The grievance studies affair

2018

James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian submitted twenty deliberately absurd papers to journals in gender, race and sexuality studies; seven were accepted before Wall Street Journal reporting ended the project. Critics noted the sample was not controlled and that acceptance rates in any field can be gamed, so the affair is better read as a provocation than as an experiment. Frequently described as proving peer review is broken across the humanities. It had no control group and no comparison discipline, which its own critics, and some sympathisers, pointed out at the time.