SIO176: Eli Bosnick on the Trial of Peter Boghossian

Transcript

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

0:00:27 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 176, I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I am so happy to bring you Eli Bosnick back on the show for the first time in quite a while, I am sure you're just as excited as I am, and we should get right over to it, I'll just say that if you want some more background on what we're going to talk about, this is the conceptual penis hoax paper 2.0 controversy that Eli did an excellent job of breaking down on this show. That was episode 45 of the show. So if you if you feel like if you got the time or maybe you weren't around then or something listening to the show, if you want to check out episode 45 first, that'll give you a lot more context. If not, we do try to summarize for you kind of what the history of this for for a little bit of the interview here.

0:01:19 Thomas: But with that said, let's get on over to it. No further delay. Here is Eli Bosnick.

0:01:33 Thomas: Eli Bosnick, welcome back, oh, my God, it's been a decade,

0:01:38 Eli: Thomas, I've missed you. I'm back from the mountains where I've been meditating, hiding, high, high up in the Alps, and I'm here to talk about our favorite subject, right-wing people in our community owning themselves as hard as they physically can.

0:01:49 Thomas: Yeah, now, I'm, are you Skyping in, the Mythicist guys, or am I, is that, I can't, both

0:02:01 Eli: I think we decide we're going to add them later. Guys, special treat, we didn't announce this, Hitler will be joining us to give his opinions on the Jews a little bit later. Uh, we will be giving him fair air time, it's important, um, we

0:02:10 Thomas: Sides, Yeah. But in seriousness, it has been a minute, I don't know why, but I'm so glad you're back, and, uh, this is great because one of the, seriously, one of the most referenced episodes of mine, I mean, there's, there is a couple of infamous ones, but, uh one of them, yeah, we don't need to, we don't even get into that, but uh, one of the most referenced ones is when you did an excellent breakdown of the conceptual penis hoax, hoax. And I want to point out that that was back at a time. That was a very different time. Slight, it was a slightly very different.

Um, like I, you know, cause that penis hoax thing happened and I read about it and I was like, oh, well, you know, if these journals are bad, then these journals about, I was kind of not really, I honestly pretty agnostic about it. Like I didn't come into it with, you, I kind of thought like, oh, maybe there's some bad journals. And I guess if they're pointing that out, then that's good.

But then you broke it down in a way that was like, oh no, they completely failed to do the thing they thought they were doing. You made a really compelling case for that, like they essentially, I'm just kind of recapping to bring it because this is like the trilogy, the great trilogy of episodes here, I think.

0:02:32 Eli: Don't need to talk about all the episodes that people reference right.

0:03:26 Eli: Years

0:03:26 Thomas: This will hopefully, hopefully this will be like the thrilling conclusion, I don't know, but uh, you've done a couple, you debated James Lindsey on this show, that's also a pretty pretty famous episode, a storied history on this show.

0:03:36 Eli: Years ago, hopeful little Eli stars in his eyes was just going to explain safe spaces and we were all going to agree and move on. Maybe have a, I

0:03:46 Thomas: And we were all going to agree that the crows from Dumbo were racist or whatever it was, according to James Lindsay. Uh, so, and then we did the penis hoax and you really did change my mind on that. And I actually, I think, I guess I had Lindsay on after that. I'm totally remembering this right now.

0:03:52 Eli: I, that's not racist, not racist.

0:04:07 Eli: Yeah, you did an episode with me, an episode with Lindsay.

0:04:09 Thomas: Yeah. And, uh, he was totally unsatisfactory and in the end, oh

0:04:14 Eli: Well, to be fair, Thomas, you did violate copyright when you published.

0:04:17 Thomas: Yeah, that was, I was just going to get to that. In the end, the relationship between James Lindsay and I was terminated because I said, hey, you made a lot of claims about stuff in the show. I sent him an email or yeah, I think it was an email. Yeah. And I said hey, he made a bunch of claims about bad scholarship and such and such. And like I always put references in my show notes. So can you give me, you know, shoot me any links you want, references you want. And I say the same thing to Eli when he comes on and spouts a bunch of nonsense. No, I'm just kidding. But I do.

0:04:45 Thomas: I'm like, give me some links so people can follow along. And so James Lindsay sends me these links. And I was like, all right. And every single one of them, by the way, this is not like, oh, this Is the first time he's thought about this or all that. This is his now life's work, which is showing, proving how bad gender studies is and and all this stuff. And every reference was just from the Twitter account, uh, real peer review, which takes,

0:04:44 Eli: OK, one time, one times, two times, six times. Mm hmm.

0:05:15 Thomas: Which I've now found out. It looks bad when you look at the Twitter account, but all they do is take abstracts of papers out of context. Some of which are, you know, like there's a lot of journal, lot of scholarship out there that might seem a little weird to you or I, but like every single one he gave me, I decided to actually follow up and read through. And there are mostly really interesting, like one of them was like a personal essay and a lot of them were personal essays. They weren't meant to be like, this is scholarship that's changing how we, you know, it's just like, here's what I need to do to finish my stupid degree at a thing. I need To publish in a journal. So I will write a personal essay about a thing. And most of them were taken out of context. Like, you just take a quote out of context, it looks real bad, and then you read the paper and it's like, well, that's actually kind of interesting.

0:06:06 Thomas: Someone did a study about, you know, how overweight men are portrayed sexually, like, whatever. And they pull these quotes that make it seem like this, you know, batshit insane thing, and they've started they've inflamed this massive culture war using bad snippets of stuff to make it look like there's, you know, insane people running academia who have no idea what's what. So that was what I kind of learned from that whole process. And when I published that, to finish this thought, as you said, when I published the show notes that I asked for James Lindsay to give me links for, he said I violated his copyright by taking the links from his email that he sent me to put.

0:06:47 Eli: Because any list of an appropriate length is copyright. And I will say I have had three or four of my favorite moments ever with Andrew Torrez. But top five is definitely what?

0:06:54 Thomas: So that's that story. Sorry.

0:07:07 Thomas: That was just his answer. Yeah. Yeah, I think he said, oh, he's even worse at law as he is at, you know, perpetrating academic hoaxes or something like that. It's, it's, yeah, that's not how the law works. That was, and that was early on in a way. So anyway, that brings us up. I just wanted to get the, you know, the backstory. I think that should bring us up to now. So they did the penis hoax. And then recently they did their, their, you know, their magnum opus of penis hoxes. Is they published a bunch of fake stuff or they tried to publish a bunch of fake and that's what I'm hoping, you know, you can bring us up to date on this latest iteration.

0:07:10 Eli: Okay.

