Why the Conceptual Penis hoax was a bust: It only reveals the lack of skepticism among skeptics

[rug]

A pair of "skeptics" published a bogus paper to undermine the field of gender studies. It blew up in their faces

MONDAY, MAY 22, 2017
07:00 PM EDT

Have you ever witnessed a prank gone wrong? If not, here you go: This is precisely what happened when a philosopher and mathematician, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, respectively, published an intentionally incoherent fake paper titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” in a journal called Cogent Social Sciences.

In an article simultaneously published in the magazine Skeptic, this project was loudly advertised as a “hoax on gender studies.” It primarily aimed to expose what the authors presume to be the nonsensical absurdity of gender studies, an interdisciplinary field that attempts to understand gender identity and how these identities play out in society.

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Boghossian and Lindsay are sadly not so nuanced in their claims. Instead, they take their hoax article to expose the entire field of gender studies as an intellectual scam. So, too, does the public intellectual Michael Shermer, the editor in chief of Skeptic. In a rather un-skeptical foreword to Boghossian and Lindsay’s article — subtitled “a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies” — Shermer wrote:

"Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose [sic] of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed journal today."

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As the historian Angus Johnston put it on Twitter, “If skepticism means anything it means skepticism about the things you WANT to be true. It’s easy to be a skeptic about others’ views.” The quick, almost reflexive reposting of this “hoax” by people like Dave Rubin, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Christina Hoff Sommers and Melissa Chen reveals a marked lack of critical thinking about what exactly this exercise in attempted bullying proves.

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/22/why-the-conceptual-penis-hoax-was-a-bust-it-only-reveals-the-lack-of-skepticism-among-skeptics/

[Jim__]

1. "Its easy to be a skeptic about others' views."

Yes.

[rug]

2. The ideological Turing test.

"But the situation is actually much worse than that: Boghossian and Lindsay likely did damage to the cultural movements that they have helped to build, namely “new atheism” and the skeptic community. As far as I can tell, neither of them knows much about gender studies, despite their confident and even haughty claims about the deep theoretical flaws of that discipline. As a skeptic myself, I am cautious about the constellation of cognitive biases to which our evolved brains are perpetually susceptible, including motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, overconfidence and belief perseverance. That is partly why, as a general rule, if one wants to criticize a topic X, one should at the very least know enough about X to convince true experts in the relevant field that one is competent about X. This gets at what Brian Caplan calls the “ideological Turing test.” If you can’t pass this test, there’s a good chance you don’t know enough about the topic to offer a serious, one might even say cogent, critique."

[Jim__]

3. If you want to be a genuine skeptic, the first thing you need to question ...

… are your own firmly held opinions.

[rug]

4. The more vehement the opinion, the more skeptical the response.