#1191 - Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay

James Lindsay (0:00)

There is good stuff.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

Live already? Damn, there's no countdown?

Jimmy, you're radical. You're radical. Mr. Boghossian, welcome back.

Peter Boghossian (0:14)

Good to be here, thanks.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Mr. Lindsay.

James Lindsay (0:15)

Good to be here.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

James or Jim, depending upon preferences.

James Lindsay (0:18)

That's right, go with Jim.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

First of all, gentlemen, and there was one other person that you did this with, this whole project.

Peter Boghossian (0:25)

Helen Pluckrose, from England.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Shout out to Helen from England. Is she back across the pond right now?

Peter Boghossian (0:31)

She's across the pond.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

Fish and chips.

Peter Boghossian (0:34)

She's making tea and managing aerial magazine.

James Lindsay (0:37)

That's right.

Joe Rogan (0:37)

Excellent. All right, well, shout out to her as well. Let's explain what you guys did and what's so significant about it, because when I first read it, my first inclination, I had two reactions. One was a huge laugh. I laughed really hard, and then I said, thank God somebody exposed this.

So, tell me, tell me what you guys did.

Peter Boghossian (1:02)

Jim, go for it.

James Lindsay (1:03)

Yeah, so over.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Let's explain who you guys are and what you did.

James Lindsay (1:08)

My background is in mathematics. I bailed out on academia in 2010, though, because I kind of see the writing on the wall.

And so now I am a renegade gender scholar, and I write nonsense about genitals. That's primarily what I do. I mean, I manage a business at home, so I got out of academia.

Peter Boghossian (1:27)

Yeah, and I'm a, I teach philosophy at Portland State University.

And I met Jim years ago. We collaborated, and we've written a number of things over the years, and at some point, it just came to be, we had to do something about this. It was just too ridiculous, and it was translating into the real world. And so we collaborated, and here we are.

Joe Rogan (1:49)

Well, let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous. What we're talking about, what was ridiculous, is there's many fields of studies that you can get legitimate degrees in, that are absolutely preposterous.

Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles, and then they give these degrees, and these people go out in the real world, and they infect things. Their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses. Like you see it infecting. James D'Amore. Yeah, let's explain what you guys did.

James Lindsay (2:31)

Yeah, so we started about a year, I guess a year and a half ago now, it was last summer, we started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent these fields. And so everybody understands what an academic paper is getting out of the gate. This isn't like an op-ed that you dash off for like Washington Post or some magazine or whatever. This is a thing like academics work their careers to write one or two of these a year. And so they're really hard to write. They're supposed to be hard to get published. So we wrote 20 of them in 10 months.

And seven of those got accepted. Four were actually published.

And at least four more. Yeah, we got busted. And at least four more were on track. Maybe five or six more would have gotten in.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

What's the difference between getting accepted and getting published?

James Lindsay (3:19)

So the process with everything in academia is really slow and a lot of people don't know this. So you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.

If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers and that process takes months, often as long as, I mean, with one paper, there was eight months under peer review. So the reviewers look at it, they try to figure out if the arguments are good, they try to figure out if the research is good, they evaluate that, they give extensive comments, they send it back to you, then you have to revise it according to whatever they say, make it better is what's supposed to happen, they made ours crazier. And so then they did every single time.

Peter Boghossian (3:57)

We took the feedback and made the papers just the most extreme thing.

James Lindsay (4:00)

Most extreme things. And so then you send them back. So now you're probably three, four months in just the review process, not to the writing, which should also take months.