7 ms·

Anatomy of a Hoax

120 points by mef 10y ago

grabcocque 10y ago
Given that, for various reasons, a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us, you might well ask why you'd think academics would be well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. If anything I'd suggest quite the opposite.
- mcguire 10y ago
  By and large, nobody is well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. This particular example is rather egregious, since it involves the "critical studies" people, who were meandering around in territory that they were completely ill-equipped to navigate. But there are plenty of other examples from academia and elsewhere, where the recipients of the hoax were supposed to thoroughly understand the details. Further, those hoaxes outside academia, such as Theranos and Bernie Madoff, tend to be directly harmful rather than merely embarassing---one would think the victims would have been more careful.
tsunamifury 10y ago
Just from reading the summary, it feels like his joke had some strains of truth to it, and his fear of the impact of what it would mean to take that seriously caused him to frame it sarcastically instead. What a shame he chose to not take the idea of rebuilding science in post-truth philosophical world and instead made it a crude joke.
- Marazan 10y ago
  Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.
  - tsunamifury 10y ago
    Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
    - Marazan 10y ago
- mcguire 10y ago
  You should read the rest of the article; the history involved does a pretty good job of explaining what happened and why: "ALAN SOKAL: In the spring of 1994, I saw a reference to the book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. My first thought was, Oh, no, not another one of those right-wing diatribes that tell how the Marxist deconstructionist professors are taking over the universities and brainwashing our children. There had been a whole spate of such books in the early 1990s — Dinesh D’Souza and others. "My second thought was "academic left and its quarrels with science"? I mean, that’s a little weird. I’m an academic leftist. So I decided to read it. I learned about a corner of the academy where people were employing either deconstructionist literary theory or extreme social constructivist sociology of science to make comments about both the content of science and the philosophy of science, often in gross ignorance of the science. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the library and check out the original works that Gross and Levitt were criticizing to see whether they were being fair. I found that in about 80 percent of the cases, in my judgment, they were." ... "I thought, well, I could write an article to add to the Gross and Levitt critique, and it would probably disappear into a black hole. So I had the idea of writing an article that would be both a parody and an admittedly uncontrolled experiment: I would submit the article to a trendy journal and see whether it would be accepted." ... "BARBARA EPSTEIN, professor emerita, history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz: A friend of mine at UC-Davis said that she wanted to tell me about something if I would promise absolute secrecy. She said there is a physicist at NYU who has written an article that purports to be by a scientist who has converted to poststructuralism, and actually, it’s a hoax. "She said he wants to find a humanist who knows something about poststructuralism, can’t stand it, is a leftist and feminist, to work with. He wanted to write a piece outing himself, and explaining why he had done it. I said, "Absolutely. Sign me up."" ... "EPSTEIN: ...By that time [after the article was published, but before Sokal's second article exposing the hoax], I really was persona non grata. It was very clear that I was a minority in my department, and not only a minority but a target. I had an article in Socialist Review in which I criticized poststructuralism. It had become a crusade and an orthodoxy and a juggernaut, and the more I was part of that culture, the more I disliked it. The emotional atmosphere around this wasn’t that different than the emotional atmosphere around the election right now. People on two sides of the fence were barely talking to each other."
DanBC 10y ago
If you enjoyed reading this you might also enjoy the BBC Radio Four Programme "The Reunion", which reunites a group of people involved in a moment of modern history. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc For example: Dolly the Sheep http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw The 1983 Hitler Diaries forgeries: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj The Centre for Alternate Technology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k
- tomcam 10y ago
  Also the reunification of Berlin: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224
ruminasean 10y ago
Wait, does it bother anyone else right off the bat that the fishing line in the pic accompanying the story is tied incorrectly around the eye of the hook? I'm the only photographer here? I'll see myself out.
mcguire 10y ago
Good article! For those who haven't finished it, here's the bottom line: "ELLEN SCHRECKER, professor emerita of history, Yeshiva University: What Sokal was showing was the downgrading of academic expertise. Historians go into the archives and we interview people and try to find out what happened from the evidence — rather than relying on secondhand information. Basically it’s a confrontation between a trained mind and a piece of evidence. This is what physicists do, this is what biologists do. This is what literary theorists do, too, but I think what happened to them is they ran out of new documents, and so they began to poach on the rest of us. [...] "What really bothered me was the inability of Alan Sokal and the other people who were responding to him to realize how this was playing out in the larger world. The hoax was very clever. But then he should have made the broader point about what’s really happening out there. I don’t think that things would have changed if he hadn’t written it, but he didn’t look around him and see that academic expertise was already under attack. Today is the culmination of 40 years of attacks on academic expertise. It’s fine if you want to make fun of deconstruction, but it’s not fine if you make fun of climate change. "BÉRUBÉ: It’s widely accepted now that among the most controversial things you can do on a campus is deal with gender and sexuality, the Middle East, or climate change. I mean, they’re not