https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NtroGK9D6-o
Peter and I had this wild-brained idea to write as many fake academic articles for feminist theory, gender studies, you know, all these kind of woke postmodern journals, put them in the highest ones we could get and see how many we could get published. And we had planned roughly two years. Our goal was that we were going to start in August of 2017 writing these things as fast as we could write them, and we were going to write until sometime around a year later, some summer 2018, we would stop writing and finish the academic process on wherever we got and we’d see what happened. So when we wrote the 20th paper, which we finished in June of 2018, we called it. No more no more new ones. Let’s just finish these, do what we have to do to get them, you know, into the world and see where it goes. But then the article got published on us in October, so we didn’t see all the way to the end. So we wrote 20. Six of them were a learning process. They’re utter failures. I think they prove lots of interesting things. It’s maybe a discussion for another day. But then there are these 14 others. Seven of those had been accepted. Seven more were under peer review. A sociologist wrote an article, I wish I could remember who it was, but soon after this happened, and he said that he anticipated that either four or five of those seven, based on what the peer review had said and the quality of them, four or five of those seven probably would have been accepted as well. But the ones that wouldn’t were also the earliest among that batch of 14. So you got good at writing fake articles. We cracked the code. At one point, I wonder if chat GPT could do that. Yes, no question. Absolutely no question. I’m 100% confident that it could write papers. And read them. We don’t need the academics at all. The chat GPT can write the papers and read them. That’s right. And grade them for that matter. Yeah. So this project just consumed my life. An academic article, a new full 8,000 word, fully cited academic article, we covered 15 subdomains of academic pursuit across the 20 papers. So we’re all over the place having to read as fast as we can read and write as fast as we can write and cobble these things together. It was all we did. And so I couldn’t think. Plus, I knew I was doing something productive. And then, of course, why did you think it was productive? We thought that, you know, once we started to get success, it was very clear that we had figured something out that was proved against the real world. I mean, academic peer review isn’t exactly the real world, the real world. But it is the system, the actual system where the real thing that certifies knowledge or whatever we pretend this corrupt system does, where that is. And we were in. We cracked the code. We said at one point, I said at one point, I am convinced now that I could have a 100% success rate. Every paper I write, I can get in. I can pick a topic, write whatever I want, and I can get it in. Anything. Gentrification of cornbread was the next one I had planned. Just something ridiculous. Right. This was a humanities focus. When you were doing your PhD work and the previous work on that in the STEM fields, had you had any philosophical interest or interest in the humanities at that point? Or did this all develop after you stopped pursuing them? I mean, very little. I took a philosophy class as an elective as an undergraduate and had a tremendously good time with it. But that was it. Oh, right. So this really wasn’t so that’s so interesting. You hopped out of that mathematical world into massage therapy and into the humanities. And to the humanities. Yeah. Right. And you were really coming at it from from the perspective of a STEM mind. You had a STEM mind. Right. That’s interesting. You know, a lot of the greatest psychologists in the early part of the 20th century were engineers. They established all the statistical techniques that all the social scientists use. I’m an interesting mathematician, though, a different kind. There are 13 different branches of mathematics. I’m what’s called an enumerative combinatorics, a combinatoricist. That’s a lot of syllables. Enumerative combinatorics gives these very kind of Baroque counting arguments. The combinatoricists will be upset that I called it Baroque. All the rest of the mathematicians will cheer that I said this, that I’ve confessed this. But we give these things that are called counting arguments so that we say that an equation is true, an identity is true, because both sides of it count the same thing in two different ways. And so you describe it counts on this side of the equation. It counts it this way. On this side of the equation, it counts it that way. A simple example without doing a bunch of math is that if you don’t know that the square numbers, one, four, nine, sixteen, so on, twenty five, the square numbers obviously count the number of squares on a square grid and, you know, n by n. Well, it turns out that the square numbers equal the sum of the first n odd numbers. So one, then one plus three is four, one plus three plus five is nine, one plus three plus five is seven, is sixteen, and on add nine get twenty five, and you can see how it goes. But what that is, is you count the corner, that’s one, then you count the three that go around it, that’s three more, then you count one, well, it’s two by two, so there’s two, then there’s two, and there’s one, so that’s going to be the next odd number. And then it’s three, three and one, so two threes and a one, the next odd number. That’s it. That’s a combinatorial argument. Is that akin to two different measurement techniques? Would you say? Well, yeah, in a sense, in a sense. Because that’s one of the ways we triangulate on truth, right, is we use multiple measurement systems to abstract out the same pattern. They call that construct validation and construct validation in psychology. Well, psychologists have tried to wrestle with the idea of how you know when a concept is real. And the reason they wrestled with that was because of the issue of diagnosis. Like, for example, is anxiety and depression, are they the same thing, are they different? Right. Well, they overlap to some degree. And then when you’re starting to ask about whether two things are the same or different, you’re asking about the nature of reality and you’re also asking about the nature of measurement. And what psychologists concluded, essentially, was that to establish something as real, imagine there’s a pattern there, you needed a set of qualitatively different measurement techniques, all of which converged on analysis of the same pattern. It’s what your senses do, right? Because your senses provide five qualitatively distinctive reports. And if they converge, you presume, it’s like a definition of real, five converging reports using qualitatively distinct measurement processes constitutes reality. Yeah, sure. Right, right. So it seems to me there’s an analog there of the equation issue, that it’s true if one counting method produces this result and another counting method produces this result, that constitutes an equation. And those two things are, what would you say? Is equal the same as real there? I don’t know if that’s a fair thing to say. Equivalent is the word. Equivalent, right. Equivalent is an equivalence relation. Right, so they’re the same. Yeah, yeah. So as it turns out, this gave me a tremendous amount of background. I think, how does