Major Hoax Proves Regressive Left Rampant In College
A Major Hoax Proves Regressive Ideology Rampant In College. Three academics spent a year writing fake papers and submitting them to major academic journals. In one instance they used an algorithm to generate "rambling nonsense" and the paper was accepted. Some of their papers are much more alarming, advocating for white people to be chained up in the classroom. Their essay talks about "grievance studies" or what most people would call "social justice warriors." They look at how social justice and intersectional feminist dogma is a preferred moral framework in academia. But they stress that the need for good social justice is a driving reason as to why they perpetrated the hoax. Either way this is more evidence of the dark times ahead as science and academia are increasingly under attack from ideological forces.
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Yesterday we learned of a major hoax taken out against academia.
Three scholars, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, for over a year had written 20 fake papers that were submitted to high-ranking peer-reviewed journals.
Seven of them were published.
One of these papers used a computer algorithm to generate what they called rambling nonsense.
It was accepted.
The more terrifying scenario was when they rewrote a section of Mein Kampf, but swapped in feminist buzzwords, and this paper was accepted.
According to the scholars, they believe that ideology is pervasive within academia.
They call this grievance studies.
They felt that as long as they wrote papers that fit a certain moral framework, they would be accepted without question.
Now, most of their papers were not accepted.
But many of them were, and many of them were actually terrifying.
One paper advocated for taking white students, chaining them up in a classroom, and not allowing them to speak.
And this lends itself to the idea that science and academia are in trouble, and we're potentially heading for a new dark age.
Because we are hearing about scientific studies being taken down for being offensive.
We hear about people having their data removed from websites because it's offensive.
It seems now that within academia, ideology is more important than the pursuit of knowledge.
So today, let's take a look at exactly what happened with these scholars, and believe it or not, they're not the only ones who did this.
There is actually another story that came out yesterday about another scholar duping academic journals.
But first, Let's start with the three of these scholars.
In Arrow Magazine, these three individuals wrote what they called Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.
The essay starts by saying, Something has gone wrong in the university, especially in certain fields within the humanities.
Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.
This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous.
For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking.
For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of the problem.
We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with the fields of scholarship loosely known as cultural studies or identity studies.
For example, gender studies.
or critical theory, because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of theory which arose in the late 60s.
As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields grievance studies, in shorthand, because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.
They say we took this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research, because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality, and the scholarship that works with them, is nearly impossible.
Our aim has been to reboot these conversations.
We hope this will give people, especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice, a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, no, I will not go along with that.
You do not speak for me.
The essay is rather long, and I'm not going to go into the specifics of their methodology, but I do want to highlight some of the papers that got passed and their final conclusion as to what's going on.
First, they said 7 papers were accepted, 4 have been published online, 3 more have been accepted without having had time to see publication.
This can take months.
7 papers still in play when we had to call a halt.
2 have been revised and resubmitted, and are awaiting a decision.
One is still under first review at its current journal.
Four are left hanging with no time to submit them to journals after rejection.
Six have been retired as fatally flawed, but here's where it gets interesting.
They received four invitations to peer review other papers as a result of our own exemplary scholarship.
Again, the papers they wrote were rambling nonsense, at least one of them in their words.
The others just had no data and were meant to fit a moral framework, yet they were invited to review other papers because of the fake papers they submitted.
In fact, one paper they wrote, about rape culture in dog parks, gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, a highly ranked journal that leads the field of feminist geography.
The journal honored it as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal's 25th anniversary celebration.
One of the papers they submitted, Fat Bodybuilding, it was accepted and published, their thesis, that it is only oppressive cultural norms which make society regard the building of muscle, rather than fat, admirable, and that bodybuilding and activism on behalf of the fat could be benefited by including fat bodies displayed in non-competitive ways.
Basically what they're saying is, why is bodybuilding only muscle?
Why can't bodybuilding mean fat?
In that regard, fat bodybuilding would be people gaining as much weight as possible because they are building their bodies.
They said the purpose was to see if journals will accept arguments which are ludicrous and positively dangerous to health if they support cultural constructivist arguments around body positivity and fat phobia.
But in my opinion, one of the most terrifying results is Feminist Mein Kampf.
The title was, Our Struggle is My Struggle, Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.
This was accepted.
