SIO44: Debunking the 'Conceptual Penis' Stunt with Eli Bosnick

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 44 and I am your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, I want to get into this as quickly as possible. The subject of today's show is the hoax paper perpetrated by James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay's been on the show a number of times, I will be speaking to him in the next episode after this one, there's a little foreshadowing there, but anyway, they made a completely bullshit paper that was supposed to be nonsense, and they had the goal of submitting it to a gender studies journal to prove that the field of gender studies has a major postmodernism problem, so in an article for Skeptic Magazine, which is edited by Michael Shermer, recent guest on the show, they detailed their hoax and the article is called "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct," which is the name of the hoax paper, a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies and would encourage you to read the original Skeptic article that will be linked in the show notes and we will be talking about that extensively.

0:01:34 Thomas: In addition to Michael Shermer, as already discussed, a lot of very high profile skeptics, in quotes, ran with this. Sam Harris on his podcast talked about how this was such a great hoax on gender studies and it shows the field as BS. Richard Dawkins tweeted glowing words about it. This has been picked up by a lot of people as the ultimate takedown of gender studies. Eli is here today with what is an incredibly well done job of showing what really this paper means. So full disclosure, what happened was we recorded once and it was over two hours and starting that recording I was in the position of kind of in the middle and I was going to challenge Eli on a few points I thought here and there. Eli did such a good job of compiling the evidence and making the case that I totally changed my mind and the next day when we saw how much this was still blowing up and how much of a misconception there still was behind this.

0:02:31 Thomas: We decided to re-record. I don't think I've ever done this. We re-recorded the same points except in a much more condensed fashion, in a clearer fashion. So we got it done in about 35, 40 minutes to make it as short and accessible as possible. And I'm not pretending to be in the middle on this. I'm firmly on Eli's side and you'll see that. Having said that, I've spoken with James, I've taken what I've learned here from Eli, and James and I spoke recently, and I put him to the test on it, and you'll have to see how that comes out, that'll be available early on Patreon.com slash SeriousPod, but For everyone else that will be available on Monday's show. So it's pretty cool that we get to go the one-two punch there. We get Eli's side on how this hoax paper doesn't really prove anything about gender studies and we get James Lindsay the following Monday who wrote the paper talking about what he thinks it proves.

0:03:27 Thomas: So really cool exploring it from both angles. I don't hide how I feel on this one. Here you go. Here is mine and Eli's, mainly Eli's, breakdown of what this paper really means.

0:03:45 Thomas: Joining me right now is Eli Bosnick from everything in the world and his blog, which is my favorite thing that he does. How are you doing Eli Bosnick?

0:03:54 Eli: Thomas, I'm good, thanks so much for having me.

0:03:56 Thomas: All let's get into it, Eli.

0:03:57 Eli: So first off, uh, we should talk about what the claim is. So the claim made in the Skeptic Magazine article is that, uh, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian pulled off a Sokal hoax and that proves that gender studies as a field is flawed, right? So I'm gonna break down

0:04:19 Thomas: So what's a so-called hoax for everybody who doesn't know?

0:04:21 Eli: So that's, that's what I'm going to break down first. So there was a guy at NYU named Alan Sokol who basically used a bunch of nonsense language to get published in a relatively reputable journal. And it was a demonstration of abuse of scientific language by postmodernists and it proved it relatively well. But I want to point out that this is what Sokol had to say about it very important thing about Sokal Hoaxes to understand. So this is his quote. Quote, From the mere fact of publication of my parody, I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn't prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science, much less sociology of science is nonsense. Nor does it prove thatthe intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. This might be the case, but it would have to be established on some other grounds.

It proves only that the editors of one were derelict in their intellectual duty, end quote. We should point out, Boghossian and Lindsay in the Skeptic Magazine article claim the exact opposite. They say that it's a two-pronged problem. The first is predatory publishing, but the second is that the field of gender studies is bullshit.

0:04:22 Thomas: Sure. This is really important. This is, listen up. This quote is key.

0:05:39 Eli: That this proves the field of gender studies is bullshit. So for the record, right, let's even say that Sokal has since changed his mind and no longer believes the quote that I just read to you, which were words that he either wrote down or said about his own hoax. Let's say he now agrees that, hey, actually my hoax did prove all post-modernism is bullshit, right? If that's the case, let's talk about some other so-called hoaxes. A right U.S. nuclear physics conference accepted a paper written entirely in autocomplete. A trio of MIT grads created an algorithm that creates fake scientific behaviors, papers. In 2014, IEEE and Springer Publishing found 120 published papers that had been generated by the program.

