Panel discussion: the grievance studies hoaxers w JBP

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Dr. Peter Boghossian, Dr. James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose talking to Jordan Peterson about the current backlash on their peer review audit/experiment, the reasons why they got started (Lindsay brings up Durkheimian alarm bells that both he and Boghossian were seeing), and the current state of Boghossian's censure by the Oregon IRB.

A lot of you probably have not heard about this, my guess is it'll be having ripple effects for a while and especially so if the institutional review board nails him to a wall for what was, in one case out of 20, essentially cooked data in the course of a project that ended up in them - of their own accord - admitting to all of it, putting the papers on a flashdrive, and making it public exactly what they were doing and what the responses were to their papers.

Also noted - calling it a 'panel discussion' was incorrect, I was going to edit that out but it's too late. Its just a 4-way Skype or something of the equivalent.

The first acceptance, ""Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at the Dog Park," was achieved five months after the project started. During the initial peer review for its second and ultimately successful attempt at publication in Gender, Place, and Culture, what the hoaxers called the "Dog Park" paper was praised as "incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized" by the first reviewer.[7] Similar respectful feedback was given for other accepted papers.[5]"

From Wikipedia, regarding the hoax project.


Well... If it sounds too good to be true ^-^
...
I'm wondering what this hoaxing business is meant to show, though - it's technically elaborately presented fraudulent research, yet with the intent of discrediting the field instead of gaining unearned recognition.
It's not like no one has ever published sincerely fraudulent research in science journals and gotten away with it for a while.
Except for the intent, I don't see much difference.

That gender studies however is a form of poetry - as most humanities are - is a different matter
Personally, I think this kind of humanities-poetry is important. Otherwise we could only talk neuroendocrinology, or maybe only physics, and we haven't gotten far at bridging the gap between quantum physics and human social behaviour yet.
We need both. And we need to get ourselves educated enough so we can actually judge whether the ideas conveyed in some form of gender poetry is worth considering.
Just like in philosophy.

Could you elaborate on the gender poetry thing a bit?

I think the gulf in expectation here would be that a productive gender poetry wouldn't push people toward insatiable activism that ends with life not being suffering for women or minorities, which even if there were no men and no white people left that aim wouldn't be achieved because suffering permeates life (at least until we find some way of genetically raising the general pleasure window for all people - that's a science thing, not an activism thing).

Also what the heck is peer-reviewed poetry? That's like Kodwo Eshun, Underground Resistance, or Steve Goodman sending their techno-mystic abstract poems in for peer review. Also how do you falsify data in peer-reviewed poetry?

In Tim Pool's bit on this Bret Weinstein chimed in from Twitter on Jesse Singal's Intelligencer article on the topic (8:15):

well .... data is always just that - what becomes "reality" is it's interpretation. While the sciences try to find a definite, unambiguous interpretation of data, based on its paradigms, the social sciences have become way more concerned with its paradigms than the STEM fields have.
But the truth is, of course, that all of them operate under paradigms.
Yet while paradigms in the STEM fields at worst hinder progress (until the paradigms are overturned), paradigms in the social sciences actually have a palpable impact on social realities.

wait, that's wrong. Paradigms in STEM fields have impact on lives, too, but they are treated as 'truths' and 'natural laws', whereas paradigms in the social fields have, since ww2, become way more contested. - after all, racism for example has been a paradigm in both STEM and social sciences. Actually, I'm not sure if there's much of a difference, only that the social paradigms often rely on scientific paradigms for justification. The racism example however shows that scientific paradigms aren't eternal truths, either.

So it makes sense to look at the paradigms more intensely. Given the unreliaibility of the data in the social sciences, the interpretations and paradigms are very, very unreliable.
Intersectionality as a framework is bascially approaching individual perception as a paradigm - something visual art has begun to do at the end of the 19th century, say, impressionism and later expressionism.
It's not that you can't learn anything about the world from these individualist expressions - and in this way, these ideas are shaping the themselves the paradigms of their fields, and beyond.
One could, for example, learn a lot about eye-disease from Monet, or paranoia from kafka, and find ways to accommodate and alleviate issues arising from how we, say, build things etc.
An architect could get inspired by it.
Or a person with a singular view of the world could become a successful slaughterhouse designer - the fundamental research Temple Grandin would have had to do to empirically justify her view of animal perception would still be ongoing, but she basically trusted her intuition on this - and it paid off for the slaughterhouse owners to trust her.