exempt, the scientists. I didn’t think they would be, but it took some years for my argument to take hold. I said, the forces that are this anti-intellectual and this skeptical of what we do on campus, they’ll get wind of you soon enough. "SOKAL: There is in American culture a persistent anti-intellectual current, which looks down on the pointy-headed professors and is happy to pick up on any excuse to have a laugh at them. That was the negative side. "BÉRUBÉ: The echo chamber that publishes Sokal’s essay is so much less pernicious than the echo chamber that believes Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of a pizza parlor. Now we’re talking something well beyond epistemic closure and something much more like total batshit. "SCHRECKER: What we’re reaping is an incredible moment of anti-intellectualism in American life, and it’s dangerous." My take is that Sokal wanted to attack a specific, limited movement, although he didn't necessarily understand the nuances of who he was attacking. However, the result of his hoax was to give a freakin' big stick to them as want to attack those ivory tower eggheads with things like, "a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us".
- 10y ago
RodericDay 10y ago
The wikipedia page for Sokal Affair has a lovely section called "similar incidents" > Christoph Bartneck, an Associate Professor in Information Technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited to submit a paper to the 2016 International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics organised by ConferenceSeries. With little knowledge of nuclear physics, he used iOS's auto-complete function to write the paper, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence,[24] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple).[25] A sample sentence from the abstract for the resulting manuscript was: "The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids"[24] and the 516-word abstract contained the words "good" and "great" a combined total of 28 times (and is available online).[25] Despite making no sense, the work was accepted within three hours of submission and a conference registration fee of US$1099 requested.[24][25] The incident was compared to an earlier case where Peter Vamplew, from Federation University in Victoria, had a manuscript containing only the phrase "Get me off your fucking mailing list" accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.[24][26] ConferenceSeries is associated with the OMICS Publishing Group,[27] which produces open access journals widely regarded as predatory, and has been accused of moving into "predatory meetings".[28] Bartneck said he was "reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science," given the poor quality of the review process and the high cost of attendance.[24] > "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?": In 2013 John Bohannon wrote in Science about a "sting operation" he conducted in which he submitted "a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable", to 304 open-access publishers.[30] 157 journals accepted the paper. There have been some objections to the sting's methodology and about what conclusions can be drawn from it.[31][32] > SCIgen program: a paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). The conference announced the prank of having accepted the article as not peer reviewed, despite none of the three assigned peer-reviewers having submitted an opinion about its fidelity, veracity, or accuracy to its subject. The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were ignorant of the Sokal Affair until after submitting their article. --- It's pretty incredible how years and years on, techies with an axe to grind continue to milk this story to get their "two minutes hate" on liberal arts.
ComputerGuru 10y ago
Speaking of hoaxes, forgive me for going off on a tangent, but this is my favorite hoax: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_mount_edgecumbe/ http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_moun...
- mabbo 10y ago
  > Porky's favorite response to the prank came in 1980. He received a letter from an attorney in Denver, inside of which was a clipping from the Denver Post with a photo of Mt. St. Helens erupting. Attached was a note that read, "This time, you little bastard, you've gone too far."
samirillian 10y ago
Always have mixed feelings about this debacle, leaning towards positive dislike for Sokal's little trick. Despite his claims to the contrary, I simply don't believe he's serious. Plenty of articles come through HN criticizing the manner in which the scientific community legitimizes bad research, or vice versa. Sokal's critiques always seem to involve the least charitable possible interpretation of a philosopher's words, or simple misconstrual. For example, is it really so unreasonable to analogize Einstein's theories of relativity to epistemological/moral relativity?
- Aqueous 10y ago
  I agree that Sokal's point of view was uncharitable to the majority of post-structuralists, but I can attest to the fact there is a definite strain of radical relativism on today's campuses. It goes hand in hand with a reflexive questioning of authority, an attitude that views all authority as illegitimate, even when that authority is derived from legitimate learning and knowledge. And when that attitude confronts science, it becomes a rationalization to challenge or deny universal theories that have been proven repeatedly by experiment as somehow merely a 'local' knowledge framework, or 'culturally constructed' or 'patriarchal' and therefore something to be suspicious of. This opens the door to treating all scientific assertions as equivalent and suspect. And you can draw a straight line from that to the anti-intellectualism that dominates our social discourse today. As to your question, in many ways calling Einstein's theory 'relativity' was a misnomer because it was actually a statement about the absolute laws of physical reality - laws that don't change with perspective or reference frame. For example, for special relativity, the absolute laws of electrodynamics require the speed of light to remain constant in every reference frame. And these laws entail that space and time must change with reference frame in order for the laws of physics to remain absolute. For these reasons, the relativity of physics bears little resemblance to moral relativism.
  - samirillian 10y ago