0:06:25 Eli: This next one's going to be important. A paper entitled, Get Me Off Your Fucking Email List, that consisted of nothing but, Get me off your fucking email list, for six to eight pages, including charts and Graphs, that also said, "Getmeoffyourfuckingemaillist," was accepted for publication by a computer science journal. And then finally, in 2013, a hoax paper saw a scientific paper about fictional lichen published in several hundred journals. Now look, nobody, nobody would say, yeah, predatory publishing is partly to blame, but so are computer science, biology, and nuclear physics. Nobody. Buddy. Okay. But, but let's listen to why Shermer and Boghossian and Lindsay claim in their own article, why they've published it. So with all that in mind, with that very, very basic understanding in mind of what Socal hoaxes do and do not mean, let's see what they have

0:06:38 Thomas: Charts.

0:07:27 Eli: To say about what they think their study means. Thomas, why don't you read the note from the editor, that's the very beginning of the article. So

0:07:34 Thomas: And this editor you will recognize as Michael Shermer, recently on the show. Make of that what you will. Note from the editor. Every once in a while, it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed article today. Its ramifications are unknown, but one hopes it will help reign in extremism in this and related areas.

0:08:06 Eli: At the very outset of this piece, unlike Sokal, and as we all, all just agreed, anyone intellectually, honestly talking about so-called hoaxes about pay-to-publish journals, we learn at the outset, Skeptic Magazine has an entirely different agenda, which is not just to expose pay-to-publish, but to prove that the field of gender studies itself is flawed. There's a couple other quotes I pulled here, Thomas, if you want to read them.

0:08:31 Thomas: Oh yeah, Here, I'll read this one. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral, that implications maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

0:08:44 Eli: Here's another quote.

0:08:45 Thomas: We sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding, almost religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

0:09:08 Eli: Okay, now I know what you're thinking. Hey, hey, Eli, you know, they're talking about gender studies, they're not making the direct claim that part of the blame falls on the entire academic enterprise collectively referred to as gender studies. Thomas, read the next quote.

0:09:22 Thomas: Part of the fault may fall on the open access pay to publish model, but the rest falls on the entire academic enterprise collectively referred to as gender studies.

0:09:31 Eli: That's a quote. That is their quote from the article. And that's not out of context. You can read this article. It doesn't say, now only an asshole would say, that is their claim, all right? So let's look at how they claim to have done it, right? So we can already dismiss it out of hand, but this is how they claimed to have done it, right, right. Get a well-known gender studies journal to accept their bullshit paper, have their nonsense paper, make it through peer review. But again, even if that had happened, nobody thinks computer science as a field is flawed based on "Get Me Off Your Fucking Email List." Nobody thinks nuclear science and biology are held responsible for fake papers. If they had done what they sought to do, they still wouldn't have proved their point. And we should be clear, at this point, their claims that peer review and reputable journal are dishonest at worst and incredibly ignorant at best. This is Skeptic Magazine, and they should all have known better, because I have a BFA and managed to Google my way to this. So let's look at the prestigious journal part, right?

0:10:35 Thomas: Yeah, that's, this is the key part of their claim because we need to, in order, because I would argue that had they published, had they gotten this nonsense paper, which is gibberish, a lot of the Skeptic article establishes how they made it and the fact that it's gibberish. That's all fine. They made it gibberish. I have no problem with that part of it. I'm not going to argue it makes sense. But the key to their argument would be if they got it published, in a journal that's even remotely respectable, that that's something that people look up to, that has a real peer review process. So that's a critical claim to examine, so let's look at that.

0:10:36 Eli: Right. Right.

0:11:08 Eli: Okay, so Norma, the first journal they applied to, does not make it into the top 115 rankings, and it has an impact score, which is sort of like a score of how influential or important a journal is, of zero. It is not good. Let me tell you how good it is.

0:11:22 Thomas: How good is zero Sorry I'm just a lot

0:11:29 Eli: Contrast this to The Computer Science's paper about get me off your fucking email list. That journal, the one that published list get has an impact score of 2.76. A lot better, a lot better than zero. But Norma turns them down. It turns them Down and sends them to what is almost without question, a bulleted auto reply, sending them to cogent social sciences, which is a pay to play journal that has a pay pay-what-you-want model, which is a huge red flag to everyone in academia, and promises that they're very author-friendly on their website, which Is another huge fucking red flag. Now, I want to point out here, I believe Boghossian and Lindsay and Shermer know this. They're intellectuals, they're in academia. They are counting on the people reading this article not to know these things. So I think that's important to score.

