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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grievance studies affair | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:30:10.101456+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Praise === Mounk of Johns Hopkins University said that while the authors received no favors for preparing the hoax, they demonstrated mastery in postmodern jargon and not only ridiculed the journals in question, but, more importantly, outed double standards of gender studies which happily welcome hoaxes against "morally suspect" fields like economics, but are unable to accept a criticism of their own methods. He also commented on the "sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among leftists and academics" and the fact that many of the reactions were purely ad hominem, while few have actually said that there is an actual problem highlighted by the hoax: "some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit". Rejecting complaints that the trio, lacking a control group, engaged in a "confused attempt to import statistics into a question where it doesn't apply", Mounk stated that the trio had promised "nothing of the sort" in the first place, and had instead successfully accomplished their goal of demonstrating that it was "possible" to "get bullshit published" in the journals in question. Justin E. H. Smith defended hoaxing as an intellectual or scholarly practice, providing a series of examples of hoaxes ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the 2000s. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Heather E. Heying wrote that the hoax helped to expose many pathologies of the modern social sciences, such as "repudiation of science and logic" and "extolling activism over inquiry". Upon Boghossian's employer Portland State University initiating a research misconduct inquiry on the grounds of conducting human subject–based research without approval, and further considering a charge of fabricating data, a number of prominent academics submitted letters of support to him. Richard Dawkins compared Boghossian to a novelist, pointing out that George Orwell's novel Animal Farm could be criticized for its many "falsehoods" regarding the capabilities of animals to speak English. He asked:
Do your humourless colleagues who brought this action want Portland State to become the laughing stock of the academic world? Or at least the world of serious scientific scholarship uncontaminated by pretentious charlatans of exactly the kind Dr Boghossian and his colleagues were satirising? The psychologist Jonathan Haidt stated that the inquiry would be "a profound moral error—an injustice—that will be obvious to all who hear about your decision, and that will have bad effects upon the public perception of PSU and of universities in general", and concluded that Boghossian and his co-authors are whistleblowers, who undertook a "career-risking project to stand up for academic integrity by exposing what is, arguably, an academic subculture that tolerates intellectual fraud." Philosopher Daniel Dennett stated that Boghossian's targets "could learn a few things about academic integrity" from his "fine example", undertaken "in good faith". Alan Sokal and Jordan Peterson also supported Boghossian. The World Socialist Web Site's Eric London said the hoax was "a well-timed blow" against the "identity politics industry" and postmodernism.
=== Criticism === On Slate, Daniel Engber wrote that the hoaxers' project "say[s] nothing whatsoever about the fields [the hoaxers] chose to target". Since "[w]e know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud", Engber asserted that "one could have run this sting on almost any empirical discipline and returned the same result" even if such disciplines' journals were peer-reviewed, echoing Tim Smith-Laing's The Daily Telegraph article. Sarah Richardson, Harvard University professor of women's studies, criticized the hoaxers for not including a control group in their experiment, telling BuzzFeed News: "By their own standards, we can't scientifically conclude anything from it." Evolutionary biologist Carl T. Bergstrom in The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that "the hoaxers appear woefully naïve about how the system actually works", adding that peer review is not designed to remove fraud or even absurd ideas, and that replication will lead to self-correction. In the same article, David Schieber said he was one of the two anonymous reviewers for "Rubbing One Out", and argued that the hoaxers selectively quoted from his review. "They were turning my attempt to help the authors of a rejected paper into an indictment of my field and the journal I reviewed for, even though we rejected the paper." Ten Portland State University professors signed an open letter saying the hoax was not comparable to the Sokal affair, the latter taking place during "a time of debate and exploration in the field of philosophy and science", and that the trio were only exploiting "credulous journalists interested mainly in spectacle" to conduct academic fraud. They compared the trio's style to "Trumpist politics" and wrote that "[d]esperate reasoning, basic spite and a perverse interest in public humiliation seem to have overridden any actual scholarly goals." The authors asked to remain anonymous, alleging Boghossian had targeted academics at other institutions and that they would likely receive "threats of death and assault from online trolls". An n+1 article alleged "blatant manipulation of its own 'data,' the lack of meaningful controls". In UnHerd, Chivers stated that while the so-called "grievance studies" fields "probably" contain more "bullshit [...] than most scientific fields", the hoax drew attention away from scholarly shoddiness across the entirety of academia, including the "whole of science, especially psychology and medicine". He highlighted that several weeks prior to the hoax's public revelation, professor of food behaviour Brian Wansink had resigned from his position at Cornell University following exposure of instances of scientific misconduct on his part. Mikko Lagerspetz analyzed the project's experimental design and its possible results, based on the peer reviews and editorial decisions available through the project's website. He sums it up on the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values: