The sting from a sting operation and the Trojan horse of ideology

exposes a more general problem with peer review. The oddest defense? Maybe some of their
papers actually made sense. There is overlap between all of these and most, if not all, are examples
of whataboutism.
Criticism of the work as lacking experimental control
The study is not a good experiment because it was not an experiment. In the same vein, a criticism
of their critique is a poorly conducted experiment -- where are the other critiques to act as control?
Even by PBL’s description (reflexive ethnography), their work could not be considered as having an
experimental design. But I would argue it wasn’t even academic research, it was investigative
journalism or academic policing. Just as a sting operation to expose a criminal gang would involve
hours of preparation of backstories and character work, so that a journalist or agent could pose as a
member of the gang, PBL put hours of work into the submitted papers. The articles were the
undercover agents. Dressing the articles in the target journals’ ideology provided the disguise. There
was no pressure for the journals to accept the bogus papers so if you follow the analogy here,
entrapment is not a defense. The expectation that the study (or investigation) should have included
a control is a standard of evidence not demanded of other claims.
Critic: ‘You lie’
Liar: ‘Who doesn’t?’
This is a red herring, a specific form of ad hominem. To be clear, their work has exposed an issue in
absolute not relative standards. The claims are specific to these disciplines, not comparative across
disciplines. Asking for a control or a comparison is whataboutery. Their exposé not extending to
other academic fields should not be an impediment to dealing with the lack of standards, i.e. the
corruption of scholarship in these disciplines. When government corruption is reported on, a
comparison table is not necessary to bolster the evidence. When financial corruption is exposed in
business, people tend not to ask to see another industry as ‘control’. When moral corruption is
exposed in the Catholic Church, people do not to ask ‘relative to what?’ When academic corruption
has been shown in the past, the defense is never ‘did you check other researchers?’
Criticism of the work as research and the research as lacking ethical approval
If you position any of the above exposures of corruption, or any piece of investigative journalism as
research then you have many points of attack. You can criticize the breadth and depth of the
literature review that informs the research; the rationale for and clarity of the hypotheses; the
appropriateness of the research design; the representativeness and size of the sample; the
psychometric properties of the measures used etc. You can do a lot to ignore the point. After an
investigation, Boghossian’s own institution, Portland State University (PSU) have determined the
work constituted human-subjects research. The requirement for prior ethical approval from an
institutional review board (IRB) rests on whether the work qualifies as research, based on the federal
definition (known as the Common Rule). This definition of research that requires IRB approval raises
serious questions about academic freedom and freedom of speech and the press. The countless
Twitter polls conducted by academics online seem to meet the criteria for needing prior IRB
approval under the Common Rule i.e. Research means a systematic investigation, including research
development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable
knowledge. These polls ‘obtain information’ from ‘living individuals’ and ‘publish the results’.
Whether results are published / intended to be published is a common interpretation of what
constitutes ‘generalizable knowledge’. Interestingly, scholarly and journalistic activities are deemed
not to be research under the Common Rule. This is unlikely to excuse Twitter polls, but it should