0:11:41 Thomas: Better than zero yeah I would also like to say at this point here, I really wonder how they even came up with their initial journal they decided to submit to. And I think that's a critical question that I hope to ask James Lindsay when I talk to them. Already the journal they were rejected from with Norma, which you already established, that's not even in the top 115. And I want to point out that's based on a ranking site. I've got links to everything in the show notes. You can check out the ranking site. It takes a score of journals by how much they're referenced, how much they're cited, all this stuff. And it scores the journals by sort of their influence. And it's this journal that the one they started with is not even in the top 115. How did they get to that? Did Did they try all the top 100 or something and there were no takers?

0:13:11 Thomas: Because that would be critical information to their argument, but we're not given that information. So they just, for all we know, somehow they got the name of this journal that I've never heard of, nobody's ever heard of, that's not in the top 115. They got turned down.

0:13:25 Eli: Let's put that aside. Let's put aside the one that turned them down and how reputable that is and talk about how legit cogent social science is, the journal that did publish them in. Well, they have no impact score, not an impact score of zero, literally no impact store and no information about their publication rate. Not a zero, no score, right? So they, Boghossian, Shermer, and Lindsay claim that it's on, they have two claims that make it legitimate. The first is that it is under Taylor and Fisher's imprimptor, Taylor and Fischer's like a well-known academic public publisher, and that that gives it legitimacy. However, on the Cogent Social Sciences website, right on their FAQ, it says, quote, quote, you Cogent OA is part of the Taylor and Francis group benefiting from resources and experiences of a major publisher, but operates independently from the Taylor & Francis Redledge imprints.

0:13:29 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Oh,

0:14:20 Eli: And so again, this is like saying, I have the blessing of Apple because my show is on iTunes. Right. The second way that they claim that the journal is legitimate is they say that it's listed in the DOAJ. And this is their quote from the paper about how it's legitimized by the DOaj.

0:14:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:37 Thomas: Yeah, it's held out as a high quality open access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, which is intended to be a reliable list of such journals.

0:14:48 Eli: Okay, so there's a blog which I highly recommend people read. It's from the Bleeding Heart Libertarian. bleedingheartlibertarians.com, and it's called Why The Conceptual Penis Hoax Is Just A Big Cock Up. And this is what they say about this. Quote, the DOAJ is a community-run agency with, it seems, no official standing, and whose express criteria for something being a peer-reviewed journal with quality control is that it, quote, must exercise peer review with an editor and an editorial board or editorial review carried out by at least two editors. As far as I know, most vanity presses meet this very minimal standard. And again, if you're not in academia, you should know that is an incredibly minimal standard. Scathing atheist meets that editorial standard as far as I understand.

0:15:32 Thomas: With flying colors, by the way, with flying colors.

0:15:34 Eli: Yes. Yeah, no one does two runs on that thing. Um, and to further prove this, you remember the fake lichen paper from before that got published in hundreds of journals, so is it lichen I thought lichen were werewolves.

0:15:37 Thomas: Yeah, sure. I think it's lichen, right? Either way. L-I-C-H-E-N. Yeah.

0:15:48 Eli: Right.

0:15:48 Thomas: Either way.

0:15:49 Eli: Exactly, so in Science Magazine they published a whole article about it called "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" And here's what Science Magazine has to say about the DOAJ accepting the fake paper about the fake liken mistaken, this is a quote, "for DOAJ publishers that completed the review process, 45% accepted the bogus paper." So the claim that the DOAJ is somehow a legitimizing organization, that means it's real, that means it's a better journal, doesn't seem to hold up on the slightest amount of, uh, inspection.

0:16:19 Thomas: Try to summarize this just so everybody's for sure following along. So they, again, as I said earlier, they submitted to a journal, which I don't even know how they came up with this journal to begin with, not a top ranked journal by any means, not in the top 115. They got rejected. They They got referred to another journal, which is pay to play. And by the way, read the response that they got. It's in the article. It is absolutely a generic message. It is absolutely an automated message. I place a very high probability on that. I would say I'm like 98% sure. It's not specific. It doesn't talk about the paper at all. It's just an auto message. Actually, Eli, in our last recording, you made a great point about this. Talk about what an actual referral would sound like if you got a referral to another journal.

0:17:04 Eli: Right, So I'm the child of two doctorates, an actual referral is, hey Liz, not for us, I've cc'd Brian over at, you know, Coca-Cola Weekly, um, I think he'd love this thing, Brian, Ryan, you remember Liz from that wine and cheese dinner, please give it a look. And again, in academia, that's what a referral is. It is never a bullet-pointed email that advertises the fact that you won't even have to re-enter it into the system. You just click and it automatically transfers. Again, read it and imagine any other industry getting this kind of email and saying, again, they say in the article that they were recommended, that it came highly recommended. So again, just read the recommendation they got and read the flavor that they put around it. They are counting on you not understanding that to buy into the argument that this is a reputable journal that referred Cogent Social Sciences because they liked their paper. Right?

