22/5 – 28/5/23 – The Grievance Studies Affair Special Edition

Welcome to Monday’s News on the March – The week that was in my digital world.

‘Our goal is to publish as many papers as we can that are unbelievably sophisticated parodies, and we are going to publish these in Tier 1 Journals‘ – Peter Boghossian

‘We are trying to go right to the source and say the whole enterprise is bogus… we’re hoping if we can get to the source and show that the scholarship everything is coming out of, is itself a fraud nobody has to listen to these people anymore‘ – James Lindsay

Joe Rogan – Exposing Social Justice with Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay
Video excerpt at JRE clips

In this video James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian break down what comprised the Grievance Studies hoax.

Pam Baker in the comments of this clip wrote: ‘As a person who relies on scientific, peer-reviewed, published studies to guide my actual practice as a healthcare professional I have to tell you that this is not only astonishing but makes me question every single thing about the world that we currently inhabit’. (View entire video interview extract here)

The Reformers (2023) – Part One
Video documentary at Michael Nayna

The Reformers explores the execution of the Grievance Studies hoax and aftermath for those involved. The hoax, orchestrated by a group of scholars (Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose) who submitted deliberately absurd and ideologically biased articles to prominent academic journals, made worldwide headlines and sparked intense debate about the influence of ideology and the erosion of critical thinking in academia. Nayna was embedded with the scholars from the hoax’s infancy. (View documentary here).

The Reformers (deleted scene) – Peter Boghossian’s Thought Experiment
Video excerpt at Wisdom for Life

This scene was shot around the time Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay had started writing their hoax papers.

The conversation here in Peter Boghossian’s class is about the subject of Phrenology – The process that involves observing and/or feeling the skull to determine an individual’s psychological attributes.

From 2:00 minutes in the video:

Student: ‘Well, I guess the scientific method is pretty universal right? Regardless of what science you study, I mean if you use the scientific method ..’

Peter Boghossian – ‘Said from the dude with the small skull. I mean that’s the kind of argument that people who have warped skulls make’. (Watch video excerpt here)

The Evolution of Postmodern Thought | Helen Pluckrose
Video presentation at New Discourses

Helen Pluckrose develops the definition of “Social Justice” as it is used in the academic literature in this tradition, explains its connections to identity politics and the political correctness movement, and then shows the relevance of the original postmodernists to this Theory in some detail. She does this to elegantly describe the progression of these ideas from Theory to activism to the streets by describing how these ideas originated, evolved, and were built upon by successive generations of Theorists leading up to those who have become famous names even outside of the scholarly world today: for examples, Peggy McIntosh, Barbara Applebaum, and Robin DiAngelo. (Watch video presentation here)