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Brian Bruya’s attack on the PGR is even a bigger fraud than it first appeared to be

Philosopher David Wallace (Oxford) has expanded his analysis; I will just excerpt one of the new points he makes:

Without comment, [Bruya] excludes from the survey all features of the PGR concerning the world outside the USA. Since 87 of the PGR’s 303 evaluators had current affiliations at non-US institutions, this discards a non-trivial amount of data.

More significantly, Bruya speaks of evaluators being "from" a given school, or "hailing from" a school, or of "the school with" a given number of evaluators. At least to this reader, the clear impression is that what is meant is the current affiliation of the evaluator. In fact, apparently what is meant is that an evaluator is associated with a particular school either if they are currently affiliated at that school, or if their PhD was granted by that school. This fact is not stated anywhere in the main text, so far as I can see, but I was able to deduce it from the x-axis label in Figure 1 (p.663). It’s problematic that this isn’t clear and explicit in the text, and that vague terms like "from" are used in lieu.

In fact, the correlation between number of evaluators and PGR score is almost entirely due to evaluators’ PhD-granting institutions, and has almost nothing to do with their current affiliation.

Prof. Wallace then re-does the analysis showing how this additional fabrication by Bruya distorts his analysis.

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