0:17:30 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:17:58 Thomas: Absolutely. I think they worked backwards. I think they finally found some bullshit to accept it. And then they said, how do we establish that this is a reputable journal? And that's when they talk about the DOAJ, which is some directory. And you highlighted that this DOAJ directory seems, seems to be nothing more than just a community run, like, list. And there's, and as you pointed out, just to summarize, make sure we're all keeping up, that fake lichen paper was published in 45 percent of, of journals listed on the DOAJ. So, by no means does the DOAJ have some authority in telling us what's a legitimate open access journal. So, so that's what we've established so far.

0:18:39 Eli: So now let's chat about the term peer review, because look, even if it's a bogus journal, right, even if it is just a middle-of-nowhere, pay-to-play journal, why would it pass peer review? One of the things that they hit over and over and OVER in the article is, it passed peer review! It went through peer review. High-end peer review and the answer is, IT DIDN'T. It didn't pass peer review in the way you and I understand peer review. And the authors actually show us how terrible their peer review process was, but they seem not to realize that they're proving against their own point. So Thomas, why don't you read the quote about their peer interview process from the Skeptic Magazine article itself?

0:19:20 Thomas: Absolutely. And let me say this was something going into this that I intended to press Eli on and say, well, look, this got accepted. It had some sort of process. So clearly that's valid to criticize this process. So knowing that, like, let's look at it. They say. The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement sound and praised it thusly, it captures without an E, so misspelled, the issue of hypermasculinity through a multidimensional and nonlinear process, which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense. The other reviewer marked the thesis along with the entire paper outstanding in every applicable category.

0:20:04 Eli: So part of their peer-review was misspelled, and the other part was five stars, all categories. This is not peer, any peer review that spells the the word captures incorrectly is not peer review as anyone understands it. But why don't we let them continue?

0:20:21 Thomas: Sure. They didn't accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences, which is, again, this is that second journal, reviewer number two offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper better, in quotes. We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, a putting little more nonsense about manspreading, which we alleged to be a cause of climate change, and dick measuring contests.

0:20:44 Eli: Now that seems incredibly damning, right? They got real feedback, until you realize that this one or two notes about how to expand the paper is also a huge red flag among pay-to-play journals.

0:20:48 Thomas: Mm-hmm. This is an incredible point that you've made, and I am, honestly, this is, this is pretty devastating, in my opinion.

0:21:03 Eli: So we remember the get me off your fucking mailing list paper. He received the exact same notes. Here is the quote of the author of Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List from The Guardian when his paper got accepted. And again, this will be in the show notes of the episode, but this is his exact quote. Quote, they told me to add some more recent references and do a bit of reformatting, he said, but otherwise they said its suitability for the journal was excellent. Get Me off Your Fucking Email List got the exact same quote unquote real feedback from his journal as Boghossian and and Lindsay got for theirs. Over

0:21:39 Thomas: Just to make absolutely sure this wasn't a paper titled "Get Me Off Your Fucking Email List," then, then it had some, like, cogent message, this was literally a paper that just said "Get me off your fucking email list" on repeat, like it just had repeating that phrase and with charts and graphs, and this guy got that exact feedback virtually, they told me to add some more recent references into a bit of reformatting.

0:21:53 Eli: And over again. Yes. Yeah. And I want to say everyone involved knows this. Okay. Dr. Boghossian and Dr. Lindsay are absolutely aware of this process in academia, right? There is no way they don't know that this is part of pay-to-play journaling and writing this in the article has to, by definition, be amazingly ignorant or dishonest, right? They either have to know less about academia than I do with my glorious BFA from NYU, or they have to be behaving in a way that's incredibly dishonest and shameful.

0:22:35 Thomas: I agree with that, I mean that, that's really the only two possibilities.

0:22:37 Eli: Because after pointing this out, right, after pointing out how terrible their peer review process is, this is the exact follow-up sentence.

0:22:47 Thomas: Cogent Social Sciences is a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences.

0:22:55 Eli: So that is what they follow their peer peer review process with is saying Cogent Social Sciences offers high quality peer review. We just saw in their own article that it doesn't offer high quality, peer review, and yet that's their follow-up sentence.

0:23:09 Thomas: Yeah, I think this is misleading. I think, uh, and I agree with you. And I think that leads you to assume like, oh, they offer a high quality peer review. This sentence that I just read is copy and pasted from their website. They simply claim they offer high quality peer review. I think it's a bit disingenuous to put it in this way to say, yeah, they offer high quality peer review. There's a pretty big distinction between they claim that on their website in their promotional like material, and they actually do that.

0:23:37 Eli: Especially when you just proved to us in your own article that they do not, in fact, offer high-quality peer review right?