In this way: somethin like performativity of gender roles is not fundamentally provable. The idea however can inspire further ideas about how to see gender - and eventually create policies, that then can be tested and verified or dismissed.
The progression of these ideas is however much closer related to the way philosophy and art progresses than to the progress of STEM sciences. which, given the complexity of the task, is okay, I think.
And yes, those journals might publish garbage articles - but the impact of these articles is what counts much more than their shaky foundations.
And you are free to criticize them the ideas at any time - that's where the field, in the same way as the arts, have a real problem right now. By adopting the individual's viewpoint as a paradigm, all reasonable critique falls flat.
Simply put: one shouldn't adopt ideas from these fields and make them into policies too quickly, before there is consensus on them, because they aren't scientific in the Popperian sense.
But then again: women's suffrage was forced upon most western societies, and it turned out fine - the one that waited for democratic consensus on the issue, switzerland, only introduced women's suffrage in the 80s.

there is however no reason to say, insist on a two-gender solution. It's just a historical contingency. We could try and see if we can work with a tri-gender or multi-gender solution. Nothing is stopping us. The question is whether we can agree to give it a go. Someone has to put forward the idea, and argue for it, though, and that's what these fields do. Society than has to decide what it will keep and what it will dismiss.
If I remember correctly, the vast majority of doctoral theses in the humanities aren't ever cited - the ideas put forward in those might have been good enough to publish, but no one cared... so be it...

the peer review process then becomes one of judging whether something is interesting enough for anyone - like a gallery curator decides what to exhibit.

I'll try to condense that, let me know if I'm doing so accurately: STEM science is something where you can do science in a much more linear way on a given issue due to the relative non-complexity of fundamental particles and the like or the repeatability and standardized behavior of chemical reactions - thus you can sort of do a one, peer-replicate, done, and a new brick has been laid in our foundational understanding of the sciences where, OTOH, the social sciences have to be a much more recursive process and peer reviewed articles in the social sciences can't be taken as solid steps in human knowledge but rather ideas that are in the oven and still baking until a solid enough framework of all of the interactions those rules have and how they come to bear of the subject is adequately understood - and only then after many, perhaps dozens, of peer-reviewed hypotheses slowly becoming theories, do you have a brick to add to the edifice of knowledge.

That may be quite true with the fuzziness of the humanities but the problem that Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose still remains - it needs to be understood as a separate system, it needs to be understood as a very different process, and it can't be conflated with the relative finality of the STEM peer-review process and actually needs real safeguards against being conflated with or cross-pollinating procedures in STEM. It's actually a big enough problem in that case that it should probably be called something other than peer review.

The other part - it needs ground rules. Without that we get right back to Sam Harris's criticism of Joseph Campbell and his divine revelation in a Mahi Mahi recipe (let me know if I need to link a transcript of that) in that it's just a launch point for a collage of Barnum statements and it often borders on astrology for usefulness. As of right now this sort of thing is melting down colleges, through the humanities, because these departments are erasing conceptual containers with acidic solipsism and that solipsism is spreading right out into the public (Jonathan Haidt talks about tis problem explicitly in at least one of his lectures). I like that Helen Pluckrose made a distinction, ie. that this isn't postmodernism but rather it's 'applied' postmodernism, or what one might call pop-postmodernism in the way that one could call Matt Dillahunty and some of the more groan-worthy antitheists out there pop-atheism, ie. the low-brow, dumbed-down, and dysfunctional version of the actual idea.

There are also places, like psychology, where this stuff can really harm vulnerable people. Take the case of our media and culture making vogue of gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria's not a laughing matter, the people who have it need to be helped and assisted in transitioning if it's to their best benefit, but it's horrifying that we'd get a place where popular trend would dictate that if a grade schooler feels lonely, isn't fitting in, might even be best dx'd as having Asperger's, that they'd get swept up in the whirlwind and make irreparable changed to their bodies. People are welcome to disagree but this kind of adult irresponsibility is little better or worse than hillbillies blowing lines of coke or watching porn in front of their children. It's adults failing to reason or make sense and causing all kinds of suffering in the world.

This is where I have to also interject - authority needs to be challenged but it needs to be challenged on very precise and accurate grounds and in most cases where there's a 'there' there this is a perfectly feasible approach. When thinking for example of what Asian Americans are doing regarding their being discriminated against in top educational institutions based on their proclivity to achieve more than most other races including Caucasians their answer was gathering the evidence and filing a class action law suite. If BLM would have spent their time focused on getting attorneys and gathering a case against Ferguson they would have likely fixed the problem much more effectively, it would have gotten positive press across the network news spectrum, and made a much more resonant stand against corrupt police departments. Also if any other activist group - whether feminist, LGBT, or any other race or creed, wants to take problems in our culture seriously the best way to do that here in the US is to understand which part of their constitutional rights are being violated, gather the evidence, and take their evidence to court. Spurious claims don't make someone an activist, they make that person an enemy of their own cause and an enemy of the social fabric that keeps them safe from civil breakdown. If women feel unsafe walking down the street or going places alone for example, crushing the 'patriarchy' rather than taming, reforming, or informing it based on unarguable facts, if they confuse patriarchy for the system and crush the system that gives the worst men alive the best grab at power and things get exponentially worse for their safety.

Maybe to distill that last paragraph a bit better either - civil chaos and breakdown of law don't make society better for anyone, or at least that only makes things better for con artists, the avaricious, and people who thrive in chaos - like Trump and like most of the malignant populists and racists who most people on the left want to defeat for good.

Yes. All of that. The way you summed up what I said, and the points about this being a real-world problem and causing serious harm to vulnerable people. Also the bit about Asian overachievers and BLM.

But here, I'd like to point out something: asian overachievers are taking this course of action probably because a) they're smart, and b) their parents are smart.
BLM is the (likely justified) angry uprising of people who are completely disillusioned and who feel like the law is biased against them.