    But that's just the thing, I don't think post-structuralism and platonism are mutually exclusive, and neither would, say, deleuze. "Things are absolutely relative to their frame of reference." I would consider that formulation perfectly consistent with plenty of, say, morally relativist interpretations. And Kant's "Newtonian" lack of relativism is exactly the shortcoming his categorical imperative.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
CalChris 10y ago
You want an anatomy of a hoax? When Dickens Met Dostoyevsky. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-dostoevsky/ http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-do...
ianamartin 10y ago
The problem here is that there are, in fact, tons of academic research and publication endeavors that are largely bullshit. But there are overall even more tons that are legitimate. The arts and humanities don't own all the bullshit, nor do the sciences have a lock on the good stuff. There are deep problem in the academic world. The incentives are broken, and the pay is quite low. There have been movements towards "science-ing" (for lack of a better word) almost every area of thought, and the results are not good. In music theory and composition, there were attempts to "science" music back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For a solid few decades, you couldn't get a job as a music theory or comp professor without subscribing to musical set theory, integrated serialism, or 12-tone row methods of composition. There was a specific attempt to "elevate" the study of music to the realm of math and science, to use stochastic methods and musical "proofs" to show the perfection of a piece of music. It was all ridiculous, the music created by these methods was unlistenable and unapproachable, which the proponents of this movement used as an excuse to say, "well, if you understood it better, you'd like it more. But you're an idiot, so you don't get it." Similar things are happening in a lot of areas. The rise of statistics as a tool and the easy accessibility of software that allows people with no understanding of how these methods are supposed to work let's people who are basically out of ideas to come up with all kinds of pseudo-scientific-sounding thoughts to go p-value fishing and publish papers that are literally garbage. They don't just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige. If you're working in the humanities, the fastest way to a raise is to spew some bullshit out on a paper with some numbery-type words, some stats, and a theory that's the falsifiable to begin with, but can't be argued with by your peers because it's all completely unintelligible to begin with. Your coworkers wont call you on it because they don't want to lose out on the next big thing, and no one else will call you on it because actual scientists won't admit that they don't know enough about humanities buzzwords to tell bullshit from good ideas. You end up with clowns like Deepak Chopra saying things that almost anyone can tell are utter bullshit, but almost no one will complain about. The vast majority of academics are like my parents: they teach German or history, they've been doing it well for around 50 years, and they don't pretend to think the world needs new research about der, die, or das when it comes to gender agreement. And there are the occasional few who look at gender agreement and see an opportunity to get a quick raise by writing about how gender agreement in the German language is sexist according to x percent of people they surveyed on yougov who don't actually speak German. There is a legitimate problem in certain parts of the humanities, and as someone who only ever studied violin, music theory, and philosophy--now working in the tech world--it's disappointing to see the humanities and liberal arts get a bad rap. The problem is systemic though. It comes not from a lack of diligence, but from the fact that this kind of irresponsible research is strongly incentivized by the university structure. From pay to collegial respect to tenure: calling bullshit out is not encouraged. It is frowned upon. If there is a tragedy in American Universities, it is exactly this: a place that promotes tenure as a mechanism to ensure free thought and the mutual exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal has turned into a system where disagreeing with obvious bullshit is a big mistake.
bitwize 10y ago
It's been pointed out before but: a) Social Text is a pleb-tier journal b) Sokal pressured them into publishing his junk article So it's not the home run against postmodernism that Sokal and his fans thought it was.
- golergka 10y ago
  Your points are about the article being admitted in the journal. But wasn't the bigger point of the fraud about the reaction after publication of the article?
- mikeash 10y ago
  a) is an excellent point, but why is b) relevant? If they'll bow to outside pressure to publish nonsense, that's still bad.
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  How did Sokol manage to pressure the journal? Or did you just make that up out of nothing because you don't want to admit the journal made a mistake all on its own?
woodandsteel 10y ago
It's important to understand that structuralism-post-structuralism-postmodernism is basically a far-left political movement. When the workers failed to overthrow capitalism, when the Soviet Union turned into a dreary dictatorship, and when the newly-independent colonies of Africa failed turn into social paradises, many leftist intellectuals looked around for a new way to attack capitalism. What they came up with was a social-constructivist, radical relativist attack that goes back to Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, and ultimately Plato's two-world view of reality. This was supposed to work because the argument for capitalism is based on a belief that reality is such that it works better for increasing human well-being than any other economic system. What is interesting is that the postmodernists are themselves not really radical relativists. They believe, for instance, that famine is a real phenomenon and that it is truly bad. Their idea was that deconstructionist arguments would cleanse people of their capitalist ideology, and then their minds would be open to see the truths of socialism. Needless to say, this strategy was a failure.
- tokai 10y ago
  It is also important to understand that the hoax was not a critique of the whole political left. Sokal identify with the left himself.[0] The hoax was aimed at a specific group of left-wing literary scholars. [0] Last paragraph, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/li...
  - woodandsteel 10y ago
    That's a good point. I need to include it when I write about these issues.