0:23:43 Thomas: Right. Right. If you wanted to say, look at how wrong they are in their claim of offering high quality peer review. Amen to you. Like that's totally great, but that's not what they're doing here.

0:23:52 Eli: Yeah, right. So let's see the conclusions that they reach. Because again, if they had just said, hey, we pulled off a Sokal hoax, isn't this fun? One, we wouldn't be doing a podcast episode. We wouldn't even care. Sokal hoaxes are funny, right? I have no problem with Sokal Hoaxes. The conclusion of their paper is twofold. One, Sokal Hoaxes exist apparently, but the second is that Sokal destroyed postmodernism with his hoax and they have destroyed gender studies. I've pulled a quote here. Thomas, why don't you tell them what they say towards the end of the paper here?

0:24:02 Thomas: True.

0:24:23 Thomas: My pleasure.

0:24:24 Eli: Two,

0:24:24 Thomas: The components of the problem are, it seems, reducible to just two. Academic misfeasance arising from pay to publish, open access financial decision making, so that's one, okay, we got that one, and unconscionable pseudo-academic inbreeding contaminating if not defining the postmodernist theory based social sciences.

0:24:46 Eli: It. There is absolutely no basis consensus for that second point. None, none. Listen to this second quote, Thomas, I pulled another quote where they seem almost self-aware. Listen TO THIS QUOTE.

0:24:58 Thomas: Sure. "The publish or perish academic environment is its own poison that needs a remedy. It gives rise to predatory, profit driven journals with few or no academic standards that take advantage of legitimate scholars pressured into publishing their work at all costs, even if it's marginal or dubious." Subtitles by the Amara.org community To suspect that a majority of the other academics who have published in Cogent Social Sciences and other journals in the Cogent series are genuine scholars who have been cheated by what may be a weak peer review process with a highly polished edifice.

0:25:50 Eli: We absolutely agree, right? That's a, that's an excellent diagnosis of what has happened. Last sentence. Here we go.

0:25:58 Thomas: Our question about the fundamental integrity of fields like gender studies seems much more pressing nonetheless.

0:26:05 Eli: Why? Why? There's literally no evidence in this article for that. There's nothing supporting that. Of course, I mean, if they mean there's nonsense in gender studies and we proved it by by putting nonsense in gender studies, of course there's a nonsense in all fields. There's nonsense in computer science. It is a non-point. It proves nothing. There's non-sense in physics. And were I to go to some pay-to-play physics journal and publish nonsense and submit to Skeptic fucking Magazine an article that says "look at how we expose the extreme ideologies of physics," I would have been laughed out of the goddamn room. I wouldn't even have gotten an auto reply. So I want to talk about, they're going to shuck and jive on this because it's already happening and I just want to call it out.

0:26:55 Eli: So the first thing is they're gonna challenge pay-to-play because they got sent an invoice but nobody paid it yet. Please.

0:27:10 Thomas: I don't know if they're but related, a Paul Boghossian, who looks a lot like him, he tweeted, he said, I haven't read this yet, but if you merely submitted this to a pay-to-play journal, this doesn't really prove anything. And Peter Boghossian, skeptic for the ages, responded, we didn't pay a penny. What on earth is that response? I interrogated further and James jumped on there and I just asked him straight out. I said, hey, I'm confused because we didn't read this quote. The Skeptic Magazine article makes it absolutely clear that they paid $625, which was the minimum fee.

0:27:49 Thomas: There's a sentence that literally says, well, in the footnotes, it says that. Yeah, but in the main body, it just says, all what's the quote? All we needed was the $625, something like that.

0:27:49 Eli: Well they had an independent person who paid it for them.

0:27:59 Eli: They were ready to publish us right, right.

0:28:00 Thomas: Yeah, it makes it absolutely clear. It's unambiguous by that sentence. We go in the footnotes, we find they didn't want the university to pay for it. I'm totally happy with that. They had a financer pay it for them, whatever. But then I, as I asked James about this, I was like, so what happened? Did you, cause you're saying, cause Boghossian saying here you paid zero and the article makes it clear you paid 625. Here's what happened. They merely haven't been billed for it yet. Can you believe that? So that's his great counter argument to, hey, this is a pay to play journal, is, well, we haven't been billed yet. What a non sequitur from someone who I would expect has to know that that's a horrendous reasoning. It doesn't matter that you haven't paid it yet. And it doesn't even matter if you chose to pay zero or a million dollars. The point is we need to evaluate the integrity of this journal.

