Second, my own pretend-social-science prediction (which may of course be disconfirmed) is that Steven Pinker and other prominent ‘skeptics’ are not going to rush to acknowledge that the hoax has gone horribly wrong, even though it obviously has. On the one hand, the skeptics’ own theory of themselves is that they are cool headed, rational assessors of evidence, who hew to scientific standards of proof in developing and testing their personal beliefs while their enemies are prepared to believe in all sorts of gobbledygook. If this theory were to hold true, then one would have expected either (a) that skeptics would have rejected the hoax immediately (perhaps treating it with particular suspicion given that it fit so closely with their political priors about postmodernism and academic feminism) or (b) that if they couldn’t quite get there on their own, they would acknowledge the flaws in the spoof and recalibrate their own beliefs and public arguments as soon as the problems had been pointed out to them.

My prediction starts from the alternative assumption that skeptics, like their opponents, are less a conclave of ice-minded Bayesian ratiocinators than a sports team or political faction looking to win. This means that (like all of us) they are (a) inclined to clutch at anything that has a superficial resemblance to evidence supporting their beliefs, and (b) not to want to let go of it, even when it becomes clear that it isn’t evidence at all, both because of various forms of anchoring bias, and because they don’t want to hand an advantage to their opponents by admitting they were wrong. This leads me to predict that either there will be no acknowledgement of fault by Pinker et Cie, or that if there is some grudging acknowledgment it will be framed so as to assert or imply that the skeptics are right, even if they are wrong.

[Of course, if this is disconfirmed, I could start touting my own ancillary hypothesis to save the phenomenon – that Pinker and people, having read this post or similar arguments, have decided to ‘fess up so as better to prevail in the meta-struggle behind the struggle. That, however, would be cheating on my part.]

The comments on the BHL page are priceless. In response to the obvious bad faith displayed by Boghossian, Jerry Coyne (among others) basically replies “well, we already knew gender studies was garbage so it doesn’t matter that this experiment is worthless.” Tells you all you need to know, basically.

This hoax is just one more brick in the wall of vacuity that surrounds much of culture studies.

Lindsay comes oh-so-close to the epiphany needed to see the fatal flaw in his and his colleague’s project: These two “prongs” aren’t merely in tension; they are inversely correlated. Publishing in Cogent doesn’t merely muddy the waters on their point against gender studies; it completely vitiates it. Cogent isn’t even about gender studies. Not a single “senior editor” of the journal has an academic background in the field. Rather, the various editors’ expertise lies in (I kid you not) tourism, criminology, development planning, geography, sport management and communication sciences.

The most crucial point, therefore, is this: Submitting an article on gender studies to that particular journal and then claiming that its publication proves that gender studies is idiotic is tantamount to a creationist writing a fake article about evolutionary biology, publishing it in an unknown pay-to-publish non-biology journal (whose editorial board includes no one with expertise in evolutionary biology), and then exclaiming, “See! The entire field of evolutionary biology is complete nonsense.” This is puerile gotcha-ism that completely misses the target while simultaneously making, in the case of Boghossian and Lindsay, the skeptic community look like gullible, anti-intellectual fools.

...[A]s 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.

Boghossian and Lindsay pretty clearly don’t pass that test. Their main claim to relevant knowledge in gender studies seems to be citations from Wikipedia and mockingly retweeting abstracts that they, as non-experts, find funny — which is rather like Sarah Palin’s mocking of scientists for studying fruit flies or claiming that Obamacare would entail “death panels.” This kind of unscholarly engagement has rather predictably led to a sizable backlash from serious scholars on social media who have noted that the skeptic community can sometimes be anything but skeptical about its own ignorance and ideological commitments.

If you're out to disprove maleness is the source of all evil, acting like a couple of dicks isn't the way to do it.

The Boghossian and Lindsay hoax falls far short of the goal of demonstrating that gender studies is full of nonsense. But it does expose for all the world to see the problematic condition of the skeptic movement. Someone should try to wrestle it away from the ideologues currently running it, returning it to its core mission of critical analysis, including, and indeed beginning with, self-criticism. Call it Socratic Skepticism(TM).

Update: Steven Pinker has admitted on Twitter that the hoax was a bad idea: “‘Gender studies’ is an academic field that deserves criticism, but The ‘Conceptual Penis’ hoax missed the mark.”