Peter Boghossian Pulled Off the Greatest Prank in Academic History

0:01 so I was in a sense lucky or I was unlucky I was in Portland teaching at Portland State which was truly an inconceivable ideological sinkhole there was just no escape from the people who were caught in that Madness so I started to realize that there was a problem where are these where are my colleagues getting their ideas these ideas are totally unhinged from reality they're completely

0:32 deranged there's no questioning the ideas so I started to dig a little bit into literature the what we term grievance studies literature those subjects that deal with race gender identity basically trans issues in particular that's extra crazy in 2017 we published the paper that people lost their minds about the conceptual penis is a social construct I don't know if you've read it but I think it's extremely funny it basically argues among other things that penises are

1:03 responsible for climate change it was a soal sty style hoax paper and the goal of the paper was to show that there was a problem in gender studies and so we wanted to see if we can get an in completely broken truly crazy paper published and we did and it was in the style of Alan soal who is who's now A friend of mine who's a physicist and

1:34 mathematician at NYU who published a fake paper in the most famous postmodern Journal social text so we copied that style for the conceptual penis in 2017 and of course the usual suspects lost their minds and said this paper doesn't prove what you think it does if you know this is a lowlevel journal uh you you only did one you got to do multiple papers so I call up Jim James Lindsay

2:05 and I'm like all right this is awesome they gave us a road map let's do it let's just do exactly what they've told us to do they've told us exactly what we need to do to make the point let's see if we can do it so we we delved into the literature really I think I lost quite a few brain cells in that process but we delved into the literature figured out what the claims were what the

2:29 assumptions were were and then we wrote 20 intentionally broken completely crazy often vile reprehensible papers and then we just started getting them we started Landing those all over the place and H in exactly the kind of journals that they told us journals that specialize in gender studies we got one for example in the best gender studies journal in the world which is hpaa we got that's a funny one we never talk about that because it's too complic licated for

3:00 most people to understand people like the simple ones like the dog park dog that like everybody you can meme that out everybody gets it but the other papers were more complicated we got busted by The Wall Street Journal after we had seven published I'm quite confident we would because we got better at writing them as we we went along and 10 months we we my guess is by the end of the year if we didn't get busted we

3:24 probably would have had 12 or 13 so layout for the viewer what what this actually means because there's I think for for a lot of people Academia and it's um its systems are opaque yeah so you talking about these journals like what is a journal why did this matter so much and you know we we got dinner last night we were talking about this idea of um the sort of smuggling of ideas or laundering

3:55 of ideas get into that so um what are these journals and why is it such a such a kind of gotcha to produce nonsense and have it be accepted yeah it's a great question so the papers were actually not nonsense they were vile and Despicable but they played into the moral Orthodoxy the purpose of the journals is to forward certain conclusions that then affect public policy so let's take a step back so a peer review journal is

4:27 not like a periodical it's not like a blog post these are there's a reason that they're called Jour peer reviewed peers your peers review these so people who have domain specific expertise read the articles that you submit and if they find that it passes it's good enough to get in it's published in those journals and so the way the system the university architecture and the promotion and

4:58 hiring system is setup is that in general there are some exceptions to this but as a general rule seven papers in seven years get you 10 year so seven peer-reviewed papers papers that show that you're an expert in a subject area as determined by your peers they're then published in a journal and then the professors show when they go up for Tenya look I've published here here here here here I am a scholar I've met

5:30 certain benchmarks now I have tenure which is a job for life so everything about that too I think the average person sounds bizarre right so I'm G to write an article it's going to go to this um cluster group of people I've maybe I don't know them but there's a chance I do know them because I'm in this sort of very particular strange little subset of a discipline like uh they all seem to have become like that like so I'm not just

5:59 Economist I'm a international macroeconomist that focuses on uh asian-pacific trade so there's like 14 people that do that and I'm going to write a paper about that and then five or six of the 14 are going to read it and then say yeah this is good and put it in a put it in in this publication like was that ever a thing that made sense and works like what what's the best version of what that is supposed to

6:29 be doing so that me the skeptic who thinks Academia sort of sucks why should I trust that that worked ever okay so I'm going to answer that question a and there's another massive piece to this a massive piece so the reason that you trust at the reason if it's done ideally is because we need to have a system in which we vet knowledge everything there's fake media there's disinformation so we need to have some

6:59 kind of gold standard something upon which we can rely and trust and that something should be then used to inform our decisions in the world our public policies how we live our lives because we know that people have tried to falsify those things it's Carl parer's notion of FAL falsifiability they've tried to show that that the best Minds have of people who know the subject area right the best minds are people who hold AC and

7:30 positions who have try are trying to show that those ideas are false and that's one of the ways that we gain knowledge in science and mo most of the peer-reviewed process for example in psychology psychology has a massive problem right now it's called a replication crisis so this speaks to your point 50% of papers in Psychology can't be replicated so if someone goes to a clinician seeking help with either a psychological disorder or what have you

8:01 it's a coin flip it's a toss of a coin whether or not that clinician has been trained in something that can effectively help patients so yes you're correct in that the system could have been broken for a very long period of time and because we weren't replicating studies for example in Psychology but this is far worse than that this is far wor this is very specific disciplines forwarding very specific conclusions about very specific identity

8:34 markers race gender trans status sexual orientation Etc and the reason that matters is because we need to study these things these are indispensable aspects of human life sexuality is extraordinarily important how we construct institutions and fairness and systems that's incredibly important that we don't have racist systems is incredibly important and yeah if you don't the purpose of the journal is to forward certain narratives and

9:05 accept certain papers so they themselves have been ideologically captured the whole system is a way to replicate the dominant moral ideology and so the other the other parts of this that are so important to understand is that if you don't get those seven papers in seven years you will not get tenure you will will not have a job for life so if you so you're almost forced to write to the Orthodoxy you're almost

9:36 forced to write in in a way that you forward certain conclusions that the raison Detra of the journal incorporates in its very structure now the other piece that's important in this that's just vital to understand is that professors then take those Journal articles and assign them to students in class is that clear yeah okay they become they become accepted science correct they become this is the this is the new Canon this

10:09 is the Canon this is the knowledge and information that we pass on to the next generation of leaders these people will go into administrative positions they'll go into governmental positions these people will make decisions in public policy that affect all of us but the whole thing is a house of cards it's all untethered to reality it's all the musings of ideologues all of it literally all of it so you write a bunch of stuff that is sort of

10:41 pantomiming this sort of uh well I'll just say woke Phil philosophical framework these you know critical theory critical studies mindset things going in through well I won't read that one because we're kind of a family show a lot of them like I don't want to read actually but yeah human reactions to culture and queer P per uh performativity at Urban dog parks in Portland OR Oregon so that's the popular one that people have that's the one that

11:10 got us busted that's the one that got you busted yeah but it so what was that what was the thesis of the paper oh my god do you remember like hard I I just even telling you was so crazy I mean this is a family show so I don't know how much I can say but try to keep it as as as p as as you can okay so or maybe maybe pick another one that might be a little I know it's

11:38 hard because all of these are like that though well that was the part of the point right I mean part of the point is to make them so utterly outrageous that any sane person who looked at that would be like what you know put put white people on the on the floor and change and speak over them as a form of exper experiential reparations you know I mean some of the papers you know and we had

12:02 two versions of of Adolf Hitler's mind comp that we translated one we just straight out took out Jews and put in white men and then the other one was more of a rewrite of mine comp but the the dog par paper we basically said that some woman I think her name was Helen Helen Wilson closely examined the genitals of item something crazy like 10,000 dogs but never in the heavy rain and then she used black feminist

12:32 criminology which literally had nothing to do with it like literally nothing I by the way I chose black feminist criminology because I needed something that they could not criticize they could not criticize black feminism so I figured if I put black feminism in there the likelihood of this paper getting accepted even though it was in truly crazy would have been much higher because they couldn't critique it they couldn't offer any critique of it because it would go against the whole

13:01 purpose of the journal in the first place so basically we they came to certain conclusions like we I can't remember the exact line but you know unfortunately we cannot leash men like we leash leash dogs and we said these are condoning spaces and it was really a crazy crazy paper and just numerically the data could not possibly have added up I mean could look just imagine some somebody closely examining the

13:32 genitals of 10,000 dogs and then interrogating their owners as to their sexual orientation so so yeah so so you produce like a range of vile and ridiculous things that goes from inspecting dog genitals to just submitting mind com with the with Jews swapped and these get accepted into these these so-called prestigious academic journals in gender

14:04 studies and all of this you don't need the so-called they were actually prestigious I mean the impact factor on those journals impact factor is a way to assess their their uh gravit toas their weight the impact factor on those journals was quite high so one I never talk about this but it's probably worth talking about because I think it's interesting but it doesn't it it's just too complicated for the it doesn't meme out well to the public but

14:29 the one we we submitted two pieces to heso one we're rewriting before we got caught but the other one was one of my favorite my favorites remember I told you we did the conceptual penis as a social construct in 2017 well yeah in this paper again remember we're submitting these under fake names and we had all fake institutes in case anybody looked we had like faked pictures of people that we just pulled online and photoshopped them a little bit

14:59 B but the paper the high so high Pacer is the top journal the paper was I can't remember it's like the title something like when the joke's on you and in that paper we criticized rather brutally James Lindsay and Peter bagoan and we said that James Lindsay and Peter Ban's paper of the conceptual penis doesn't work because you have to punch up and they punch

15:31 down but the paper was when the jok's on you and we they were thinking the jokes on Peter bagoan and James Lindsay but the joke was really on hpaa because we published a paper criticizing ourselves and which were actually punching up at the journal and they accepted it do do did any of the journals that you basically punked into Oblivion go away or change as a result of what you what nope and even if we didn't get busted by

16:00 The Wall Street Journal and we got you know 20 of those papers we write those it still wouldn't have made a difference I think I was very polyan in my thinking about it the system is too entrenched there are too many ideologues too many people who have tenure who have jobs for life they have absolutely no interest in veering from course the entire system is an ideology Mill it's purely designed to replicate the dominant ideology if you like this clip we've got

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