraud. There's also no political angle to any of the fraudulent work.
So to me it seems far from clear what lessons can be drawn from this or the earlier Sokal hoax about the humanities vs. hard sciences.
I think the main lesson to be drawn is that peer review in all disciplines assumes good faith on the part of the authors.
I agree that this specifically targets humanities and left coded thought. Your point that this hits all of the sciences is true. Academia has this problem in general.
I would challenge hand waving it though. Peer review *should* be skeptical if not hostile. That is how you get an advancing and trustworthy academy. Peer review assuming the best and loosening standards is a black mark on the system. Academics doing research *should* be rigorous in their work and passing those bars that ensure anyone engaging with published work is engaging with conclusions that have met real scrutiny.
Without that, the scientific method falls apart. Without that, I cannot trust what academia publishes because I don’t know if it was actually challenged by their peers. All I know is that an academic wrote it up and submitted it to a group that published it. I don’t know if it followed the scientific method.
This is having a rippling effect with broader society as people are trusting these institutions less. Most easily seen in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, but also within the aforementioned humanities, psychology, environmental science, economics, and various other social sciences. I know people will trust them like they do any authority, but they are eroding their mandate as an authority by doing this.
I use to write these types of article for fun around 1984-85 in Usenet, for friends. Some made “all time hits” of Usenet and are searchable by Google, fortunately the most notorious “Candy Pink” which was a disquisition on structural racism, dildo preferences and dishwashers doesn’t seem to be indexed or easily findable. I’m surprised people pay attention to them anymore, sadly they are utterly obvious.
I generated and typeset a dozen 250-page test books recently by “Judith Butler” refuting Judith Butler’s own views of gender, in the writing style of variously Alcott, Nabokov, Dickens, Mishima, Allende, (Nancy) Drew, (Edward) Gorey, Foucault.
I proposed in discussion with English Lit and Information Theory ideas, that there’s a mathematical principle that high entropy writing (which can assume high levels of multiple meanings (nonsense)) is very easy to generate using Markov models, whereas low entropy writing (high specific meaning) always emerges fairly intact. Shakespeare survives well, newspapers not so well, porn the least. These abstruse writings have the same sort of information content had hardcore porn - highly repetitive permitted rearrangements not conveying much of anything.
Butler’s writings are so much jibberjabber you can arrange her phrases to mean anything.
Feel free to read and chuckle:
Butler
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5vwtrgnc06kipela6muug/Butler_112233full.pdf?rlkey=39zh8v4p2dsluni0xznlt1k8j&dl=0
(Nancy) Drew
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l64vkkcs9q1z3hzt5tyi1/ButlerDrew_112233full.pdf?rlkey=d1k8968emvlmvkhw9i6s1hm61&st=y12zkn83&dl=0
Allende
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1usbiqiltdgpg2etha17x/ButlerAllende_112233full.pdf?rlkey=yuv8pjacvsvx8fq7sejlq7qje&dl=0
Foucault
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/11z67n1vrpj2rdb1adhj5/ButlerFoucault_112233full.pdf?rlkey=ehmkzggyowztnsazgwsw92qbp&dl=0
I aligned the Foucault version to write in Pepe le Pew style but the AI flipped into pure French on and off through the full text.
These are 100% AI generated, a prompt “Write a book refuting Judith Butler’s concept of gender in her own language” iterated through a matrix of OpenAI prompts, then funneled into Python program written by an AI which drives a commercial typesetting program from Adobe.
I have around 65,000 books generated (and many illustrated) I generated to learn how contemporary AI tools work.
I ignored this business at the time. But as I am procrastinating on an approaching deadline, i thought I would take a look at one of the articles in question entitled "Pretty Good for a Girl': Feminist Physicality and Women's Bodybuilding" It was supposedly written by a 70-year old male bodybuilder, critiquing the culture. I found it a bit dull, but not an obvious hoax (unlike the Sokal paper, for example). As it happens, it was rejected. Taking cases like this, along with tricking referees with faked data, i don't think the hoaxers are worth defending.
Helen Pluckrose also wrote about the response to Dr. Louks, I think very much in the same vein as you did. She’s a liberal in the truest, not-progressive sense, and one of the most reasonable people on the internet.
Or to put it in a more long-winded fashion: https://tempo.substack.com/p/the-dumpster-fire-that-is-academic
https://theconversation.com/scientific-fraud-is-rising-and-automated-systems-wont-stop-it-we-need-research-detectives-206235