0:07:48 Eli: Yeah. And so the first thing that I'm going to say is listen to the first episode, because I'm gonna try not to repeat myself and not go over all of the differences, right? The chicken, chicken, Chicken study or the get me off your fucking email list study that was published in an academic journal. That's all still applies to this. The short summary of that episode, in case you don't want to go back, is publishing in pay-to-play or irresponsible academic journals proves nothing about those subjects. It happens in science journals, it happens in math journals, and it happens all the time. And the things that non-academics assume are sort of created by hard-working folks like peer review or editor editor comments are actually much, much more common and a lot less thought out than people assume. Right. So one of the things that came up with the original hoax that they also emphasized in this hoax, even though they sort of knew it was false and knew that it wasn't true, knew they were being dishonest, was like, no, no.

0:07:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:53 Eli: No, we didn't just like submit these to pay to play journals. They also had editorial review and editorial feedback. But what's hard to understand is you're outside of academics is that in academic journals, editorial feedback most of the time doesn't even consist of reading the thing, right? I mean, that's, that's, if you're going for a standard, like, pay to play journal with the pressure of publication, there are some wonderful, highly rated journals out there which read and give great feedback and and look really closely at the papers that are submitted. But for the sort of pay-to-play edge, low-ranked journals, it is truly someone just looking to make sure you haven't written the word chicken over and over again, or sometimes not doing that.

0:09:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:33 Eli: So the fact that there was editorial feedback on this latest one, in the original hoax, again, listen to the first episode. Because it's going to give you a background gonna give you background about why this whole experiment is in bad faith, all...

0:09:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And sorry, I just remembered a couple of things I want to chime in there. I know it's hard to not read you that parts of that episode because it was so good. In my opinion, you did such a great job. But one thing that I remember, just to give you an idea of the kind of thinker Boghossian is because he showed, in my opinion, a few years ago, he's not to me a serious thinker. This was his response, by the way. So here's what happened. They got a bunch of pushback. They published the conceptual penis hoax in a pay-to-play journal. They declared victory over the humanities. We've just disproved the humanities, basically. All of the... Yes.

0:10:21 Eli: Women Don't Exist.

0:10:24 Thomas: Yes. And then when everybody, you know, most people in the world who aren't Jordan B. Peterson fans were like, wait, but no, uh, they're like, Oh, hold on. We also showed that there's a problem with pay to play. So there's got a couple of things. It's like, no, no. If you just paid to publish something, it says nothing about the other thing. It'S just the pay. There may be plenty of legitimate pay to pay problems in publishing. We've covered that. There's totally legitimate criticisms of that, but you can't have it both ways. You can't say, yes, we paid to publish this nonsense in a journal that didn't even look at it. And it's not representative. And also that means the humanities are all wrong. And, uh, back to Boghossian, his response to this, which I think is pretty indicative of his level of, of good faith in this was to say, we didn't pay a dime to publish this.

0:11:12 Thomas: And what he meant was somebody else donated the money to publish it, like they, they, it's so, like, honestly, I didn't, I didn't seek to make these people this way. Like, they just are this, like it was so disappointing because we, we first came across Boghossian when he wrote that book that we were, people were talking about, you know, atheism related stuff.

0:11:30 Eli: Manual for Creating Atheists, one of my favorite books on atheism. I

0:11:32 Thomas: Yeah. It was like, we didn't go into this thinking like, okay, this guy is, you know he, we were kind of fans of it and yeah.

0:11:42 Eli: Was a Boghossian fan. I emailed back and forth with Boghossian about veganism multiple times before this thing. Short of getting hate mail from my dead father, Boghossian's fall into right-wing trollery has been a difficult emotional journey for me.

0:11:57 Thomas: Yeah. It's been disappointing. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, that was, so it, I guess the, the theory is if somebody else pays for you to publish, then that solves the whole problem. Like, like, like that's the technicality.

0:12:07 Eli: It's not pay to play because we didn't pay.

0:12:10 Thomas: So just wanted to, I just remembered that I had to bring it up. Okay. So, and then I think we're, we're to today now, right? Or we still need to, yeah, sure.

0:12:10 Eli: It is, Yes, we're here to today. And today is important because there's been a twist in the story. And I want to I want to tease something for the end of the episode. I'm going to pull a little Andrew Torrez here. I want to tease something for the end of the episode, because I know you have some people who consider themselves centrists or moderate or somewhere in the middle on the sort of social justice issues who who are concerned about sort of bias in academia, who think that, you know, there is real problems in social justice and grievance studies, as it's sometimes called. So what I want you to do is if you're one of those people, I want you put a pin in your concern about bias in academia. At the end, I'm going to talk a little about what's going on in academia right now. And I want to you to ask yourself which you're more concerned by. But we'll get to that later.

0:13:04 Eli: We'll get that later because we're talking about a twist that was brought up to both of us independently, and I just couldn't help but celebrate in Thomas's inbox, which is that Peter Boghossian is being railroaded by Portland State University.

0:13:04 Thomas: Oh yeah. I'm excited.

0:13:17 Thomas: Yeah. Well, we, we yes. And it's related to, I think we, maybe I might've skipped over. Sorry. We're so excited about this episode. There's a lot to talk about. Um, so they did the, the 2.0 of this. So they, they really, and I want to, I wanted to say the number. So, they said, according to them, by the way, we don't have any independent verification or any way of knowing that this data set that they are alleging is real. Like we can't really verify it, but they say this is Boghossian, Lindsay and Pluckrose. They, they did a little like summer camp, a sleepover and in their jammies and they all wrote a bunch of these fake things and did a video about how smart they are and writing these, these fake thinks. They said that they wrote 21 of them and a third of them roughly were accepted, quote unquote, like accepted into some sort of journals.

0:14:05 Thomas: So that's the latest iteration that we're talking about. And as you just said, subsequently, a few months later, Peter Boghossian is under investigation for academic fraud.

0:14:17 Eli: Okay, so let's talk about what's actually happening. Let's talk about what you're hearing. Let's talk about the headlines. And then we'll talk about what's actually happening, right? Because, and I will admit, I was concerned when I first read the headlines, and then unlike many of the people who sent me those headlines, I clicked it and read what was happening and began to celebrate the absolute joyous truth of this circumstance. So if you're on Twitter and like me you care about social justice a little bit, you've probably seen an article or a tweet along these lines: Portland State University seeks to murder Peter Boghossian For his sokal hoax study?

Question mark, click for more. Um, and people like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, intellectually, intellectually honest bastions of liberalism, have all come out in support of Peter because Portland State is planning to have him murdered for doing this soca hoax thing. And like many of you, I had people who do not care about the truth or even pretend to care about the truth tweet me these articles to show me, Eli, don't you see, they've put poor Peter against the wall, but

0:14:52 Thomas: Perfect.

