The "Grievance Studies" hoax, human subjects research, and the whole, big mess

 The big news in academia right now is that Peter Boghossian has resigned his position at Portland State.  Boghossian was one of the three co-authors of the "Grievance Studies" hoax, along with Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.  You can read the original piece here.  There is also a follow-up book called Cynical Theories.  Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian pulled one of the epic pranks in the history of academia, and depending on whom you ask, it was either an example of the intersection of muckraking and scholarship (see what I did there with that word, "intersection?"), or the most evil thing that anyone has ever done, nazi-ism included.

It all started, intellectually, with Alan Sokal.  Sokal was a mathematician who got fed up with bullshit.  Hence, he's my hero.  He wrote a total bullshit paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."  If that sounds like nonsense, that's because it is.  Also, bonus points for "towards" rather than "toward."  Regardless, it don't mean a thing, swing or no.  Sokal wrote a whole paper of nonsensical, anti-intellectual, pseudo-scientific blather like that, and then submitted it to some postmodernist journal to see if they'd accept it.  And... they did.

So a few decades later, Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian came along, and they got annoyed with the various Woke Studies departments and their, let's just say, excesses.  They took the Sokal concept, and went all Nigel Tufnel on it.  One louder.  Crank that baby up to 11.

What they wrote was so much worse than Sokal.  Sokal buried them with nonsensical blather.  Here was the Sokal trick.  Write stuff that meant nothing, such that nobody would admit that they couldn't understand it because that would reveal their own inability to grasp it.  Something about an emperor and sartorial choices...

Parsing the papers that Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian wrote?  That was never at all difficult.  The papers were just batshit.  How batshit?  "The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct."  The penis is a social construct, and it is responsible for climate change.  Accepted for publication.  Yup.  No joke.  Well, cosmic joke, but this happened.  Why?  Because these people have no place in academia.

So Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian kept going.

So here's the thing.  If you are an intellectual and take issues of race, gender etc. seriously, and think that our political and social worlds need to address them coherently, and that this requires rigorous scholarship...

Hi!

Come with me if you want to live...

... the life of a civic-minded intellectual!  Let us discuss matters like systemic racism, properly and scientifically measured.  Let us discuss the best ways to structure legal institutions to provide opportunity, let us read history together, literature, art, music in all of the gloriously diverse complexity of the world.  Let us read not only John Locke and Edmund Burke and John Rawls and John Stuart Mill, but James Baldwin, Mary Wollstonecraft!  Yes, of course let us savor Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, the artistic traditions of the African-American communities, plural, jazz and blues!  Above all, let us read!

Can a heathen get an amen?!

And the point is, if you want to address these critical issues, then don't you want them addressed intelligently?  And if you do, then who are your enemies?  The ones dragging the whole endeavor down into the realm of self-reinforcing bullshit, or the ones exposing that it is happening?

So you see, there are several ways to read the Grievance Studies affair.  Way 1:  Get rid of the study of the topic(s) because the whole endeavor is intrinsically laden with bullshit.  Way 2:  The studies have lost their way.

The Fox News/Trump-style reading of the Grievance Studies affair is obviously Way 1.  Kick 'em all off campus and get back to academia as it was in the pre-civil rights, pre-women's rights era.  Yet that does not logically follow.

If you are an intelligent, logically-motivated person who thinks about matters that get called "social justice," but you are not "woke," you look at the Grievance Studies affair in sort of the same way that you look at the replication crisis in psychology.  Damn!  These people need to get their damned act together!  There are important topics to study, but these people are not using rigorous methodology, so the journals are full of shit!

That seems to me to be a more coherent reading.  Professors acting badly does not negate the value of the topics they purport to study.  And there is so much bullshit that I actually, literally teach a class on it.  And I assign Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian.

The thing is, Way 2 is an intellectually difficult reading.  It is what we call, "a shade of grey," and shades of grey are hard.  So let's introduce Way 3.  Get Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian!

