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The further a discipline is from reality, the easier it is to hoax. And the easier it is to hoax, the angrier scholars in that field become once it is hoaxed. The reasons for anger are many. A bogus paper that passes the peer-reviewed process shows, 1) there are either serious problems with the peer-reviewed mechanism in that journal or the entire discipline is operat­ing in make-believe-land, 2) scholars have wasted a considerable amount of time, money, and effort in a bogus field, and most interestingly, 3) they are morally motivated to believe that their scholarly efforts are of indispens­able importance. Successful hoaxes should force every honest scholar to take a long, hard look at their discipline of study and bluntly ask themselves if they should still pursue lines of inquiry that have been exposed as fraudulent.

The best analogue for this are the countless videos on YouTube of martial arts “masters” (almost always in ancient, Eastern disciplines) who effort­lessly destroy wave after wave of assailants. Many of these masters do so without ever having touched their opponents. Attackers just fly through the air, as if by magic. To an onlooker, of course, this is absolutely remarkable. How can one person definitively incapacitate scores of attackers, many of whom are wielding bats and knives?

The answer is that he cannot. The assailants have bought into the delusion that their master has secret powers. Consequently, whether they realize it or not, they are complicit in the charade. It’s all bogus. All of it. The drills. The training. The attacks. They are all untethered to reality. And the more time participants spend practicing their make-believe martial art, the more invested they become—invested in convincing themselves of its efficacy and of their own powers.

All it takes to show that the Emperor has no clothes is to find one individual who actually knows how to fight and who’s not bought into this collective delusion. (Usually that person is an amateur MMA, or Mixed Martial Arts, practitioner.) Then it’s straightforward: with basic rules and a referee, the master fights the Mixed Martial Artist. Time after time after time, the master loses ignominiously, usually in just a few seconds. His disciples are shocked. The most delusional among them manufacture elabor­­ate excuses, from cheating opponents in collusion with the referee, to mystical forces (or big toes) being out of alignment, to chi energy being un­balanced. The rest of us, however, see it for what it is: a group of practitioners who, along with their leader, convinced themselves something worked when it didn’t.

This is almost exactly what happens when hoax papers are accepted in peer-reviewed journals. The master is the field. The willing participants in the charade are the scholars in that field. The hoax paper is the MMA fighter. Submission of the hoax paper is the challenge. Publication of the paper is the result.

In the case of hoax papers, what’s interesting is the reaction of the scholars in the particular field of study. Just as the master’s students, who have invested time, money, and energy into an activity that does not do what they thought it would do, become indignant, incredulous, and outraged, so too do the scholars in the field that was hoaxed. But there is one crucial difference. The master’s students don’t think they’re better people for practicing that particular art. That is, they don’t think the martial art makes them more moral, they just think it make them better fighters. (There are exceptions to this, of course. Some practitioners believe they’re more “moral,” but they interpret “morality” as meaning “possessing higher spiritual purity”.) And this is the crucial distinction. Gender scholars, for example, think they’re better people as a result of doing work they consider to be morally necessary. Consequently, they interpret hoaxes morally, in a way that mathematicians and physicists would not if their journals were hoaxed. That is to say, gender scholars can be fooled by nonsense if it is sufficiently aligned with their moral predilections.

This is why it’s particularly interesting that many martial arts masters solicit challenges and even offer hefty rewards if they can be defeated. They solicit challenges because they believe they can win. And they believe they can win because they believe their art does what they think it can do—defeat resisting opponents. Many postmodern scholars, for example, possess no such honesty because their moral minds have overridden their rational minds. That is, they perceive their discipline and their work within it as morally crucial. This causes them to interpret challenges as immoral and challengers as unethical, or worse. It also causes them, like the master’s most devote disciples, to rationalize hoaxes as failures or flukes.

Just as we can independently figure out if a master’s and his art are legitimate, so too can we figure out if a journal and the field to which it belongs are in lawful alignment with reality. Hoaxes act as correctives, both for the journal and for the discipline. Consequently, as the student of the master should want to know if she’s spending her time wisely, so too should journals and fields encourage hoaxes. In this way can we find out if the things we value are true. More importantly, however, hoax papers can help us figure out if we should value the things we value.

Peter Boghossian

Portland, Oregon