0:15:29 Thomas: Yeah,

0:15:29 Eli: Here's the truth

0:15:29 Thomas: He's actually just sitting in those stocks right now. He's been there ever since

0:15:30 Eli: Yeah, exactly it's funny um they had to choose between expediting either him or that lady from Saudi Arabia, and they choose that lady who got to go to Canada, so he's still in Saudi Arabia, run by social justice warriors. It's now Social Justice Arabia, um, you can read about it in Aero Magazine, I'll let you guys look that up on your own, it's in a Yik Yak. So here, so here's what actually happened. And, and I'm gonna say what happened first, and I'm gonna assuage your worries, and then I'm going to tell you why it's beautiful. So a, but a few last week from when we're recording this, Boghossian announced that his university had said, hey, man, you work for us as a professor. Did you publish a bunch of fake data and also use human subjects in research without asking for IRB approval? To which the answer is, yes, he did. So let's go over the facts in question and then I will talk

0:15:34 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, well and we are we on the video, because you have to talk about the video, okay, okay all right, because I have thoughts on that too, but I'll let you go, okay

0:16:33 Eli: About the video. I have a pizza pie level, and again, it just keeps getting deeper. I Have a pizza Pie level delicious video for you, my friends, but we're still talking to the people in the middle. So middle people come on in. So when Boghossian published these articles in Sokal 2.0, one of them had a fake study about witnessing 10,000 dog humpings at local dog parks, right? It included a fake study to try and get published. And then, of course, they published all of these or submitted all of these fake academic articles to journals all over the place because, again, they didn't take the criticism that people like I and Thomas and Skeptic's Guide to the Universe guys applied to them. They were We're just like, we need more publications. So the problem is, and again, this is why it's beautiful, is the whole point of their experiment is, you can just publish anything. Just hit your head against a keyboard hard enough and you'll make it into one of these grievous studies journals.

0:16:47 Thomas: Okay middle people right

0:17:36 Eli: Except you can't. In fact, they have policies and commissions in place to prevent you from doing that. And one of those things is an institutional review board. Now, for those of you who aren't aware, institutional review boards are basically the people who you have to submit your study to. So I can't just be like, I want to see how many people would say yes at a kissing booth. I'm doing science, right?

0:18:03 Eli: They're, they're associated with universities, and their job, they're an anonymous group of scholars. And they're actually, I shouldn't say that, because some of them are anonymous, and some of the people that I've met in the past have said, I'm not going to do that. Doing something with human subjects, you're not doing it in a way that harms people more than the benefit of the study, so for example, yeah yeah

0:18:02 Thomas: Yeah yeah and the reason of that is there's sort of a history of bad things happening when you, when you subject human beings to studies without their consent, or, or, yeah, without oversight.

0:18:32 Eli: Before IRB, we had, like, all right, you're gonna shock this other guy, and then he's gonna shock you, first one to die loses. Go, I forgot to write down the results, I need you guys to do that again yeah So IRBs are almost universally considered to be a good thing, and again, the whole point of Boghossian and Lindsay and whatever, what's her name, Pluckrose's, experiment was you can just publish anything, but of course you can't. And it's actually not okay to use the human subjects in this case, of editors and magazine reviewers and publications, to conduct an experiment without at least going to an IRB first and saying, hey, this is what we're going to do. On top of that, so again, didn't speak to an IRB. On top of that, he published a fake study. Now

0:18:37 Thomas: Yeah. Winner gets $5 by the way. Yeah, Pluckrose.

0:19:22 Thomas: Yeah

0:19:23 Eli: Look, you can't publish a fake study without warning people. Even as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker and all the people who've come to Peter Boghossian's defense have said, even if it's a joke, you're not allowed to. I mean, look, I'm sure Andrew Wakefield would love for you to just be able to go, oh, I was joking, I was kidding, prank, prank war, um right so it's actually a huge problem that they included a fake study, and again, all of this would have been resolved

0:19:23 Thomas: Yeah yeah good point. Yeah and it is important a fake data set. Can I chime in on the the dog thing because I saw a really good Twitter thread on this. Maybe you saw the same thing where someone was saying there's an academic who who wrote a thread who was saying, hey, you can't peer review if somebody just says they studied for a thousand hours, 25 full work weeks, 10,000 dogs. Like there's a certain point at which it's actually, you need academic rigor and trust and integrity for the system to work. Like if I come at you with a data set and say, I studied, uh, the, these either dogs, human, whatever it is, I did all this studying of the, here's my data set. What are they going to do to figure out that you didn't do that? Like you can't, you know what I mean?

0:19:51 Eli: Yeah right

0:20:40 Thomas: Like if you just make it up, they can't what are they gonna review the surveillance tapes to check that you actually did. So this person's pointing out when it comes to the dog thing, yes, the that particular study, um, it did get get published and it had some nonsense in the theorizing about it. But this person was saying like, look, these things often get published just because of the data sets, like stuff will get published. And he was saying here, let me read this. If this was a real observational study, just the data collection was an immense effort.

If these data had really been collected, it would be a possible interesting data set for other scholars. The acknowledged limitation of the research design and data, including the caveats and terminology, puts this in the top one percent of nuanced articles of the journal issues in my field. You might think this study is silly, but it's nuanced silliness.

Let's say someone tells you, did you know that when a dog humps another dog, owners intervene 97 percent of the time when it's two male dogs, but 32 percent of the times when the genders are mixed.

0:20:47 Eli: And

0:21:41 Thomas: Would that be the silliest study result you read this year? It wouldn't for me. And this is Daniel Lakens on Twitter. Let me see if I can link this. That actually is an interesting result. Like, if it's all made up, so, you know, obviously it's made up, and you can say, oh, the victory is they got a made-up thing in the journal, but if you make up a data set, no one can check that you didn't do it. And if the data set reveals something interesting like that, it's, it would be interesting, like, that that would actually be interesting knowledge for science. Like, if people don't care when two, when a dog starts like raping another dog if the genders are mixed, but they do care if it's two males, that would be interesting to think about.

0:22:21 Eli: Certainly worth publication, but more importantly, even if it isn't interesting, right, even if you, you do a study on what flavor M&M people prefer, right? You're not allowed to fake data. And the whole point of SOCL 2.0 is that you're allowed to bake data. Of course, there are consequences for these behaviors. So the wonderful thing about this is that their whole experiment was based on, look, there's no academic rigor. Nobody cares. It doesn't really matter. And as soon as they face the consequences that they claim they want there to be. They're like, oh, they're coming after my precious vital fluids. Theyre coming for my joints and my bones and my blood marrow. Right. And here's the thing that I really want to emphasize here. So in the article that I read, which you should all check out, there's an article on Slate, which I have already

0:22:31 Thomas: Yeah. It was really

0:23:17 Eli: Sent Thomas.