math help what I do? A lot of background in detecting a pattern and being able to articulate it in a less abstract way as to what it is. So I would find patterns and say, how can I describe this pattern, not just in one way, but in two ways at the same time? And you were doing that in the papers? So I read the papers and I detect a pattern of how they use language and how they cite and who they think are important. And then I just go reproduce this in another way. And of course, you’re building a little chat GPT in your imagination. More or less, yes. Definitely. Absolutely. And it was extraordinarily successful. Another, by the way, thing that math helps with is mathematicians are pretty particular about definitions. Yes. The most. Right, of course. Because whatever we say is a definition, all of the logical conclusions of that definition in the axiomatic system are necessarily true by consequence forever, universally. Right. So if you get it wrong a little bit, if you say, for example, a prime number is a number that’s divisible by one in itself, that’s a very common elementary school definition. That’s not adequate because it leaves open the question, is one prime? And the answer to that is no, one is not a prime number. So the actual definition of prime, when you get very cautious, is it is a number with exactly two factors, which sounds like the same thing, but it’s not the same thing because it removes that one question of ambiguity upon which all expressions of things like the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Right, so deeper axioms, right. Well, so, OK, so partly what you’re doing as you’re diving into the underlying religious substrate is to go farther and farther down into the axioms. Well, yes. But it also, I have the ability to read them and when they misuse words, I can figure out what they must mean by the word they’re using. And then I can go start to check that to see. Right, right, right. Like equity, for example. Like equity or diversity or democracy or actually literally almost every word or power. Yeah. And so. Impression. Yeah, yeah, it’s really useful to figure out what those words mean. So that STEM mind ends up having been, it was trained in kind of these two particular skills. And I think I had a proclivity. There’s definitely why does anybody become a kind of fringe branch of mathematics where it’s hard to get a job if you apply for them? Because there’s just not that many of them. Why would you do that? It’s because you have a proclivity for it. There’s a selection bias into that. You’re interested in it. You’re good at it. You’re talented in it. I thought it was the most fun thing in mathematics. I could have been an algebraist. I was good at algebra. Algebra is very employable. It’s very necessary. It’s very useful. I didn’t want to be an algebraist. I wanted to be a combinatorialist, which why? Because I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed getting to think that way, challenging myself to think that way about patterns. 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That’s E X P R E S S V P N dot com slash Jordan. Why T. And get three extra months free expressvpn.com slash Jordan. Why T. And you were able to you think you were able to take that proclivity and then apply it to what you were doing in humanities. And oddly enough, what you ended up doing in the humanities was producing parodies of humanities papers. And and and so you found that intellectually compelling. What what was your what was your motivation outside of the intellectual compulsion? Now you talked a little bit about the right that you were annoyed about the fact that when you were teaching at the university, you were called on essentially to falsify the teaching process. So that must be lurking around in there in the background somewhere. But what were you and Pluck Rose and Bogosian conspiring about, so to speak, when you were producing these false papers? Like, why the hell were you doing it? Because people have asked. No, yeah. Just causing trouble. No, it’s a very simple answer. We had seen some of these things because we were involved in the new atheism movement and it got attacked by this, you know, woke virus very early on for anybody knew what to call it. We were all saying third wave radical feminism back back then. That was the phrase. And I think you were the only person saying something like postmodern neo-Marxism or something like this. And so we were we were looking into this and we would criticize, you know, this deviates from, you know, standards of, you know, free liberal society. This is oppressive. This is against free speech. We would offer these criticisms. And you know what we would get back if we didn’t get called white or male or something stupid. We would get the most substantive criticism we would get is you’re not credentialed. You don’t have a PhD in this. You can’t criticize it. So we thought, well, you can delegitimize a fraudulent enterprise. We started to read the papers and thought that they were fraudulent and it was an emergency because they were dipping into the sciences. Well, that made you weird to begin with that you were reading the papers, because I think 80 percent is it 80 percent of humanity’s papers are never cited once. Somebody asked a question at one point. You said this is sexist. What sexist? And I said, well, sexism is systemic. This feminist woman was talking to me and I said, what does that mean? And she sent me a feminist theory paper about feminist about sexism. And I read it and I came back to her and I said, OK, I kind of get this concept. But why do you just why don’t you say it’s this is systemic sexism and distinguish from what most people think of as sexism? She said, no, it is sexism. It’s the same thing. But they’re clearly not the same thing. So this made me curious what’s going on. And then I started to read some of their papers here and there. I wasn’t that invested in it yet. 2014 and 50. It also means it’s interesting, too. It also means that all these. See, I’ve noticed this tendency among creative liberal types, right, is that they’re very, very good at producing ideas. Yes. They’re not very good at editing them. Yes. Right. Right. And so and those are actually separate neurological functions, by the way. Yes. So the two different brain areas do that. And so one’s a producer and the other is an inhibitor, an editor. And so. If you’re in dialogue with someone, true dialogue, you produce your ideas, but the other person can act as a critic. That’s what peer review is supposed to do. But if no one’s reading your papers, there’s no editing function. And so that creativity can just go everywhere, produce false positives, which is what unconstrained creativity does. Sure. It’s like, well, that’s a new idea. It’s like, yeah, but it’s stupid. Why is it stupid? Because if you act that out in the world, you’ll die. Yes. That’s like the definition of stupid. That is right. Right. And you’re supposed to kill your stupid ideas before you act them out. And you do that with critical thinking. And if these papers aren’t being read, they’re not being criticized. That also means that the people who are producing the ideas don’t get to hone their ideas because they don’t get to learn how to distinguish between the smart ideas and the ideas that aren’t so good. Right. Yeah. OK. There’s no iron to sharpen the iron. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. There’s nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff.