Thread by @AlsoACarpenter

This claim has always puzzled me. I just don't see how the "grievance studies" hoaxes can demonstrate expertise. Lemme splain.

Boghossian, Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted twenty one articles to various sociology, race, gender, and queer studies journals. 1/

https://twitter.com/nohelltogoto/status/1363540723660898310

2/ It is important to me that no article written on race was accepted by any of the journals, and no journals focused on race or Critical Race Theory accepted any articles.

Second, of the articles accepted, the majority claimed to contain independent research, which would

3/ rightly be of interest to any academic field no matter how silly the attendant conclusions. But more important to our purposes, why was the discovery of this “hoax” such an embarrassment to the journals who bit?

4/ I see only a few options. First, it was embarrassing because they were duped by fake names and fake credentials; but this would certainly not in itself prove any problems with “Grievance Studies,” as the authors contended.

5/ Second, they were duped by fake research; but, again, how would a publication’s reliance on “experts” to provide independent research prove anything negative about their field?

Third, the content was so bad that it proved the foolishness of the publications.

6/ This is a live option, but assuming the authors were legitimate and the research credible, as the reviewers did, why would it embarrass these journals to publish content that they found agreeable? I mean, they obviously knew the content when they published, so how could that

7/ be the source of the embarrassment?

A final option is that they discovered that the articles were written by non-experts, and were accepted only because of agreeable jargon.

Here lies the true embarrassment, I’d argue—an embarrassment which assumes the opposite of

8/ Boghossian, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and all their fans' claims to expertise.

And if that were not enough, Boghossian and Lindsay respond directly to the claim that they are non-experts. In the article “Cogent Criticisms : A Point-by-Point Reply to Criticisms of the ‘Conceptual

9/ Penis’ Hoax,” we read:

"Criticism: We need to know the field of gender studies to criticize it.

"Harkening back to 2006, when Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, there followed a large hailstorm of criticisms hurled at him, much of it claiming that his apparent lack

10/ "of theological savvy undermined his criticisms of theology and religion. An entire sociopolitical movement rumbled into action in his defense. The atheist and skeptic community identified a fallacy, coined the “Courtier’s Reply,” applied to when proponents insist one cannot

11/ "criticize a field (in Dawkins’ case, theology) unless one has first attained sufficient sophistication in it.

"It is thus ironic that this criticism against us flowed not merely from the postmodernist vanity shops we targeted but from some vainglorious corners of a “skeptic

12/ ""community” eager to scold us as bad skeptics. Some people who have trained themselves to point out the nudity of Emperors lose their sense of proportion when it’s the Gender Studies Empress nakedly parading about. This criticism treats us all to a gentle reminder that we

13/ "shouldn’t really need. It is easy to see when someone else’s religious beliefs are transparently dubious, but far harder to notice when they are one’s own. In all this high-minded discussion, however, let the point not get lost: the Empress has no clothes."

14/ In other words, Boghossian & Lindsay don’t have to be experts to critique “Grievance Studies.” This, again, is truly puzzling.

They are experts b/c they wrote hoax articles which demonstrate the “Empress has no clothes” b/c they are not experts (& never needed to be)?

15/15 That's just silly business, IMO.