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Academic Drivel Report: Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax
- pervycreeper 11y agoHere's a direct link to Sokal's original paper, which is an incredibly amusing read if you get his references: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2...
- Crito 11y agoIf anyone is only familar with Sokal for his Social Text hoax, you owe it to yourself to check out his book Fashionable Nonsense (originally published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles). While Sokal's hoax exposed inadequacies in Social Text (and similar journals), his book is far more damning. In it he exposes numerous French philosophers/'intellectuals' for the misuse and abuse of scientific and mathematic concepts and terms to obscure the meaning of their texts. The examples he presents range from plausibly the consequence of well-meaning ignorance, to inexcusable outright quackery. Some of his examples may seem like pedantic nitpicking of flowery poetic language, but much of it is truly damning. Excerpt from the introduction: > Some readers will no doubt think that we are taking these texts too seriously. That is true, in some sense. But since these texts are taken seriously by many people, we think that they deserve to be analyzed with the greatest rigor. In some cases we have quoted rather long passages, at the risk of boring the reader, in order to show that we have not misrepresented the meaning of the text by pulling sentences out of context.
- dragandj 11y agoThis reminds me to kick in with my own achievement: Three years ago I published a hoax article that was accepted and published in one of Thomson Reuters indexed journals. For a good laugh, take a look at the copy freely available here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORMATIVE-HERMENEUTIC-HEURISTICS-FOR-PROCESSING-RANDOM-DATA https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORM... I wrote a serious analysis of that hoax (including motivation) and published it in a proper journal. Unfortenately, it is behind a paywall, but that is what sci-hub.io is for: http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4 http://link.springer.com.sci-hub.io/article/10.1007/s11948-0...
- elliotec 11y agoMy favorite part is the pictures.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dragandj 11y agoDamn youngsters! Nobody reads the text anymore...
- hoodoof 11y agoOh dear. I founded a successful company based on the theories outlined in this paper.
- stfu 11y agoAre you running a publishing mill?
- alphydan 11y agoGotta love the references too, with the wink to Sokal :)
- huj123 11y agoReminds me of a winner of the World’s Worst Sentence award: >"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
- danieltillett 11y agoCan you translate this for me? What in the hell is this about?
- curveship 11y agoSure. This is actually a pretty standard summary of the shift away from structuralist social theories. Social structures tend to be pretty stable: the same people and forces stay in power for a while. How should we think about that stability? One way is to imagine that society is like a building: a solid structure that preserves those people and forces in power. It's stable because it's rigid, and time doesn't affect it much. But there's a second option. Think of a standing wave in a river, like the kind that whitewater kayakers like to surf on: it's not rigid at all, but it's still "stable," welling up continually at the same spot. So is our society structured like a building, or like a standing wave? If we go with the standing wave idea, that brings up a lot of new questions. We start wondering about dynamics, flow and motion. We also start wondering about the river bottom: is there a big rock under there causing the wave, or does it just happen to emerge from the otherwise random arrangement of smaller rocks?
- Crito 11y ago2000 years on, and we are still arguing over the Ship of Theseus
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- aaronbrethorst 11y agoThis reminds me of Neal Stephenson's description of "War as Text" in "Cryptonomicon" just a bit too much.
- conistonwater 11y ago> I assume the panel was successful, although I never heard from the organizer or any of the other panelists inquiring why I didn’t make it. It would be interesting to know what the organizers themselves thought of the abstract, because the editors' response to the Sokal article was quite amazing [1, 2]. [1] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf [2] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/reply.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/reply.html
- avs733 11y agoI've read about this incident before, and as someone who transitioned from the 'hard' sciences (specifically semiconductor engineering) to the 'soft' or social sciences (specifically education and economics) it has been a bit disquieting. First, for Dr. Sokal, I am a bit...bemused or surprised I guess I would say...at what seems like a quite childish simplification and overall process. This was not a peer review journal, as is implied in most coverage of the incident. Further, I strongly suspect (as I have seen from my former colleagues when I discuss my new field with them) Sokal showed an enormous amount of hubris (as Robbins and Ross note "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist...On the other hand, we recognize that professional scientists like Sokal do feel that their beliefs and their intellectual integrity are threatened by the diverse work done in the field of science studies"). To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous. It is a bit as if Sokal found himself laughing at the naked emperor, unaware that it was a mirror. Second, I have always wondered what about what this incident, and its references, says about other disciplines understanding and approach to social sciences and fields like philosophy and psychology. We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed? Engineering colleagues I have look at the fact that things are rethought, changed, dismissed, in conflict, can't be confirmed, etc. is seen as a flaw whereas I see it a reality. Much of the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain. True social experiments are difficult or legally/ethically untennable. When they are conducted, they are often conducted in ways that try to minimize outside variables...but reality isn't that simple. Human beings don't share a universal 'ground state' from which decisions or behaviors emminate.