0:28:28 Eli: Um, So the the secondway that they're going to dodge this is they're gonna move the goalposts, and we've already started to see this happening, from "we disprove gender studies," which is how everybody has been talking about and selling this, including in their own paper, to "we pulled a Sokal hoax," which is bullshit. Better Better Sokal hoaxes have been pulled off. They've been pulled of in quote-unquote hard science journals. It's clear that they believed in the Skeptic Magazine article that they proved gender studies was bullshit as well. It's clearly in the editor's note. It's cleared from the quotes that we've pulled from the article. It's clearer from their own words, which we have said throughout this, that this was a two-pronged point. One, pay-to-pay publishing, and the second was gender studies is bullshit. Shit So when you see them shifting towards, "it was just a socal hoax, we never claimed to disprove gender studies," I'm just telling you right now, that's not what their article said. Do not let them dodge away from this.

0:29:53 Thomas: Then another thing I'm seeing and I cannot believe the names of the people who are going along with this coin. Jerry Coyne is tweeting. By the way, with disdain for anyone like Eli and I who is saying, hey, this journal isn't reputable, it doesn't prove anything. They tweet with disdain. Look at the all these links to other journals who have published papers. Look at these papers in other journals that are that we think are nonsense. Look at what's happening there. So they're saying you and I are unreasonable for saying, hey, you just claimed your hoax paper disproves gender studies. However, this journal is nonsense. They're saying, look at this other stuff that we think proves that point. Because they know their hoax paper doesn't do it. Can you imagine? Now, this is all about hard science, right?

0:30:40 Thomas: This is all about a battle between like real sciences and bogus, you know, nonsense, touchy-feely stuff. Imagine if you submitted a study trying to prove a certain hypothesis, and upon reviewing it, people were like, "hey, you didn't establish this at all, like your methods were terrible, this doesn't actually prove the hypothesis you were seeking to prove," and you said, "dummy, publish this anyway, because look at these other studies that I kind of think prove the point," that no one would accept that. You would all recognize, everybody would recognize, that's a bullshit tactic. You can't just decide, because your thing is bullshit, "but oh, look over there, there's some other stuff that proves it," that that that means you've been right all along. It's incredibly dishonest. Let

0:31:22 Eli: And And Let's address the point directly. Right, no one is saying there's not bullshit in gender studies, no one's saying there's no bullshit in every field of study, right. I think we would all agree that would be incredibly dishonest if I were to reply to Dr. Coin by saying, "yep, and here's the proof that computer science is bullshit, you're trying to tell me that this was pay to play, get the fuck, get me the fuck off your email list, get me the fuck of your email." I mean, it is an incredibly dishoneste shot, and we should just say everyone, everyone involved here knows better. Dr. Coyne's work with evolutionary biology is brilliant. Dr. Boghossian's work for Creating Atheists is brilliant. James is an open, smart, brilliant intellectual who I enjoy chatting with on this show, I've enjoyed chatting with since, I've recommended him as an open interlocutor since. I cannot believe that people of this magnitude are behaving this way.

0:32:22 Eli: Take my opinion out of it. We have presented the facts. We've presented the information, right? If you don't, if you want to ignore E-Boz's opinion because I'm a big fat SJW, fine. Ignore everything I'm about to say and have said in the last 30 seconds. Just look at the facts of this. But if you don'T conclude that this is absolutely shameful and never should have made it into Skeptic Magazine, this is about your bias and not the facts involved, Right? You can't give the same skepticism to Skeptic goddamn magazine that you can to someone reviewing video games and feminist tropes in video games, then you are the problem. You are the the problem. And hey, if you're a skeptic and you listen to this, you should write to Skeptic Magazine because they represent us.

0:33:07 Eli: They represent our community. And you should say, hey, this is bad skepticism. You did a very clearly politically motivated hit piece on a part of academia that you don't like with bad research and bad study. And then you gloated about it on Twitter. And it's very clear you're wrong. It's very clear. You were dishonest and it doesn't belong in the skeptical community. It just doesn't, right? I came on here and apologized for a fucking yik-yak, and I'm the movie reviewer. This is abhorrent behavior. Expected And it from some of the people involved, I will say, James, I never expected this from you. I never expected this form James. I am heartbroken at this behavior from James. Heartbroken at it. Yeah,

0:33:39 Thomas: Agree.

0:33:49 Thomas: Yeah, I want to say a couple things. First off, I, I agree with with all that. I think that, uh, another great irony in this is, it's it's absolutely just incredible, the blindness of this, because their whole point was to prove that a political motivation overrides this entire field of gender studies. And in the process, they showed that their own political motivations override all their logical faculties, that they're willing to accept something that does not in any way prove their hypothesis.

