#1221 - Jonathan Haidt

Joe Rogan (0:02)

And four, three, two, one. Hello.

Jonathan Haidt (0:08)

Hello, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Thanks for doing this, man. I really appreciate it.

Jonathan Haidt (0:10)

Oh, this is exciting. I don't think I've ever had a conversation as long as we're about to have.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

I've been listening to The Happiness Hypothesis over the last few days, and I really, really enjoy it. I'm really enjoying it. It's really fascinating stuff, man.

But one thing I wanted to talk about, because we're talking about it right before we got started, was what's happening with Peter Rogozian at Portland State University. For folks who don't know the story, he and, I forget, his two colleagues, James Lins, and James Lindsay, they released these fake papers on homoeroticism and rape culture in dog parks, and just really preposterous papers that are almost like an article from The Onion. And some of them, not only did they get peer-reviewed and accepted into these journals, but they got lauded as being these amazing pieces of-

Jonathan Haidt (1:00)

One did, one got.

Joe Rogan (1:01)

Yeah.

Jonathan Haidt (1:01)

Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan (1:02)

And now he's getting in trouble.

Jonathan Haidt (1:04)

That's right.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Yeah, and we were just talking about it, and I just would love to know your thoughts as a professor, like what-

Jonathan Haidt (1:10)

Oh, sure. Yeah, so for those who don't know, I guess most of your listeners probably do, but it was called the Grievance Studies Hoax. Yeah. Because, and this is one of the big issues going on in the Academy, which I hope we'll talk about, is what does it take to have good scholarship? And the argument is that in some fields, as long as you hate the right things and use the right words, you'll get published. And that's not scholarship, that's activism. And so these three people who did this hoax, they were trying to show that that's the case. And so they wrote these papers. One of them was actually a section of Mein Kampf.

And they just substituted in something about feminism for Nazism, something like that. And I don't remember if that one actually got published, but I think it did. At any rate, the point is they were trying to show that some of these fields in the academy are not really about scholarship. They're just about showing that you hate the right things. They're activism. And so there's no way to break in within those closed worlds. So they did a time-honored thing. They did a hoax. They published, they submitted these papers. They made up fake names and a lot of them got accepted. And now what's happening is that the University, Portland State University, which is only one of the three, is a professor, he's an assistant professor, so he's not tenured.

Of course, he has a lot of enemies. And of course, I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but it looks like some of them wanted him investigated for violating the IRB, the Internal Review Board, because the claim is they fabricated data because one of the papers says I inspected the genitals of 10,000 dogs in the dog park.

It's obviously absurd, and 63% of the attempted humping, because the thing of the article was the idea that you go to a dog park and you see dogs humping each other, and they were interpreting this as rape, as doggy rape.

And so he's got all these fake numbers in there. So is that fraud? Is that data fraud? And if you read, so I'm writing a letter, a lot of us are now writing letters in support of Boghossian.

Joe Rogan (3:10)

Thank you for doing that.

Jonathan Haidt (3:11)

But if you read the, they, at his university, a committee was empaneled, and they looked at the literal definition of data fabrication. And it's possible that he does fall under that. But the point of this whole thing, so it's not clear, I can't weigh in on whether or not, technically.

But these rules are put in place to prevent the corruption of the scientific record. And what he was doing was not going to corrupt the scientific record, it was done to correct it. They were doing it to show that there's a huge problem. And then they were going to unveil it. So the question is, is the university going to interpret this in the worst possible way, in the narrowest possible way, and thereby make fools of themselves look like laughing stocks?

Or are they going to use some common sense and recognize this for what it was? It wasn't data fabrication, it wasn't a fraud.