So here's the thing.  If you are an intellectually serious person concerned with matters of race, gender, etc., then you want serious research done on these topics.  So I repeat my borrowed line from Arnie.  Come with me.  You're with me.  Let's do some social science together so that we can address this stuff in a rigorous fashion.

But what if you're an intellectually unserious person concerned with matters of race, gender, etc.?  Then you don't care about the intellectual quality of what gets published.  You care about the moral quality of what gets published.  There is the right side, and the wrong side, and Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian put themselves on the wrong side by siding against the people on the right side.  Manichaean logic.  The enemy of my friend in a dualistic religion.  See:  McWhorter, John.

If you look at the actual politics of this trio, they run a wide range, with Lindsay as a libertarian-ish far right-ish... something (dude voted for... fucking... Trump), and Pluckrose is basically a socialist (she's a Brit, but probably wouldn't have voted for Trump).  Point being, this is not about policy.  At all.  It's not about how you treat your fellow human.  At all.

It's about scholarship.  And where it is failing.

Yet to point this out makes a lot of people very angry, because wokeness is the official religion of academia.  Facts, science, methodology... all of this is becoming less important than virtue-signaling.  And Portland State was going after Boghossian hard.

The only thing they could find was... human subjects research.  In a very bad-faith attempt to find something, anything to pin on Boghossian for the sin of exposing the intellectual vacuousness of Woke Studies as they are currently practiced, someone noticed that he never filed paperwork to conduct research on human subjects, and argued that the editors of the journals who accepted those bullshit papers were human subjects.

So, I am of several minds about this.  Here's the thing.  On a straight reading of university policy, Portland State is right.  Editors (and reviewers) are humans.  This is research.  If he didn't file paperwork, then he did human subjects research without approval.  We have processes in place to prevent human subjects research from being conducted in a way that would cause harm because, in case you didn't know, there is a history of human subjects research that actually fucks people up.  We need a process.  A lot of professors are... unethical, and the irony here is that a lack of ethics is precisely the thing being exposed!  So on a straight reading, Boghossian (and probably Lindsay) violated university policy.

But.

First, how do we assess the bad faith nature of the complaint against Boghossian?  First, does it matter in a technical sense?  Well, let's say you don't like your neighbor, for whatever reason.  You hear something suspicious, call the cops, and it turns out your neighbor was engaged in an act of domestic violence.  You may have called the cops in an act of bad faith, but would that provide legal defense for the domestic violence?  No.  It makes you maybe, kinda jerk-y, but your neighbor still did the deed.

Next, what about the investigation?  Here's a complication.  Would Portland State have engaged in any kind of investigation had Boghossian failed to get human subjects approval for a similar project exposing racial bias, gender bias, or some other woke bailiwick?  Nope.  That makes this selective enforcement, and there are issues of academic freedom involved, running up against a violation of human subjects research, which are real, let us not forget.  He did the deed.  So, selective enforcement, which is problematic, versus an actual violation.  Yeah... messy.

So.  What if Boghossian had gone to the human subjects committee with this proposal?  Here, it gets interesting.  Would they have axed this project?  They shouldn't, but they might.  Why?  University.  Woke.  Here's how it might go down.  The Woke-Human Subjects Committee argues that by exposing the specific, public figures, who are the editors of these journals for being so egregiously bad at their jobs, the project causes psychological distress to these figures, both for the hoax itself, and the public embarrassment.  I can read the rules, and from their perspective, I can come up with a ruling that would axe this project, no problem.  Would they treat a project exposing racists similarly?  No.  Again, woke.  Selective enforcement.  Thus, Boghossian would be in the position where he's supposed to get pre-cleared, but the body that grants clearance is as biased against the project as the very institutions he's trying to study, so they shut down the project to prevent that exposure.

Trap.

And would they treat a project to expose racial bias similarly?

No.  Selective enforcement, and that's a real issue here.

Yet, he did the deed.  He did the deed.  Yeah, Peter, you did the deed.

And I write that as someone who is about as on your side as you'll find.