0:34:42 Thomas: And here's what I want to say right now. And we should have said this at the beginning if we didn't. And I don't know if you agree, but I will say this. It may very well be true, it could be true, that the whole field of gender studies is nonsense. I'm not even gonna claim on that. I doubt it. Is It's an entire field, like, I'm sure there's a a spectrum of like some great work done over here, some questionable work over here, I don't know, I'm not an expert. That could very well be true. That would make no difference in the entire logic of our argument, because their hoax paper proved nothing, and they're embracing it, the entire community around them is embracing it as though it took down a field, but it didn't.

0:35:21 Eli: Anybody looking at this from an anyway impartial thing sees the motivation behind this. This is Twitter fodder for trolls to who have "feminism is cancer" in their bios and frogs as their profile pictures, to prove that gender studies is bullshit, because there is a tremendous amount of money to be made on anti-intellectual support. Support for racist young white men on anonymous forums. All right, now, I'm not saying that's the intention. I'm saying that who's buying that, that's who's buy and taking this article and spread it and kecking at it and LOLing at it. That's the intent of this article. It's incredibly, incredibly intellectually dishonest, and everyone involved should be ashamed. Everyone involved should being ashamed.

0:36:07 Thomas: I agree. I think you've laid it out really well. I'm really, I'm really impressed by the work you did with this, Eli. I think you dug up a lot of interesting stuff. That I mean, a lot of this we credit, credit to that Bleeding heart libertarians blog. They did a great job as well. But I'm also just really impressed with the work and insight you put into this Eli. So

0:36:26 Eli: There's there's another one as well, from from katanjoshi.co, "The Engine of Irrationality Inside the Rationalists," that's where I got a lot of, uh, my information from as well. So I want to give, uh,

0:36:37 Thomas: Excellent. Yeah. Credit where it's due. Uh, there, there have been some good takedowns of this, uh, but yeah, excellent work, Eli. Thank thank you for coming on and, you know, defending logic. Cause that's, I mean, really that is, that is my biggest disappointment in all this. I don't care if you hate the field of gender studies.

0:36:37 Eli: Right.

0:37:03 Eli: And I I just want to say, I'm really tired of being told that, like, starting these fights is 50/50. You know, one of the biggest feedback pieces of, because I, I leave Scathing Atheist as a relatively safe space for people who are anti-social justice, right? We never have a diatribe where I come on and go like, "let me tell you about Pete Boghossian." Wow. Right. We, we on exact on Scathing Atheists, we keep things to atheism, right. But one of the biggest pieces of feedback, one ofthe biggest reasons for abuse I get is because of my opinions on social justice. And one ofThe biggest lies that I am constantly bombarded with is that it's somehow 50 50 that, then, oh, it's both sides, and haven't you seen this person say this, and haven't seen this person say that?

This is in Skeptic Magazine, and I'll tell you what, when, when Dan Arel publish an article in Skeptic Magazine about how it's okay to Punch Nazis, I will also take that down. Right? But you don't get to have it both ways. You need to start realizing that the people you look up to, the people you support, are acting like 80s movie villains. They act like they're about to shut down a fucking ski center,

0:37:06 Thomas: Yeah, you saved that for my show.

0:38:19 Eli: And they should be ashamed, and you should be ashamed for not being open enough to let them go.

0:38:25 Thomas: Well, not only that, this isn't an opinion piece featured on Skeptic Magazine with like, oh, here's some authors, some internet personalities and PhDs with an opinion on gender studies. This is note from the editor. The following article completely just shows how many problems there are with gender studies as a whole. That couldn't be more plainly endorsed by Skeptic Magazine.

0:38:25 Eli: Yeah.

0:38:51 Eli: And I want to say, if you are remaining inactive because you believe that you are neutral to this, or you believe that atheism is just about how many gods you believe in, you are on the wrong side of history and you should be ashamed. Neutrality, when this kind of dishonesty in place, contributes to that dishonesty, right? If you're not willing to call out people for their bad behavior, you should, you should.

And if you're a person who just generally agrees and stays in the bubble, you have an opportunity with this article to enforce good ideas. Write an email to Skeptic Magazine, send a tweet to the people involved, let them know, if you're trans or non-binary or one of those, send them an email, let them know how invalidating gender studies through a bogus Skeptic Magazine article is bad science, bad thinking, and hurts you personally, because if we all just stay in our bubbles bitching about each other, just like back and forth, nothing changes. We need to start holding people responsible, because I gotta tell you, I got no dog in this fight, I'm the movie review guy. It's gonna go, are you kidding? I got so much evidence that I'm on the right side of this thing, I could put my hands behind my head and wait for 10 years.

And in 10 years, they're going to be like, "hey, that Eli guy was right all along." All those crying college students, oh, look, they're the ones running the conferences now. And this is what blows my mind. Who do you think is going to be in charge of the movement in 10 years? It's the crying college students that you like to pick on so much. Do you think your YouTube trolls with the frog pictures are going to make the money to support Patreon? Because I gotta tell you, once mommy and daddy stop paying the bills, that money goes bye-bye.