0:23:18 Thomas: Good. I'll, I'll link it. I found it independently and loved it as well.

0:23:18 Eli: Yeah. They announced this via YouTube video where Peter is in his bathrobe. I don't know why they chose to publish a YouTube video. So it's it's the guy who's making a documentary about the SoCal 2.0 hoax.

0:23:28 Thomas: Oh my God. So great. Hey, the, uh, because this is pretty important. Do you want to like put on clothes? No, no, we need the, we needed this now. We can't have it 15 seconds from now. It has to to be now

0:23:37 Eli: Nope. Film me this very second in my back because here's the thing, like, don't get me wrong, I walked out on stage last week dressed as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. I am not pretending to be a serious curious academic. Peter is. So I don't know why he published this in his bathrobe, but they do this. I mean, it is Making a Murderer 2.0. It's like, I don't know. They're coming for me. They're coming for me harder than they've ever come for anyone before.

0:24:09 Thomas: It's So great. It's so great, yeah.

0:24:11 Eli: And truly, if you are a moderate or if you don't know how you stand on these issues, you're not sure about the whole social justice thing or Peter Boghossian because, dang it, you don't like that feminism or or you just find yourself in the middle and you want to see both sides, watch the video. Really, watch the video and say to yourself, are these rational people having a rational reaction to being asked to have a conversation with your review board?

0:24:39 Thomas: Think you're making a great play if you are somebody on that, that's kind of centrist, not sure about this, watch that and realize the logic of this video. This video is published, it's the, it's so, with the tone and the attitude and the thesis of the video is, I'm about to be murdered and railroaded for what I've done. It's, in fact, it's so dire and important, I can't even put on clothes. Like, it's, I have to do it in this bathrobe. We would do it now. We're doing live because it's so important. They, the tone, that the title, everything is Peter Boghossian is about to be, you know, hang drawn and quartered because of this. And in their own video, several times, please, please watch it. If you don't believe me, several times they go, yeah, they're saying, you know, we need IRB approval for this.

0:25:25 Thomas: And there's the research was, and and they go, so are there rules about that, like, they literally don't know. Like, they're, they're declaring that they're being railroaded, and in their own video they're like, yeah, we don't, like, is are there, you know, guidelines for this or We are, we supposed to know? I'm not, this isn't a joke, like they actually are asking, "Are we allowed? Can we do this?" "Oh, we're not sure, so..." Research that, everybody. "Is a good conference call here," like, let's check, you didn't check before you did it.

0:25:42 Eli: And before you filmed yourselves talking about it.

0:25:59 Thomas: Unbelievable. That's the level of rigor we're talking about here. That is the level of intellectual rigor that we are talking about. In their own video, they say they don't know whether or not any of these rules apply to them. And by the way, if you don't know, is it maybe not that ridiculous that a board wants to talk to you to say, like, "Hey, let's figure out if something was violated here?" You don't even know yourself. You've said in your own video that you don't know whether this is ethical or not. Yeah.

0:26:25 Eli: Right. And the thing I want to add to this that I think is super duper important, right? Because again, for the sort of center people who listen to this, and I know there aren't a lot of them. I know that we are largely preaching to the choir, but you who we are preaching to will probably have the person who tweets at you, you know, and says, well, what about this? And you can pass along this episode for them to not listen to before they respond. Um, but just in case one of them listens because you've wrapped headphones around their ears and put them in a chokehold, right? For the centrist, it's important to recognize that But Peter Boghossian absolutely knows the purpose and use of an IRB.

0:26:44 Thomas: Yeah

0:27:03 Eli: There is no possible way, Dr.

0:27:03 Thomas: Well, he mentions it in

0:27:07 Eli: Peter.

0:27:07 Thomas: The video, yeah.

0:27:07 Eli: Yeah, there's no way. And he admits it in the video. He's like, oh, yeah, IRBs. Right. There is No possible way that he doesn't understand this. And more importantly, there is no way that the people who have come to his defense don't understand this, right? Right. Jordan Peterson already

0:27:23 Thomas: Do you want to do you want me to read those statements? Let me know when you want because I, yeah.

0:27:25 Eli: Been. Yeah, please. Let's let's hear from the the academics on this subject. A

0:27:31 Thomas: Let's hear from legendary scientist, linguist, thinker Stephen Pinker. First off, well, we'll go with his: "I have been informed that Professor Peter Boghossian is being investigated for academic misconduct, specifically for falsifying data in his spoof paper on rape culture in dog parks." Okay, he could have just stopped there and been like, good job, look into that. But no.

0:27:50 Eli: Thing that we all agree happened is happening.

0:27:54 Thomas: But it continues. "This strikes me and every colleague I've spoken with as an attempt to weaponize an important principle of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion.

Not only is Boghossian's claim to have examined 10,000 dogs' genitals self-evidently ludicrous, like a satirical headline from The Onion or Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, but Boghossian himself patently did not intend to use the fake study to bolster his resume or reputation, nor did he intend to let it stand in the literature as misleading, as a misleading finding. Indeed, the whole point of publishing the paper was to reveal the subterfuge, which Boghessian promptly did.

I can understand the temptation to implement damage control." And, see, okay, here, this is the part I want to draw. So, starting here: "propaganda. If scholars feel they have been subject, subject to unfair criticism, they should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them to try to punish and silence him. Second, it makes a mockery of the norms and institutions that the university have set up to deter genuine academic misconduct. In the way that, in that way, it is reminiscence of the dictators who abuse anti-corruption laws to imprison their opponents." It, uh, not dramatic at all there. "It sets a dangerous precedent, simultaneously corroding principles of research integrity and academic freedom. Third, it saps the credibility" this is all, right, man, write a shorter letter, I think that's pretty much all.

0:29:45 Thomas: Um go first. Well,

0:29:45 Eli: OK, let's point out, there is absolutely no way Harvard professor Steven Pinker does not know he's being dishonest in that tweet storm. That is a three sentence conversation in real life, and it's why Twitter has done so much damage to our discourse. Right, if, if we, we're sitting with Steven in person, and Steven, well, well, obviously this is an attempt to avenge themselves on that, we'd be like, Steven, he faked data. He faked data and he's being investigated for faking data. And Steven would go, ah, yeah, but it seems, I don't know that they, you don't know that? They should investigate fake data. How much of a jape, how much of a joke is okay to investigate fake data, Steven? At which point he would be like, have you guys tried the cheese plate? It's actually really good.

0:30:33 Eli: There's grapes on there. Get some grape, right?