Shades of grey.  When you lose the ability to see shades of grey, you've lost.

Helen Pluckrose does not have an academic position, so she is not bound by the same rules.  And really, I don't have even the slightest bit of sympathy for the human subjects here.  Look at those papers.  In some disciplines, there is a thing called "desk reject," where the editor of the journal just looks at the paper and says, yeah, I'm not even going to bother sending this out for review, I'm not wasting any reviewers' time.  Thanks for sharing, but no thanks.  Every single one of these papers should have gotten a desk reject from every single editor, and every editor who failed to desk-reject should have resigned in shame.  Every reviewer who wrote anything other than, "what, is this a joke?!  Reject, and stop wasting my time" should re-evaluate his or her approach to manuscript reviews.  Lindsay, Pluckrose & Boghossian did something very important.

But they also broke the rules!  This is not 'Nam, Peter!  And I honestly never realized that until I read Boghossian's resignation letter, and found out about the human subjects committee thing.  As a political scientist, I just know that when I want to go interview people, or something like that, I go to my IRB, and file my paperwork.  Any political scientist who doesn't know that, and doesn't do that is either an ethical nightmare, a fucking idiot, or both.  Boghossian is a philosopher, and isn't in my world.  He didn't get social science training.  But also, this kind of prank is so far from how I do my work that... I never thought about the process, so it truly never occurred to me that yeah, this is human subjects research, but it is.

Look, I'm on Boghossian's side, intellectually, but part of that is being a fucking hardass, and being a fucking hardass also means being a fucking hardass on ethics, and he fucked up, with the various problems being that a) Portland State was doing selective enforcement, and targeting him for woke heresy, and b) his human subjects committee might have acted unethically to shut down the project for that very same reason, and this was important for us to know.

And when I say, "us," I don't mean the fucking Fox News, white nationalist reactionaries, Trumpists and neo-confederates.  (Secede!  We'll let you this time!  We want you to!  Go away!)  I mean, scholars and intellectuals who want issues of race, sex, gender and related issues addressed, but addressed in a serious, rigorous and scientific way so that we can deal with the reality of the world and the reality of the problems of the world rather than just calling people out on twitter and trying to get people fired when they commit woke heresy, which solves precisely zero real problems.

Golf clap, kids.  You got Peter Boghossian to resign from Portland State.  If what really matters to you is the racial wealth gap, how much did that change when Boghossian resigned?  If what really matters to you is the proportion of women in the tech industry, did that change?  I can keep going...

You think you did something?  You think because Boghossian is less sympathetic to you than Isabel Fall that you're righteous today?  No.  You did the same thing.

Remember Isabel Fall.  Always remember Isabel Fall.  I'm among the few who stood for Isabel Fall against the woke mob before they realized what they had done.

Are those journals subject to the same publication and acceptance problems?  Have they cleaned up their acts?

No, but golf clap, kids.  Better to hector Boghossian out of academia than get those journals to tighten up their publication standards, right?  I mean, you may still be able to publish bullshit papers like "The Conceptual Penis," which is terrible, but at least the guy who revealed that horrible fact got driven out of academia for revealing this uncomfortable truth, so the world is better, right? 

As a statistician, I'm going to make a decision for today.  I'm going to spend some time looking at racial income data.  Will I make any real headway?  Make a breakthrough?  Is this the day that I, Justin Buchler, have a eureka moment?  Not likely.  But it's a moral choice.  I'm going to be a social scientist today.  I am making a moral choice to look at a real, scientific and sociological problem as a scientist.  No bullshit today.

Science is the answer.  Sorry, science is the method.  And you'll never get the answer without it.  Cut the bullshit.

Oh, and in tenure veritas.  Everything on this blog is protected by academic freedom, just in case anyone wondered.  Even though I'm tellin' y'all to read James Fucking Baldwin!  Seriously.  Come on.  Read in good faith.

Now.  This one's for you, Peter.  Willie Nelson, "Take This Job And Shove It," from Willie & The Family Live.