What's the backstory to the "In defense of merit" paper? How did these 29 authors come together? It didn't just happen spontaneously....

It was Thursday night and we were chilling on the intellectual dark web. Jordan was torrenting the James Watson bootleg that just dropped. Pinker was like “You know what doesn’t matter in science anymore?” Cowen guessed “GRE scores?” but no and Lindsay said “the art of the blade?” and everyone was all wait how the fuck did he get back in here and by the time that got sorted it was bedtime but when Pinker dropped a truth bomb “merit” we knew there would be no sleep to be has for us that night.