Controversy

A few weeks back I published an item that reviewed the book A Manual for Creating Atheists, by Peter Boghossian.

In that item, I added a note that I was hesitant to recommend Peter Boghossian to readers, as he had become a somewhat controversial figure.

Well, one of our readers took issue with me calling Boghossian controversial, and indeed that anybody can be described as “controversial”. I think it's a perfectly valid use of the word, but arguing about the definition of words seems to me to be a fairly weak argument.

I don't think we've discussed Boghossian in the past, but it seems that he's on a crusade against “wokeness”.

And while the reviewed book was written back in 2013, the controversy started back in 2017, when Boghossian, along with Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, began what seems to be a crusade against what they perceived as illegitimate academic disciplines, or disciplines where intellectual rigour was lacking.

Boghossian, along with Lindsay, got a parody paper, called The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct, published in an open access journal Cogent Social Sciences. The journal has a “pay to publish” model, which makes acceptance for publication more likely. Indeed, the paper was originally submitted to another journal and rejected, and then suggested for referral to another journal by the same publisher. Indeed, the original reviewer of the paper is quoted as saying “we thought it was sheer nonsense”. Nevertheless, the paper was peer reviewed and published.

Pluckrose then joined Boghossian and Lindsay. The trio wrote twenty hoax academic papers under pseudonyms, supposedly attempting to parody various disciplines, and submitted them to peer-reviewed journals. Of the twenty papers, four were published and three were accepted for publication. The majority were rejected.

They somehow thought that their experiment would prove that their targeted disciplines were invalid, simply by journals in those disciplines uncritically accepting and publishing their hoax papers. This is all pretty well-documented online.

It's been pointed out that what they did was an example of skeptical p-hacking.

“...yes, if you carry out a badly designed experiment, you will sometimes get a positive hit, but you can't conclude anything from it. No one is surprised that, in the volume of papers submitted to the peer-reviewed literature, clunkers get through. We know the system is not perfect.”

There are existing mechanisms in place for dealing with bad papers - that is by writing rebuttals and criticising the ideas outlined. But these mechanisms are designed to work with legitimate ideas, not completely made up junk.

Publishing bogus papers and making up data doesn't constitute a good experiment, in my opinion. Boghossian was subject to a complaint from ten of his colleagues at Portland State University, where he was a non-tenured associate professor. He ended up resigning from his position, publishing his (in my opinion, whiny) resignation letter online.

Anyway, I stand by my comments. Had I not made them, I think it would have left readers with the impression that I (and by extension, NZ Skeptics) fully support the work of Boghossian. That is certainly not the case. There are plenty of well-intentioned voices in the skeptical movement that we can call on. I'd prefer not to be promoting the work of bad actors.