Lindsay is also associated with a blog called New Discourses, which seem to be a rightwing anti-"wokeness" website. He was for a while associated with the New Atheist movement, which operates in the more-or-less "highbrow" intellectual space as Jordan Peterson and what was recently known as the Intellectual Dark Web. PZ Myers who also identified with that group expresses his disappointment with Lindsay, including his role at New Discourses, in The grift, oh the grift Pharyngula 08/09/2020.
He cites a conference at a white nationalist conference in London at which Lindsay, Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian appeared. Those three are listed as the first of several contributors at the New Discourses blog, which Myers says is owned by "Michael O’Fallon, who wants to promote conservative Christian Nationalism" and heads a group called Sovereign Nations.
Zack Beauchamp, reports on a project a few years ago by Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian in The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained Vox 10/15/2018. It involved writing papers and sending them to academic journals advocating for philosophical/theoretical positions they didn't actually support. Several got published and the authors mocked the journals for publishing them. A "highbrow" version of "owning the libs," I guess.
The idea was that the authors wrote things they themselves claimed to be ridiculous and then claim it discredits the journals that accepted them because they should have recognized it as ridiculous. Beauchamp recalls a case that attracted attention in academia and among positivist-minded skeptics/New Atheists, in which physicist Alan Sokal placed an article on gravity in a journal called Social Text that he used as a kind of intellectual "sting." Ben Goldacre wrote a glowing mini-review of Sokal's later book on the action. (The Sokal affair Guardian 06/05/2003) Stephen Hilgartner took a more academic looks at the Sokal stunt in The Sokal Affair in Context Science, Technology, & Human Values 22:4 (1997).
Beauchamp notes, Sokal's stunt "was self-consciously more limited than the Pluckrose et al. sting." It was focused more particularly on a certain kind of argument about all of science as a social construction. Lindsay and his two collaborators were trying to discredit a larger and more amorphously designed philosophical/sociological kind of position. But Beauchamp also argues about it and the more recent one, "These hoaxes are not so much about academic hygiene as they are about discrediting one’s political opponents." Although it seems to me that Sokal was actually trying to make a point about the philosophy of science.
Hoaxing to "own" the other side can encourage bad habits. And as Beauchamp points out, achieving publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal is not an endorsement of the author's conclusion. It means that the article was judged to meet certain standards. And criticism of the article is part of scholarly, scientific, and academic processes. In fact, for someone just entering an academic field, an article by a leading figure in the field disagreeing with the article, even savaging it, can be great for the writer's academic career. Also in the 1990s, a sociologist named Daniel Jonah Goldhagen became a kind of rock star in the field of Holocaust studies with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) in just that way. His work was criticized by leading specialists in the field on good grounds, and few accepted the key conclusion of the book about the nature of German anti-Semitism. But the fact that so many leading Holocaust scholars gave it serious attention raised the book's and Goldhagen's prestige and fame.
But it's one thing to claim you made an experiment you didn't. Or to falsify the results. Or to plagiarize someone else's work. Or to libel someone in an article.
It's another matter to make a scholarly argument that may somehow not be completely in line with one's innermost beliefs. I'm not fond myself of Karl Popper's treatment of Hegel's legacy, for instance. But if I wanted to - I don't, but if I did, I could construct an argument in a paper to defend Popper's position. If I then persuaded some academic journal to publish it, it wouldn't in itself reflect any discredit on the journal if I came out after it was published and said, "Aha! I didn't actually believe that argument and the journal editors didn't figure that out! It might just mean I have some talent as a philosophical ghostwriter.
Beauchamp elaborates at some lengths on why he finds that the Lindsay-Pluckrose-Boghossian trios claim that their experiment/stunt discredits the field they sought to attack doesn't hold up well. The factors he cites apply to academic papers on hard-science topics as well as liberal arts:
[A]ny field can be hoaxed if you lie about the data you’ve gathered and hide your true intentions: The entire system depends on good faith and honesty. When people break it, by submitting bad-faith arguments or by manufacturing data, the system is not well-equipped to catch it.Science is said to be a self-correcting field because claims can be evaluated and experiments validated by other researchers. Here, Popper's concept of designing scientific experiments that can invalidate claims is very important, though it may not have quite the universal relevance positivists claim for it. See: Stephen Thornton, Karl Popper (2021) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 4. Basic Statements, Falsifiability and Convention.
My colleagues Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz, for example, have done extensive reporting on problems with statistical research in psychology and health, respectively. A shockingly large percentage of papers, even in leading journals, can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments. Part of the problem is researchers selectively reporting the results of their research to make their conclusions seem rigorous when they aren’t, a trick enabled by a kind of a statistical cheat called p-hacking.
Peer reviewers can’t tell if a statistical paper is flawed in this way, because by definition they don’t have access to research results that are excluded from the paper. They have to trust that the researchers came by their conclusions honestly; the entire peer review system depends on establishing a certain level of trust.
This is why it matters, as Engber notes, that the most striking papers from the hoax actually invented interviews and data from observation. “We know from long experience that expert peer review offers close to no protection against outright data fraud,” he writes. “These examples haven’t hoodwinked anyone with sophistry or satire but with a simple fabrication of results.”
In order to draw the big ideological conclusions about gender and identity studies that Pluckrose et al. want to, you need to show that this is something different from the standard problems with academic publishing. [my emphasis in bold]
Here is another example of this particular Jordan-Peterson-esque train of rightwing argument from New Discourses .This is another example of a rightwing analysis treating the "critical race theory" trope as an extension of the crackpot, anti-Semitic, far-right Cultural Marxism theory: Matthew Nielsen, When Critical Theory Took on Race 06/09/2021.
It's frustrating to offer any kind of reality-check about propaganda constructions based on bad-faith arguments. In the case of the "critical race theory" the Republican are raving about today, it really means nothing much more to most of them than, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"
Nielsen explicitly calls the concept of critical theory as defined by Frankfurt School scholars Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse in the 1930s with the new Republican bogeyman concept "critical race theory." Nielsen calls the Horkheimer-Marcuse concept the "philosophical parent" of "Critical Race Theory," which he capitalizes for some reason. In the terms of the highbrow neighborhood in the far-right swamp, that the link between the crackpot conspiracy theory about "Cultural Marxism" and the current Republican "critical race theory" dog-whistle slogan.
The cultural-Marxism conspiracy theory is the idea that the Frankfurt School invented "postmodernism," which is just not so. Nielsen writes, "In other words, 'critical' arguments are formed and founded in rhetoric - only. You cannot test their claims with any instrument of measurement. This is Critical Theory in a nutshell."
In fact, the most famous and influential work of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s were the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) and the Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, both of which were based on extensive original sociological research. Both looked at the "authoritarian personality," an idea describing how family and social structures produces a certain percentage of people who are psychologically very inclined to support authoritarian movements and regimes and to distrust democracy and the equal rule of law. An outstanding recent treatment of the subject is Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020) by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer.
The notion that all this work was based only on rhetoric is worse than silly.
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