0:30:33 Thomas: Now I think you'd actually go into, you know, things are better now than they've ever been. The enlightenment.

0:30:39 Eli: It's the best. I'm crushing it. Have, have some grapes. It's awesome. Right. So, again, the question to ask ourselves is not, you know, is the institutional review board using, you know, this thing against against Boghossian as a form of vengeance? Because even if they do, right, even if this is entirely out of spite, it's not. Even if it's entirely out-of-spite, the punishments from an institutional review board vary vastly, right? They can be a citation, they could be a slap on the wrist, and yet the assumption here is that he's going to be fired or drawn and quartered. There has been absolute, this, this letter and this YouTube video of him in his bathrobe was a week ago. He has already met with his university. He's already met with his president of his university. And the last word we have from Boghossian is, well, time to get off Twitter, need to focus on my writing, and, you know, why? Because he didn't get fired.

0:31:10 Thomas: Yep. Wow. Yeah.

0:31:32 Eli: His president was like, hey, Pete, I talked to them. Don't publish any more fake data unless you talk to someone. In the way that it's okay to publish fake data, and he was like, no, I do what I want, logging off Twitter, blam. So the question is not whether or not the IRB is being abused. The question is why someone of the intellectual level of Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins or Jordan Peterson, although I wouldn't say intellectual level when it applies to Peterson, but why someone one of those intellectual levels is falling for this. And the answer that I have for you, and the answer that you need to give your centrist friend, that it's vital you give your centrist friend, is that he's not. He's lying. Steven Pinker is smarter than this.

0:31:33 Thomas: I

0:32:18 Eli: I know he's smarter than this.I've read his books. I'm a fan. And I don't know why he's lying, maybe the world moved a little bit too fast, maybe it's just easier to feel separate from each other now. But he doesn't mean it and Dawkins doesn't mean it. And anyone who tells you they do is lying. And that's really important to acknowledge.

0:32:37 Thomas: Don't know, man. I, I kind of, I have a different interpretation of this. Like you might be right.

0:32:41 Eli: Let me hear it.

0:32:43 Thomas: Well, I think that this is a white male cultural blind spot that we see. Like, I Think it's easy for these people of a certain generation and certain blind spots in terms of their own privilege and politics, it's easy for them to convince themselves that there's a grand conspiracy about feminism and all that. I think it's just easy to... It's like a cognitive dissonance thing. I don't think they necessarily have to be lying about it, but either way, I am just in disbelief. You make a great point. Like nothing as, as of now, we don't even know that anything has happened. These people, when, okay, this whole thesis that they have is that the victim mentality, the, the Grievant study.

0:33:29 Thomas: Like they're so dedicated to grievance that there's no scholarship. Meanwhile, nothing has happened, it's merely been announced that there is, they're going to review view that there's been a fake data set, uh, put you into the study here. They're going to review it. And these people are already coming out as though, as you said, as though he's, he's on the gallows, like talk about grievance studies. Like what do you,

0:33:52 Eli: Watch the video. James Lindsay is somehow he's in a safe house in a monastery somewhere. It's in the military pillbox. It is the manner in which this is shot is truly as though he is going to go to jail mail because they're gonna take a look at what he did for

0:34:08 Thomas: It of things to, yeah, I gotta come. Well, he doesn't work in academia, so he doesn't, it doesn't matter for him. It's just Boghossian. I think he's, Boghossian's the only one who actually has a job to where, that's why he's the one that's the focus of this.

One thing I wanted to, um, say about that Steven Pinker thing is watch where he, again, great scientist in mind, you know, of our time, Steven Pinker, just decides, he just decides without evidence, uh, and, and without proof, without demonstrating it, he just decides that the people responsible for this review are like the grievance study, third wave feminist people. Watch.

He says, "I can understand the temptation to implement damage control and seek a measure of revenge." Revenge, this is not, this, this isn't, Bogosian is being investigated by the journal, you know, feminism and geography or whatever the heck the journal is, this is where he works, like they're like, "Oh yeah, there's academic standards that we need to make sure you didn't violate," that's not the he Pinker is writing this as though, so, like, a league of feminists have taken control of Boghossian somehow, but that's just

0:35:19 Thomas: Not, yeah, yeah.

0:35:19 Eli: Of the IRB Yeah. The the world and again, this is why, to me, I just can't believe that he's honest for two reasons. One, um, I understand the like white male blind spot because I have it, and I think you'd agree that you have it, but, like, when you're in the public spot, spotlight to such an extent, there are people correcting you, right? We don't make mistakes without someone tweeting and being like, "Eli, it's not international review board

0:35:44 Thomas: Oh, they don't pay attention to that. That's part of the blind spot. They don't, they're not open to or receiving that criticism.

0:35:45 Eli: Right, right. But but that to me passes over the line to dishonesty, right, if you just don't listen when a vast amount of people call you out for that. But the other thing is, like, again, all the implications of Pinker's statement, and we'll go into Dawkins' statement and p, and Peterson's statement as well if you want to, all the implications of Pinker's statement are to totally not understand how IRB works, how falsifying data works, how review works, right? The implication is that either he totally doesn't understand that process, or he's shifting the conversation to be about that victim narrative.

And again, I do not believe that Steven Pinker is that ignorant, I just don't believe it, I don't believe it. I think it is a good way to get a certain amount of retweets, and I think if somehow we could cast a magic spell on Steven Pinker and make him be honest, he would admit to us that he has problems with grievance studies, right, that he thinks are legitimate, and whatever he says or does, even if it's a little on the dishonest side, his heart's in the right place, right, he's AOC-ing it, right, his heart's in the right place, he found it on a Yik-Yak, yeah.

0:35:58 Thomas: All right, fair enough.

0:37:05 Thomas: Yeah, and I got to point out, the other thing I wanted to bring to that is the letter that kind of led to this investigation That was written by, you know, a ton of Bogosian's colleagues, I Portland State. The letter has a good quote that I think, again, even if you're somebody in the center, and I do strongly want to say that when I first saw this news, I have questions about how appropriate and what appropriate like punishment or consequences for this would be. Like, I'm not I don't know that I know that for sure. I also want to make sure we talk about at some point, you know, like if this was wrong, compare it to Sokol and the hoaxes that people think we're good.

0:37:50 Thomas: And, you know, are we, I want to make sure we're not, we're not having like a double standard when it comes to these things, like we wouldn't want Sokol punished in this way, but we would want it. So that, keeping all that in mind, a quote that I think should give some people pause, maybe. Quote, since this is, again, this is from the open letter from a bunch of the Portland State colleagues that kind of started this. Quote, "Since, since there were 20 or more pieces, and journals of any quality require at least two peer reviewers, a job that academics perform without pay because they actually care," end quote. And I just want to, like, point that out. This isn't like a cost-free, fun game that you get to play just for fun. That's why there's an investigation. And maybe the result of the investigation is, as Eli said earlier, like, "Just can you not," you know, like, maybe it's, we don't know that it's death by firing squad, you know, but it's like, with this much wasted time, potential human experimentation, and faked data sets, yes, absolutely, there should be an investigation into this.