- p4wnc6 11y agoIf the true purpose of academic hierarchy is for wealthy elites to compete through the status of affiliation, especially with whomever has the most fashionable, progressive opinions and presents them in the most esoteric and obfuscated way yet can still have others call it "art," then most of the bad behavior of this post seems to just be rational business on the part of the academics. As much as we like to talk about rewarding academics for actually making breakthroughs that have positive effects in the lives of most others, that is all just talk. Want we really want is to collect academics like they are elusive Pokemon cards ... the more obscure their abilities, the better, as long as they can be plausibly connected to whatever cause, regime, or attitude is favored in the in-group where that academic's works wield influence.
- carbocation 11y agoAs an academic trainee in the life sciences, I am curious to know if you are positing this question across all disciplines.
- p4wnc6 11y agoMy personal belief is that it is a significant effect across all disciplines, but that the objective nature of some disciplines offers occasional ways to combat it. My own academia experiences were in machine learning and image processing, and even there it was a heavy competition for demo ware. All ideas were basically vetted for their plausibility of leading to a TED talk or a conference keynote demo. If you proposed something or showed passion for something, but it wasn't clear that you could talk it about it while wearing a black turtleneck, then it got rejected pretty quickly. Little if any time was ever given to whether the fundamental questions were good ones or whether their answers constituted value-adding directions for humanity to move in. And don't even get me started on teaching. I once got yelled at by an adviser because I spent the time to write up my recitation notes for my probability students in TeX, instead of just scanning my unreadable hand-written notes. Good luck convincing them that investing time into how to teach something is worthwhile. The process of moving past qualifying exams did include some objective hurdles of study (sort of quality control for the university's or department's brand) but it largely consisted of convincing certain key status figures that you were On Their Team and would be a good spokesperson for the sorts of positions and ideas they most wanted to affiliate with. It will surely vary by discipline, geography, political climate, etc. But I think this is the dominant reason why we have academics at all. I do not think that the well-worn stories about funding fundamental research for society's benefit are even remotely true.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoI'm sure I'm not the only one to notice that not turning up was the perfect way to deliver a talk "On the Absence of Absences."
- jkyle 11y agoIt's a Glass Bead Game. [1] One of my favorites. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
- justifier 11y agoi commented on the scihub article(o) posted earlier today by suggesting a possible solution to the issues that research publication is facing right now the idea is to build a marketplace for peer review around an open publication, alike arxiv.org, that confers reputation and encourages multiple reviews if a person hires a peer reviewer to review their work or someone else's, but you are skeptical of the review, you can hire a reviewer that you respect to do an independent review, one which could uphold or dispute the original review, or even illuminate some further clarification such a community would address the issue of these 'hoax' and convoluted papers directly (o) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177957
- musgrove 11y ago"I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life." He really should have added "...within my sociology department." He has a high opinion of himself if he thinks he can speak for academia in its entirety. Also, obviously this guy takes his academic reputation, job and profession not seriously at all:
- vixen99 11y agoNo, not obvious at all. If you took the trouble to confront the points he makes instead of hand waving you might have something to contribute to this discussion. "<<Most>> of their attacks are off-base, but there is a <<grain of truth>> in their claims. Academics who believe in the mission of higher education—teaching, research, and public service—need to defend academic freedom, but <<some>> of our colleagues have to clean up their acts, because it is difficult to defend the indefensible."
- pcrh 11y agoTIL "agnotology", "the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
- rectang 11y agoChicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chickens. https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf
- peter303 11y agoThe tech world is not immune from such drivel too. YCombinator is likely inudated with half baked startup ideas, a copy of a copy of an existing app, or a group of 20-somethings trying to slve another trivial problem of 20-something existance.
- mrharrison 11y agoA lot of this could be due to a poor diet. The author or anybody in a similar situation should look into this as well. Eat less carbs to avoid insulin swings, etc. It's amazing how a better diet can affect your mood.
- PaulHoule 11y agoThere is always going to be a fringe where bad papers get published and bad conference admissions accepted. Regularly the CS colloquem gets speakers who do not know what they are talking about and should not be there. The CS people are really polite, the only people who will ask them hard questions are the refugees from the physics department. Even though we are not speaking terms anymore sometimes I team up with the meanest physicist in the world to methodically disassemble such a speaker like two crabs on a starfish. Your story shares a lot with the "imposter syndrome" in that you are failing to internalize the achievement because it is fake, you are a fake, etc. L Ron Hubbard wrote some crazy books and managed to wreck the lives of millions. Donald Trump could be president. There are far worse scandals than anything here