I mean, to be fair, not getting into college is a bit different than being intensely policed and getting shot at by the people who embody the law. I understand that they don't want to trust in the law.

But that doesn't mean you're not right.

There's one thing I'd like to add to the STEM/humanities distinction: the reason I call the humanities a kind of poetry is that they don't necessarily form bricks to build an edifice at all.
Science progresses, and save a massive destructive force, the bricks of knowledge stay there - they might need to be revised and transferred to new fundaments now and then, whenever an Einstein smashes newtonian physics, but still

The social sciences are different. You can pick up Aristotle's ideas on the ideal state and they still are interesting. Not so his thoughts on physics. They're just wrong.
Look at greek or even ancient egyptian sculpture - they're still impressive.
This is why I put the humanities and the arts together - there's no direction.
One could argue that the humanities have developed to value ideas of individual freedom - but that's not true, the middle ages were a step backward and the future might look different again - China is leading the way...
John Gray also pointed to this, when he says there's ni progress for humanity.

I don't think bricks are the right metaphor for the humanities. Nodes in a network is maybe a better image.
And if you ascribe agency to these nodes, and study the network, you actually happen to employ actor-network-theory, one of the frameworks often employed in the social sciences...


Oooh I just remembered a great quote: philosophies aren't disproven -they get abandoned.
I know Graham Harman said it, but I think he was quoting someone else...

I'm really commenting more that there are effective ways of doing things and there are ineffective ways where you directly harm your cause or you have a Pyrrhic victory that's about as bad. If I have a fly on my glass table I don't want to swat it with a sledgehammer, it's better to use a rolled up newspaper or a fly swatter.


I think psychology is probably the social science with the most adjacency to science, ie. that it has a basis in biology, neurology, and psychiatry and when you get down to the motifs in mental illness, whether by way of neurology or personal maladaptation, there seem to be relatively canonical categories that things can fall into.

With the rest of it it seems like we're arguing 'Yes, there are all of the facts but they're not taking every individuals feeling into account'. Also it's true that there will always be loads of complexity that we're still trying to find better ways to account for. The question today, in 2019, seems to be do we want to smash society with a hammer, kick off pogroms across the west, have another dark age, and fight our way out of it to get back to what dysfunction we have today just to relieve ourselves of pent up feelings? That's also assuming that the slightest veer off course won't cause our relative extinction considering the 7.5 billion people and how tightly drawn resources have already become, add pollution and accelerated climate change.

I've been thinking a lot about how Hollywood took the hero myth, the one jordan peterson goes on about - and turned it into a strange individualist tale.
So ... when the hero goes out to learn to become dangerous and slays the dragon and rescues his father, who is
supposed to be a symbol for tradition and values .... I think hollywood replaced all the figures with the individual itself.

The hero doesn't rescue his traditinal values, in a hollywood myth, but his own "authentic self" - he saves himself from corruption and eventually finds a way of how he can be himself.
(basically any story that has the message of "be true to yourself and people will love you for it, or else screw them")

Maybe it needs a revolution in storytelling. I hope Captain Picard's return to the screen can pick up where TNG left off, teaching utilitarianism to young nerds.
After all, we are not individuals - in the sense that, we couldn't be who we want to be, without a society that provides us with food and laptops, anyway, so the whole idea of being an independent self is moot.
It's time to learn to compromise and live with a bit of hurt feelings. ....

btw.: I teach students in germany, and when I criticize their work, they don't get personally upset, but they don't get that I'm criticizing *their work* either, and that they should make changes to improve it - they overwhelmingly scrap the thing entirely and try again, from scratch. This way, they never really get better, and I find it frustrating.
It seems, what doesn't communicate to them at all is that there is such a thing as "better" - they seem to try to make something I like (at least, occasionally they say things like that) - without understanding qualitative aspects at all. It seems all subjective to them. I don't really know how to tackle this.

That's one of the challenges of being a teacher. If you see too much of that you may have to dial it back or figure out a way to phrase the ideas in a way that's less maintenance for them. Most I'd figure our there to get their degree more than to learn and bribery/flattery is a common way to grease wheels.

I think on narratives we may need to try and find which cultures have run a good hybrid between the Daoist or Buddhist takes of the 'this too will pass' sort and the epic story building we're hooked on in the west. The east is correct that life is dominated mostly by vicissitudes, very few long-term tragedies or triumphs, nothing really endures, but at the same time we have to stay flexibly goal-oriented enough to keep our eyes on the big issues such as climate, waste, human population tole on environment, etc.. Too much self-identification with x makes us too brittle to deal with the demands, too little leaves us too disorganized.

On something of a side-tangent, I know you spend a lot of time with film and philosophy, have you ever tried a similar dive into music? I've been a long time fan of Goldie/Rufigee Kru and the Metalheadz label. For some reason I had just about everything else at least 15 or 20 years ago but I never bought Saturnz Return. I ended up listening to Mother/Truth a couple days ago and he dug pretty deep on that, Mother's something like 70 minutes on its own and I get the impression Truth is supposed to be an epilogue that reifies some of the ideas in Mother.