0:39:07 Eli: Yeah, absolutely there should 100% be an investigation into this. And, and again, I, I think it's important, so, uh, and you hinted at it, right, we are expecting a slap on the wrist for Bogosian, right, possibly some form of public censure, but but I would not be comfortable with Peter Boghossian losing his job over this. And don't get me wrong, like, if something bad happens to Peter Boghosian, I assume it's my birthday. But I don't want him to lose his job. I don't think he deserves to lose this job over this. But that's not what's happening. It's being reviewed. What he did is being reviewed by a board. And this is what we should want to happen. This is what Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins and the rest and your so-called centrist friend should want to happen.

0:39:52 Eli: And if they're pretending that they don't want it to happen, they are lying to you because their whole experiment was supposed to be about responsibility in academia. And it obviously wasn't. It was about owning feminists. It was about owning trans people. It was about owning minorities, right? And now it has come back to bite them by their own methods. And and it's beautiful. It's so beautiful you can cut it into slices and eat it.

0:40:19 Thomas: You know, speaking of, uh, wanting to, uh, own the feminists, this is where, and again, do we need to say that we used to be fans of Richard Dawkins and appreciate his books? I've read a lot of his books, actually. Maybe not quite all of them, but most of them. And in fact, Greatest Show on Earth, which is one of his more recent ones, I guess by now it's probably, I don't know, six or eight years old, but I love that book. I absolutely love that book. Uh, and I, I have to read Dawkins statement because we can again, do the same debate of, you know, stupid or liar. Um, because I don't know, I genuinely don't or, or like, is he just so old that he doesn't care or what? But Dawkins' statement is so monumentally stupid that how this happens. How does somebody so brilliant and so influential and someone who wrote amazing books on biology and communicating atheism and biology.

0:40:39 Eli: Yeah.

0:41:24 Thomas: How could they write something so stupid? So here we go. Well, this is interesting. So this is the 14th of December. Has it been a month? Here's.

0:41:32 Eli: Oh, wait, no, that's important. If it's been a month, he's 100% not fired. It's over. They haven't been reviewing for a month. I'm really happy if I'm like, "Eh, it was a week ago," and later in the episode we're like, "Wait a second, that was a month ago," because we're all looking at a calendar that says 40. If this happened a month before, and nothing's happened, this should be a show about, "Hey, remember how right we were three sentences ago when we didn't know how long this had been going" on for

0:42:00 Thomas: Well To be fair, I mean, the holidays, I don't know, who knows how much work was, I, I don't KNOW

0:42:03 Eli: Look we're not gonna fire Peter Bogosian over Christmas. I tell you what, Pete, we're gonna meet with you real quick right now, and then after the new year we'll get together, we'll fire you. I'm a bugger picker gun

0:42:14 Thomas: Uh, or it's or it's just like the princess bride thing like, oh, good night, Pete, good work, most likely kill you in the morning, but they just do that forever because the firing squad is, uh, so yeah, this is dated 14th December, and this is the letter from, uh, Dawkins, this open letter, I guess. My first response on reading of the punitive investigation, punitive investigation, you're already, okay, into Dr. Peter's, how can you have a punitive, like, whatever, into Dr. Peter Boghossian's brilliant hoax was to let out a howl of incredulous mirth. Do your humorless colleagues who brought this action want Portland State to become the laughingstock 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 satirizing? For satire it was, and it is of the essence of satire that is not literally true.

0:42:16 Eli: Yeah exactly to

0:43:09 Thomas: This is great, and here's where he really just, uh, he's just, he, he dribbles the ball down the court, he just gets a frickin' tomahawk, jam it onto us right now. "Dear Mr. Orwell, imagine this. It has come to our notice that your novel Animal Farm attributes to pigs the ability to talk and to walk on their hind legs, chanting, four legs good, two legs better. This counter to known zoological facts about the family Sudae, and you are therefore arraigned on a charge of falsifying data.

Bad scientists who falsify data do so to gain advancement, to improve their list of publications, for example. But Boghossian and his colleagues openly publicized the fact that their papers were satirical and that the putative data were false. If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression," expression, they should come out and honestly and say so, but to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive. Could it be that somebody is gunning for Dr. Bogosian or for other reasons which they dare not admit? Of course I have not the smallest evidence for such a suggestion, but don't you think it rather springs to mind given the accusation of falsifying data is so palpably absurd? I suspect that you will probably agree and have no difficulty in throwing out the accusator. Okay, so Dr. Richard Dawkins, genius of the ages, is comparing submitting false data to writing a novel. That's

0:44:40 Thomas: Not the same thing. I

0:44:40 Eli: To Writing Animal Farm. And he knows, again, the thing that's really important about this, right, because the moment we started this episode, the moment we got into, "Hey, this is what IRB is and this is what falsifying data is," most of you got it, right? Most of you got it. You were like, "Oh, that's a cool thing for me to know in case someone asks about it or in case someone talks about it," right? You clicked in right away. But the thing that probably hasn't clicked in for a lot of you is that they know, and the people in your life who pretend they don't know are wasting your time. And one of the things that I want to talk about is why, right, because Dawkins isn't stupid, right, and Thomas, I completely respect your opinion that maybe it's just like a blind spot.

0:45:26 Thomas: Think it's a massive blind spot. I, I think it's, I think it's hubris and just incredible arrogance, uh, that leads to people not being able to recognize when they're wrong about something like this, personally. But we could disagree. It's fine.

0:45:38 Eli: I agree that it's hubris. I agree that it is arrogance. I would add one more thing to it. It is because for too long there have been no consequences for This kind of behavior. Not legal consequences, obviously, but just social consequences. Being wrong about something when it comes to oppressed people or being wrong about something when it comes to the far right. By the very nature of atheism sort of being reversing a right-held opinion, there's just been too much forgiveness in our community, right? The fact of the matter is so many of us come out of religion where they think that gay marriage is wrong and this is wrong. Many of us held these right-leaning opinions and then moved to the left-leaming opinion of atheism, that our community is overly prepared to forgive when people make right-leaning mistakes and overly prepared to allow for those mistakes not to reflect on someone's character, right?