0:40:31 Eli: Grown-ups don't troll. They just don't. And that's what this article was. It was a giant troll. It was a literal troll, why a so mad, bro? And it's published in Skeptic Magazine. And if that doesn't enrage you, there's something wrong with your fucking rage machine. Machine now back to movie reviews david r white's funny looking thanks

0:40:57 Thomas: Eli Bosnick, everyone. I just want to take a moment to say, as I said before, great job on this. I'm in disbelief. Oh, by the way, I should say, I mentioned it. James Lindsay is going to talk to me soon and I want to get his perspective on this. And I definitely, I'm going to put some of these questions to him and we're going to talk about it. And by the way, that's why I fucking love James Lindsay. He has. I mean, I'm disappointed that he put his name on this, but he's going to come on and he's going to defend it. He's going to. So we'll all hear what he has to say. Who knows? Maybe he'll have some counterpoint. I can't imagine what it would be, but we'll see. But but I'm looking forward to that. I just want to say thanks again, Eli, and absolutely check out Eli's blog, because for those who know him merely as the movie review guy or something, Eli's blog is a place where he.

0:41:53 Thomas: He does things that are, there maybe you might think are out of character for him, but they're incredibly thoughtful and insightful and fascinating. I've devoured his blog, uh, I've listened to it in the podcast form probably two to three times. Fully, like I've repeated the thing. I think it's excellent. Like even, I want to say now too, let's even if you're someone listening who hates Eli because you think he's a movie review social justice guy, I bet you would still like this blog. Like it's, it's so good. And it's so, it's so, I guess not your normal, I don't know, the thing that people might be familiar with you for. That I just want to say, I encourage people to check that out. So thanks, Eli. You Uh, know, I'm a big fan and I think you've done some really great work here.

0:42:39 Eli: So much thomas thanks for having me

0:43:03 Thomas: There you have it. There's the case against this gender studies paper proving anything about gender studies I think the tide is maybe starting to turn a little bit if you're on Twitter You may have noticed that Steven Pinker who formerly Endorsed the paper kind Apparently had second thoughts and tweeted out Phil Torres's excellent article debunking the entire thing. So it's possible that the tide is turning a little bit and Eli's prediction is certainly true that the goalposts are being moved. So now it's, oh, well, this just merely showed a problem with pay Pay-to-play publishing, that's all we wanted to do. Well, that's shifting the goalposts. The article certainly isn't written that way and nobody took it that way, really, online. Everybody ran with it with their anti-gender studies bias.

0:43:49 Thomas: So that's what's happening now. Like I said, I have spoken to James Lindsay on this. Find out what happened there on Monday, again, early for patrons, it'll be available patreon.com slash seriespod, and since this is the Thursday show, I do need to thank my new patrons, and they are... Thank you. Michael Gardner, Aaron Isaacs, Daniel Carnan, Michael Sullivan, Colin Salisbury, Kelton Lewis, Donald L. (Skip) Conover, Jesus effing Christ, oh wait, this was already an explicit show, Jesus fucking Christ, JT Paschal, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, Roman Hans Schorscher, Efrat Voller, Carlos Castillo, Beth Deitch, Satan Swampy Asshole, there you go, it's all, anything goes on this one, Ryan Gardner, Matthew Phillips, John Brownell, Stacey Startzel, Janice T, Squaring the Strange podcast, and Peter Carey.

0:44:41 Thomas: Thank you guys very, very kindly for the pledges. I hope you enjoyed the early Eli and you're going to enjoy the early James content, as well as the bonus content I've been putting out lately, extra conversations that I've been putting out here and there. Thank you for making the show happen. I mean it. It would not happen without you. And that applies even more so to my top patrons who enjoy a weekly shoutout, and they are Travis Peterson, Matt Garrett, Brian Garefort, Peter Skelton, Steve Sigman, Adrian Borschoff, Roger Metcalf, Matthew Maxson of the Odd Atheist Friends podcast, Andrew Waddington, Zabby, John Bodley Esquire, Ian Ryan, Matthew Vernon, Ray Loves Jenny, Robin, The Zika Baby That Lived, Marcel, The Netsec Heathen, Abseon, Beth Deitch, Ryan Gardner, Ian Rosano, Jonathan Moyet, Michael Rops, Michael Schaefer of Reason Real Estate, Hunter Ashe, and Kaylee Reiser.

0:45:32 Thomas: Thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are phenomenal. You really do make this happen. With that said, Monday, really crucial episode, getting James' side of things. I'm super excited to have been able to get both views on this and I know I'm not, I'm not I'll see you then.