The thesis that feminism which foregrounds individual choice and responsibility and female agency and strength can be countered by a feminism which unifies in solidarity around the victimhood of the most marginalized women in society, a lot of this is extremely verbose and hard to understand.
Basically, they wanted to see if they could find theory to make anything grievance-related.
In this case, part of Chapter 12, Volume 1 of Mein Kampf, with fashionable buzzwords switched in.
Acceptable to journals if we mixed and matched fashionable arguments.
I'll include a link to the essay in the description below so you can read it.
Suffice it to say, they found that many academic journals accepted nonsense, or even sections of Mein Kampf, so long as certain words were switched around.
They wanted to point out what they called identitarian madness, and they also feel like they'll be smeared as racist, misogynist, etc.
because they did this.
But they do identify themselves as liberals who are for open inquiry.
They end the essay by saying, As for us, we intend to use the knowledge we've gained from
grievance studies to continue to critique them and push for universities to fix this problem
and reaffirm their commitment to rigorous, non-partisan knowledge production. We do this
because we believe in the university, in rigorous scholarship, in the pursuit of scientific
knowledge, and in the importance of social justice.
In fact, I did a podcast with these individuals earlier this year, and we talked about intersectional feminism.
They explained to me that at its core, intersectional feminism is correct.
For those that aren't familiar, what it means is that A woman will experience sexism.
A black woman will experience racism, but also sexism.
And where sexism and racism intersect, they will experience something totally unique only to black women.
That's actually true.
That's a good point.
They talked about the need for social justice and why it's a good thing.
But they point out that ideology should not trump true pursuit of knowledge.
And this is what they are highlighting.
Naturally, they will get lumped in with this extremist faction, because people within these institutions adhere to a moral ideology more so than they're willing to adhere to the truth.
As I mentioned yesterday, they say that facts don't care about your feelings, but feelings don't care about your facts.
In this instance, many people who work in these institutions have feelings.
They're concerned about people's emotional state, and because of that they don't care what is true, they're gonna act on what makes people feel a certain way.
And it gets really interesting, too, when you realize that it's not just about gender studies or grievance studies, but also science.
Motherboard ran this story yesterday.
Scientists published papers based on Rick and Morty to expose predatory academic journals.
And the story from Motherboard is more about how there are journals that just publish anything so long as you pay them.
But the three scholars from the last story actually highlight this in their essay as well, that it's not just about ideology, but the fact that many journals will just churn and burn.
They'll take in papers, they'll publish them, some of them get paid to do it, they charge a fee, and so there you go.
The incentive is not just ideology, but it's also business.
One academic that I know actually commented saying that these three individuals were able to publish seven years worth of tenure-earning studies in one year, and it was all utter nonsense.
No one reviewed any of the data.
And in my opinion, it's not just academia.
The media does the same thing.
Because not too long ago, a report was published by dozens, or at least a dozen, news outlets that had no data set, and it was smearing me and individuals like Dave Rubin.
And thus we can see that in today's world, No one cares about facts.
Not even the media.
Not even academia, which is probably the most alarming.
Because when you see these stories about studies being pulled down from websites because they're offensive, it worries me about what happens in the future.
Will our systems start to break down because science is being restricted by moral ideologues?
So then what is the point of going to a university?
If these journals are going to publish rambling nonsense, in one instance they did, then why should a young person pay for that experience, only to be indoctrinated by someone's ideology that has no basis in reality?
This is entirely damaging to our society.
When people are willing to push ideology above the pursuit of knowledge, we end up hurting everybody.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about all this?
Is this confirming your bias already?
For one, I have never been a big fan of college.
Not just for this reason, but for other reasons.
You know, young people think that they're gonna go to school and get a great job afterwards.
There's no guarantee.
You take out huge loans, you're in debt for decades, and to me it just makes no sense.
And people tend to learn in different ways, so look, if you want to go to college, that's all you, but I'm pretty biased.
How do you feel, though?
I know a lot of people already believed this to be the case, and now there is...
There is confirmation that your belief may be true.
But maybe it's just anecdotal.
Maybe this isn't evidence of anything.
Or I should say, it is evidence, but it's not conclusive.
Simply because they were able to dupe some journals doesn't mean the problem is actually as pervasive as people might claim it to be.
So comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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