0:45:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:46:37 Eli: It's a big, big part of us to say, you know, Richard Dawkins, I can't, I'll never forget, I had a conversation with someone who I guess is close to Richard and heard me on a very, very early SIO episode where I think it was the Lindsay debate or something where I talked about Dawkins. She wrote to me and she said, no, no. I've met Richard. He's such a sweet guy. Like you have to know he's such nice person. And she meant it. She wasn't being manipulative. She wasn't mean. She said he's a nice person and I said, look, someone Elevatorgate, no matter how silly they think that discomfort is, is not a good person. And that's because there aren't good people and there aren't bad people.

And, that's a carryover we take from religion, right? Good people do good things and bad people do bad things. And I, I'm not a bad person. So what I do must not be bad, right? The truth of the matter is we all make mistakes. I've made mistakes. So when speaking to your center-leaning friends, or if you are that center-leading friend, know that like, if you've had bad opinions, if you're not a good person, then you're a bad friend. You've been wrong about things. It's not too late to be right, but it also means that you have to admit the damage you've done by being wrong. You have to face that. It is not an an instant forgiveness proposition.

And if every time you're wrong, you forget it and move on with your principles, the way Boghossian does, the Way Lindsay does, and Peterson and Dawkins and Pinker and all of those who are too far gone not to have destroyed their legacy, I'm telling you, you will end up in the same boat. You will be forgotten and remembered as someone who turned mean. And you owe it to your legacy to be better. You

0:47:01 Thomas: Yep. Wow. Yeah.

0:48:20 Eli: Owe it yourself to Stand for something better. Right.

0:48:21 Thomas: Well. Put. Well. Put, uh, yeah, and I, I this is getting a little philosophical and like psychoanalytic, uh, whatever. But I do think, I think you really hit the nail on the head. And when it comes to this, you know, are they stupid or are they lying or whatever? The reason I think it, I think about it in terms of incentives.

I think if nothing else, Trump and 2016 and all this stuff has demonstrated that if you get a critical mass of people who either agree with you no matter what or don't care, then functionally you can do whatever you want. And I think when it comes to somebody like Dawkins, who has a lifelong, you know, who has a reputation from years of decades of good work, honestly, like good work, has earned a large following when you do things, As you said, when you, when you offend and when you're awful to marginalized groups, they don't have the numbers to make it matter to you.

You know, like You, you have, sure, uh, maybe, maybe as much as, I don't know, 10% of your fan base might just quit following you or buying your books, and you might maybe kind of notice that. But when you're making millions of dollars and you have millions of Twitter followers, and it doesn't, you know, it, it's, there's no incentive for him to to realize his mistake. Every incentive is is for him to write something asinine about Animal Farm, think he's made an amazing point, get the kind of all of his massive following to echo the fact that he's made an amazing point, he's just owned the feminists or whatever, you know. All the incentives are pointed that way. That's why I don't know that it's a lie exactly, you know. But

0:49:21 Eli: Yep. Yeah.

0:50:05 Thomas: I think that's what happens. It's sad.

0:50:07 Eli: No, I certainly see that. I think I've just, I think maybe not you, uh, but I have certainly been exposed to too many people who do that for a living, um, who just in private have so obviously exposed themselves to be dishonest rather than wrong. Yeah.

0:50:23 Thomas: Yeah, maybe. You know, we can, everyone can debate amongst themselves about that.

0:50:26 Eli: Up your own minds.

0:50:27 Thomas: Let's, uh, what's, what's the, did you take out the pin that you, cause we're already, uh.

0:50:27 Eli: Are you dishonest or are you stupid Oh, I

0:50:32 Thomas: Uh, pretty long here.

0:50:32 Eli: Okay. So I have a gift for you, um, before we go today, which is for those who are worried about bias in academia, I want to tell you about a little organization, which you probably haven't heard about, called Turning Points USA. And This American Life did a wonderful episode on them called My Effing First Amendment.

And I put it in this little doc that I'm going to send over to Thomas, which he has my permission to use in or out of order, whatever you like, Thomas, go crazy. You can also retitle these because I wrote a bunch bunch of joke titles, right? So Turning Points USA is a multi-million dollar organization with Charlie Kirk, who many of you will know for being the eighth worst person who isn't a murderer on the planet, and Is a, and I'm not kidding, I'm not exaggerating, is a literal organization founded by the Koch brothers with a multi-million dollar budget that teaches college-aged kids to to create and implement psyops in their universities to get reactions out of their professors and get them fired.

So, for instance, they give them big giant balls that say "free speech volleyballs" on them, and then they tell everyone to write on it, and if anyone tells you to move, film them, and then we'll put it on our website, and we'll send it out to our various fake news articles, which will see, you know, freaked out professor, you knows, loses their mind on innocent student.

And they actually follow sort of one of these psyops using like an innocent, you know, teenage girl who has absolutely no idea how politics work, who goes to a training camp.

0:51:12 Thomas: Okay.

0:52:04 Eli: And I'm not exaggerating. A training camp held by Turning Points, inspired to create a reaction in her university. She creates that reaction and brings national fire down on that professor. So definitely read that. That. In fact, Turning Points USA goes so far as to have a professor watch list. Now, for those of you who are fans of Orwell out there, you'll love this. It's professorwatchlist.org. Check it out. It's created by Turning Points, USA. And it is a literal list of left-leaning professors and what they said that makes them liberal-leaning, along with pictures of them and their names and how long they've been teaching there. And again, all of this is funded by the Koch brothers. And look, maybe you're one of those super sweet people left out in the world who's like, no, you don't understand. My friend means that he's a good guy. He wouldn't lie. He's just confused.

I want you to tell your friend who sent you the Dawkins quote, who sent to the Pinker quote, who sent me the, they're coming for Peter Magozian headline article. I want want you to send them that episode of This American Life or send them the Professor Watch list and ask them why nobody's talking about it, right? Ask them why Dawkins hasn't tweeted about it or Pinker hasn't written about it extensively.

0:52:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:53:28 Eli: Why isn't it on Dave Rubin's show every other day? And if his answer or her answer, sorry, or their answer, we're inclusive here on Serious Inquiries Only, is anything other than they are dishonest and this doesn't fit their narrative, they're lying to you too. And what you can do to make them better is enact the social consequence of them losing the privilege of your conversation.

0:53:55 Thomas: That's well said. Yeah, this is the very thing. Like they talk about the Orwellian, oh, there was just the leftist Orwellia and leftists. And then they make lists of like people who have engaged in bad speak.

0:54:05 Eli: Lists of professors who say

0:54:07 Thomas: Speak.

