Much has been said and written about the successful academic hoax pulled off by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian to get multiple bogus papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the “grievance studies affair”. Bryan Caplan rounds up several comments and then explains why he is impressed by the work of the hoaxers:
My idea has inspired multiple actual tests. But frankly, none of them are in the same league as Sokal 2.0. Three scholars who held a vast academic genre in low regard nevertheless managed to master the genre’s content and style expertly enough to swiftly publish enough articles to earn tenure! Frankly, if that doesn’t impress you, I don’t know what would.
The main question in my mind: Does Sokal 2.0 primarily show that the authors are intellectually strong… or that “grievance studies” is intellectually weak? Both can be partly true, of course. But the harder the authors had to toil to achieve their goal, the less they impugn the honor of their target. So how hard did they toil? The authors’ self-account:
[W]e spent 10 months writing the papers, averaging one new paper roughly every thirteen days… As for our performance, 80% of our papers overall went to full peer review, which keeps with the standard 10-20% of papers that are “desk rejected” without review at major journals across the field. We improved this ratio from 0% at first to 94.4% after a few months of experimenting with much more hoaxish papers.
In other words, they barely broke a sweat. While you could accuse the authors of self-deprecation, this is a rare human failing. When we succeed, most of us like to highlight our own awesomeness, not the ease of our goals. While most people would have been less successful than the hoaxers, what they did was far from superhuman. And that, in turn, amply supports their main theses: the fields they hoaxed have low intellectual standards and don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Does this mean that the subjects of race, gender, sexual orientation, body image, and so on don’t deserve to be taken seriously? Not at all. You shouldn’t blame subjects just because the fields that study them fall short. Identity is too important to be left to people who embrace their own identity. Still, until the researchers who study these subjects calm down, speak clearly, and treat dissent with civility, they will continue to produce little knowledge.
P.S. My main caveat about my positive evaluation of Sokal 2.0: I’ve seen too many hoax movies not to wonder if there’s a hoax within a hoax. Probably not, though.
