SIO44: Debunking the 'Conceptual Penis' Stunt with Eli Bosnick

Serious Inquiries Only

Thomas Smith

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An embarrassingly unskeptical article appeared in Skeptic Magazine recently featuring a hoax paper published in a Gender Studies journal by two authors: James Lindsay (past guest of the show) and Peter Boghossian. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and several major figures in the skeptic movement like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins took the conclusion that Gender Studies as a field has been demolished by this hoax. This is incredibly irresponsible. The hoax paper accomplished no such thing, and Eli is here to explain in depth why. Links: Skeptic Magazine Article Other sokal hoaxes:

A US nuclear physics conference accepted a paper written entirely in autocomplete.
A trio of MIT grad students created an algorithm that creates fake scientific papers – in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing found 120 published papers had been generated by the program.
A paper entitled "Get me off your fucking mailing list" was accepted for publication by computer science journal.
A 2013 hoax saw a scientific paper about fictional lichen published in several hundred journals.

Cogent OA FAQ Lichen Paper published in 45% of DOAJ publishers Gender Studies Journal Rankings Excellent Debunk by Bleedingheartlibertarians Other Excellent Debunk, with Source for Sokal Quote Support us on Patreon at: patreon.com/seriouspod Follow us on Twitter: @seriouspod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seriouspod For comments, email thomas@seriouspod.com Questions, Suggestions, Episode ideas? email: haeley@seriouspod.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and I am your host Thomas Smith.
0:35.0	All right, I want to get into this as quickly as possible.
0:38.8	The subject of today's show is the hoax paper perpetrated by James Lindsey and Peter
0:44.4	Burgosian. James Lindsey's been on the show a number of times. I will be speaking to
0:48.4	him in the next episode after this one is a little foreshadowing there but anyway they made a completely
0:54.8	bullshit paper that was supposed to be nonsense and they had the goal of
1:00.1	submitting it to a gender studies journal to prove that the field of
1:04.4	gender studies has a major postmodernism problem. In an article for Skeptic
1:10.9	magazine which is edited by Michael Schurmer, recent guest on the show,
1:15.0	they detailed their hoax, and the article is called The Conceptual Penis as a Social
1:19.9	Construct, which is the name of the hoax paper, a Sokol-style hoax on gender studies.
1:26.0	I would encourage you to read the original Skeptic article that will be linked in the show notes,
1:31.5	and we will be talking about that extensively. So in addition
1:35.4	to Michael Schurmer as already discussed a lot of very high-profile
1:39.2	skeptics in quotes ran with this. Sam Harris on his podcast talked about how this was such a great hoax on gender studies
1:48.0	and it shows the field is BS.
1:50.0	Richard Dawkins tweeted glowing words about it.
1:54.0	This has been picked up by a lot of people
1:56.4	as the ultimate takedown of gender studies.
1:59.1	Eli is here today with what is an incredibly well done job of showing what really this paper means.
2:06.3	Full disclosure what happened was we recorded once and it was over two hours and starting that recording I was in the position of kind of in the
2:14.7	middle and I was going to challenge Eli on a few points I thought here and there. Eli did such a good job of
	...

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