0:54:07 Eli: Liberal things. Can't make it up. You can't make up if you tried. All

0:54:07 Thomas: Yeah. Think with this, I have one last note here to make sure we get to, is in so many any ways, as you've outlined, and I'm going to try to add one more layer to it. In so many ways, this entire endeavor is guilty of the things it's trying to prove that others are guilty of. The hoax itself is so unscientific. As some authors have pointed out of these articles that we're referencing, how about you submit a bunch of fake studies to not just the humanities? Don't you want a control group? Submit to, give us your data set, submit it to, uh, I don't know, science journals, to stuff hard science, include, uh, controls, include, uh, all manner of journals, make sure they're, you know, peer-reviewed, actual peer-previewed. And by the way, part three of these, uh, submissions, we didn't get to this, I, I think one or three of them, I forget some number of them, were like poetry and submitted to a poetry journal. What

0:55:09 Eli: One of them, they were really just hoping that you didn't notice it was like bad poetry. Yeah.

0:55:14 Thomas: Yeah, cool. So people don't like objectively eliminate bad poetry from a journal.

0:55:21 Eli: Boghossian brings bad poetry to his wife. Did Did you like it? Yeah, it was really sweet. Liar!

0:55:21 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Grievance.

0:55:29 Eli: You should be fired.

0:55:31 Thomas: So, and there's so, and the point is these, this group of people has a political aim and are locked into it. They're tunnel vision into their political aim of showing that some other people have a political aimed and will disregard all contrary evidence. They're doing the exact thing they're trying to show. They aren't, they aren't doing this in a scientific way. They are, uh, by the way, they weren't even, as others have pointed out, they aren't even hitting the range of journals that they alleged they're hitting. They talk about an entire like humanities problem and social sciences and all that. And then someone looked at it's like, no, they're pretty much exclusively gender studies. There was like one that might have had, you know, some race component to, but it's just, just about all gender.

0:56:21 Thomas: So they got fixated on that in particular, but they claim that it disproves all this, you know, data and this scholarship across a broad multitude of fields. So, they are incredibly unscientific in the way way they're going about this. And they're doing the very things that they think they're proving that other people are doing. So, and on that level, as Eli put, as you said, uh, they're also, the, the RRB is doing the thing they think that people don't do, which is, uh, fantastic. I think that's all I had.

0:56:49 Eli: Doing the thing they set out to prove the IRB doesn't do. This machine doesn't kill people. I'll put my head on it and turn it on.

0:57:01 Thomas: Uh, thanks so much, Eli. That was every bit as fun as I had hoped. It was everything I wanted and more, this is uh, but you know, in my ultimate pessimism, uh, if you get enough people to pay attention and think that you're right, it's all, that's all it's about nowadays, very post-modern, if an it is it doesn't matter, doesn't care what the truth is anymore, uh, that's the best, thanks, Eli, uh, everybody of course, check out Eli's shows, uh, God Awful Movies, oh, I might be going on that, that one again soon.

0:57:18 Eli: That is all. It's very postmodern. All right, Thomas. Make sure you don't say anything after I hang up or I will sue you.

0:57:39 Thomas: Scathing Atheist, The Skeptocrat, Citation Needed. Finally got to make sure I get them all. Thanks so much, Eli.

0:57:33 Eli: All right. God awful movies yeah alright thanks for having me Thomas

0:58:01 Thomas: Of things for the epilogue here, you know, first thing is, we actually, Eli was out of time, we ran out of time, so we didn't really get to talk about the kind of comparing this to Sokol, and I think there's some nuance there, we'll see if it's worth doing any sort of follow-up, but just very brief thoughts I wanted to add, you know, because I think it's a good faith argument and something that I'm not opposed to looking at, which is, hey, this Sokol thing is celebrated.

If you think Boghossian should be punished for this, don't you think Sokol should be punished for what he did or should have been? That kind of thing. And I think that's worth looking into. From what I can tell, I believe there's a strong difference between falsifying data and submitting a falsified data set and systematically wasting tons of people's time, as the quote I read during the show, volunteer time, you know, for peer reviewing and accepting or denying these entries, all that stuff. I think you can draw a pretty firm distinction between that level of basically Basically, fraud and time-wasting, which if you contrast that with what Sokol did, so Sokol submitted his essay to a non-peer-review journal, which he knew just because of his name would publish it on the spot, kind of no questions asked, and that was part of what he was trying to bring attention to, the fact that some of these journals back at that time would publish anything, didn't even matter that what he wrote was total nonsense. So I think you can actually draw a pretty easy distinction there if necessary.

0:59:43 Thomas: Then that brings me to the other thing that I wanted to mention, which is kind of curious. You might remember, we kind of stumbled onto the fact that Dawkins' letter, and actually, if you look at it, Steven Pinker's letter as well, are dated in like early-ish December, December 10th to 11th, 12th, around those times. And all of the public articles about this, the video, the discussion of it is from only a week ago. And I don't know, I'm, you know, I'm not getting tinfoil hatty here, but it does seem a little weird. I'm not sure what it means exactly. But I think Eli could be right that, you know, if it's been over a month, then nothing's going to happen to Boghossian. But we don't know that for sure until, you know, somebody goes public about that.

1:00:30 Thomas: But it's kind of curious. So it sounds like this review or this investigation is more like over a month old, and possibly Boghossian solicited letters of support back in December, but only publicly revealed it in January. So, you know, that could be nothing, or it could be significant. I don't know. I just think it's interesting, and it's something we kind of caught live as we were doing this, like when I looked at the date. So, Eli's guess was that nothing's gonna happen to Boghossian, and if you look at his Twitter, still the last tweet he had was, "Oh, time to go write my book," so who knows, or, I don't know, it wouldn't surprise me, I sorta disagreed with Eli slightly, it would surprise me if, you know, things take forever in academia, I dunno if a review like this takes a long time, so, who knows?

1:01:22 Thomas: Maybe there will be consequences, maybe there were absolutely none that we'll know about, maybe it was just a firm talking to, either way, The public statements of victimhood on Boghossian's behalf were very dramatic for the nothing that has happened, but I suppose they were trying to get out ahead of it and dissuade the investigative committee from coming ruling against Boghossian, so who knows, time will tell, but I still think it's, it's interesting how much was made over the nothing that has happened so far.

All right, that's it for me for this episode, I will certainly do a follow-up if warranted, if there's more information, or, you know, if anything else to consider here, otherwise, eh, we'll see, maybe it'll just be something we mention on a voicemail episode in, ooh, a couple weeks, hey, make sure to leave voicemails, everybody, we're coming up on another one of those in a couple of weeks, probably, so, feel free to opine on this subject, or any other subject, and, of course, support the show on patreon.com slash seriouspod, or or SiriusPod.com slash support, either one, please consider supporting and joining the ranks of those who make this show happen. I can't thank you enough. And with that said, I will see you next time.