The critical thinking they supposedly love so much
Amanda Marcotte also wrote about the dud hoax, along with the fakenews story about the murder of Seth Rich.
The authors claimed in Skeptic that the publication of their fake and silly article demonstrated that the “echo-chamber of morally driven fashionable nonsense coming out of the postmodernist social ‘sciences’ in general, and gender studies departments in particular,” is damaging academia.
This is, as Phil Torres explained for Salon, also utter nonsense. Torres pointed out that the authors had their bogus paper rejected from a reputable, peer-reviewed journal and published instead in a pay-to-play one that isn’t even about gender studies. In fact, these two guys demonstrated only their inability to have their fake article accepted by a reputable publication — which is the opposite of what they were trying to prove. But, as was the case for the Seth Rich story, the lack of evidence did nothing to slow down the rapid spread of the hoax across the anti-feminist internet.
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Both these stories were promulgated mainly through right-wing media. Fox News, especially host Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh have been pushing the Seth Rich story, no doubt as a bit of counterprogramming to the real news about Trump’s ties to Russia. The “conceptual penis” hoax was trumpeted mostly by right-wing clickbait sites like College Fix, Daily Caller and Breitbart.
But unlike a lot of other fake stories pushed by right-wing media, these two stories gained serious traction in supposedly liberal and even left-wing circles.
Or semi-liberal, or liberal-except-about-women.
[T]he “conceptual penis” story was trumpeted by a number of self-proclaimed rationalists, including scientist Richard Dawkins, author Sam Harris and scientist Steven Pinker. The editor of Skeptic, Michael Shermer, argued that the hoax was necessary to “rein in extremism” among feminist academics.
“[T]he hoax reveals not the ideological dogmatisms of gender studies, but the motivating prejudices of the authors and their mostly white, mostly male supporters against social justice,” suggested Torres in his Salon article. Or to put it in another way, in an effort to prove feminists are a bunch of dum-dums, these men abandoned the critical thinking they supposedly love so much.
This is not the first time we’ve seen them do that.
They do it all too often. I still very occasionally listen to Sam Harris, and have even found myself offering weaker and weaker apologies for his gaffes, but it’s clear he’s allowed his membership in a Skeptics Club colour his thinking about feminism (or at least his acquiescence that a certain subset of so-called feminists speak for all of feminism, which I’m sure pleases them but does the rest of feminism no favours).
Doubling-down and never, ever admitting you’re wrong about a certain set of topics is supposed to disqualify someone from calling themself a skeptic. But apparently some of the people who helped to spread skepticism have forgotten that.
The SciBabe has a post on the incident, addressing, among other things, the impact factors of journals. Boghossian and Lindsay couldn’t get published in a journal with an impact factor of 0.00, so they went with paying to publish in a journal that doesn’t even have a listed impact factor.
Not having seen their would-be Sokal paper, I can’t tell whether thy might have made a reasonable point if they’d exercised a professional level of patience and caution. Sokal didn’t just scribble and publish, and his project holds up even after years of reexamination.
The Tuvel horror-show, and B&Ws exile from its previous host, ought to be enough to generate some sympathy. Too bad the angry-bro antifeminism taint is so thick upon the ground in ‘skeptical’ circles.
A follow-up article about the handling of the hoax submission has been published in Inside Higher Ed:
Link to article
One of the editors of NORMA, Ulf Mellström, a professor at the Center for Gender Studies at Sweden’s Karlstad University, said via email that the referral was apparently automatically generated as part of the rejection process. Of the paper, he said that “we thought it was sheer nonsense” and that the intent was an outright rejection. NORMA didn’t realize the automatic referral system was in place and has asked Taylor & Francis to remove it, Mellström said.
As to how Cogent Social Sciences handled the piece, the statement from that journal said, “The article was received by a senior editor and sent out for peer review as is standard. Two reviewers agreed to review the paper and it was accepted with no changes by one reviewer, and with minor amends by the other. On investigation, although the two reviewers had relevant research interests, their expertise did not fully align with this subject matter and we do not believe that they were the right choice to review this paper.”
Further, the statement outlined three steps now being taken by Cogent Social Sciences: “We are working closely with the academic editorial teams of all our journals to review our processes and make changes where necessary to minimize the risk of such a situation happening again. We are reviewing our academic editor and peer reviewer education program to ensure editors and peer reviewers are fully equipped with the skills they need to assess whether a paper is fit for publication. We are working with colleagues at Taylor & Francis to examine our peer review systems and workflow so that articles deemed unsuitable for publication cannot be transferred inadvertently to another journal’s submissions system.”
Thanks!
It’s not clear in what sense Dawkins, Pinker, Coyne, Boghossian, Shermer or Harris at least are even this left-ish. If you can’t be a serious feminist (and it’s a big tent!), well… you’d better have some powerful economic justice or anti-racism cred somehow to be attributed any spot on this side of the political spectrum.
I think “anti-Christian right” is a better way to put it. Their critical, thoughtful rationalism doesn’t get past rejecting some junk science and religion.
I agree, and I’d welcome an honest and knowledgable critique of the subject.
That would have to be done by somebody who really can think critically, even when confronting their bete noir. These guys were just grandstanding.
Jeff @ 6 – And it seems they’ve all, or all but Shermer (who was never left-ish at all, from what I can tell), gotten more right-wing over time, coinciding with their increase in fame. I wonder if that’s because they’ve all taken some criticism from irritated feminists? As their fame grew, so did their egos, and thus so did their resistance to being challenged by inferior beings? Is it as simple and pathetic as that?
Sam Harris with the “estrogen vibe” bullshit for example. It should have been (I’d have thought) so easy to say “Ah shit, that was an asshole thing to say, I take it back.” Or Shermer and “it’s more of a guy thing…”
(Note that they were both answering the “Y no women?” question and both answered it in the same stupid smug “because men are better at it” way.)
I’ll go further. Boghossian, Lindsay and Shermer aren’t just grandstanding: they’re intellectually dishonest.
Lindsay is now calling the paper “satire” (while still wanting to claim it’s a hoax). Both began claiming they were making a point about predatory journals after their paper was rejected by the first (0 impact) journal.
These men are smart enough to understand the concept “post hoc rationalization.” They just don’t give a shit.
It’s possible. Another couple possibilities – they’re not mutually exclusive:
1 – Time marches on and they don’t. They are not young men, Harris partially excepted, and attitudes in populations chance over time more than attitudes in individual members. Just how thoroughly some man regards women as peers and colleagues may not change, but how much other people expect you to (hopefully) does.
and
2 – Pro-science, thoughtful, irreligious sorts DO lean to the left, I still believe, and wherever someone exposed to questions from them keeps regressive attitudes, they’ll be exposed more and more as they gain more and more attention. Questions sand-blast off the veneer of liberality; the misogyny underneath isn’t new, it just had been hidden.
And related to (1) or (0) (“I’m too famous to be wrong”), there’s that identity to protect as a hard-nosed critical thinker on whatever subject comes down the pipe. If something looks simple enough to have an off-the-cuff, knee-jerk response – if there’s no apparent need for special qualifications or empirical testing – then the “natural light” (Descartes’ go-to faculty) will reveal to the True Hard-Nosed Critical Thinker the Truth, and he can spew it right out to followers. Any dissent is clearly a rejection of Reason, since this is after all the Revelation of the Natural Light.