120 points by mef 10y ago

Given that, for various reasons, a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us, you might well ask why you'd think academics would be well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. If anything I'd suggest quite the opposite.

mcguire 10y ago
By and large, nobody is well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. This particular example is rather egregious, since it involves the "critical studies" people, who were meandering around in territory that they were completely ill-equipped to navigate. But there are plenty of other examples from academia and elsewhere, where the recipients of the hoax were supposed to thoroughly understand the details. Further, those hoaxes outside academia, such as Theranos and Bernie Madoff, tend to be directly harmful rather than merely embarassing---one would think the victims would have been more careful.

tsunamifury 10y ago

Just from reading the summary, it feels like his joke had some strains of truth to it, and his fear of the impact of what it would mean to take that seriously caused him to frame it sarcastically instead. What a shame he chose to not take the idea of rebuilding science in post-truth philosophical world and instead made it a crude joke.

Marazan 10y ago
Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
  - Marazan 10y ago
mcguire 10y ago
You should read the rest of the article; the history involved does a pretty good job of explaining what happened and why: "ALAN SOKAL: In the spring of 1994, I saw a reference to the book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. My first thought was, Oh, no, not another one of those right-wing diatribes that tell how the Marxist deconstructionist professors are taking over the universities and brainwashing our children. There had been a whole spate of such books in the early 1990s — Dinesh D’Souza and others. "My second thought was "academic left and its quarrels with science"? I mean, that’s a little weird. I’m an academic leftist. So I decided to read it. I learned about a corner of the academy where people were employing either deconstructionist literary theory or extreme social constructivist sociology of science to make comments about both the content of science and the philosophy of science, often in gross ignorance of the science. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the library and check out the original works that Gross and Levitt were criticizing to see whether they were being fair. I found that in about 80 percent of the cases, in my judgment, they were." ... "I thought, well, I could write an article to add to the Gross and Levitt critique, and it would probably disappear into a black hole. So I had the idea of writing an article that would be both a parody and an admittedly uncontrolled experiment: I would submit the article to a trendy journal and see whether it would be accepted." ... "BARBARA EPSTEIN, professor emerita, history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz: A friend of mine at UC-Davis said that she wanted to tell me about something if I would promise absolute secrecy. She said there is a physicist at NYU who has written an article that purports to be by a scientist who has converted to poststructuralism, and actually, it’s a hoax. "She said he wants to find a humanist who knows something about poststructuralism, can’t stand it, is a leftist and feminist, to work with. He wanted to write a piece outing himself, and explaining why he had done it. I said, "Absolutely. Sign me up."" ... "EPSTEIN: ...By that time [after the article was published, but before Sokal's second article exposing the hoax], I really was persona non grata. It was very clear that I was a minority in my department, and not only a minority but a target. I had an article in Socialist Review in which I criticized poststructuralism. It had become a crusade and an orthodoxy and a juggernaut, and the more I was part of that culture, the more I disliked it. The emotional atmosphere around this wasn’t that different than the emotional atmosphere around the election right now. People on two sides of the fence were barely talking to each other."

DanBC 10y ago

If you enjoyed reading this you might also enjoy the BBC Radio Four Programme "The Reunion", which reunites a group of people involved in a moment of modern history. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc For example: Dolly the Sheep http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw The 1983 Hitler Diaries forgeries: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj The Centre for Alternate Technology: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k

tomcam 10y ago
Also the reunification of Berlin: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224

ruminasean 10y ago

Wait, does it bother anyone else right off the bat that the fishing line in the pic accompanying the story is tied incorrectly around the eye of the hook? I'm the only photographer here? I'll see myself out.

mcguire 10y ago

Good article! For those who haven't finished it, here's the bottom line: "ELLEN SCHRECKER, professor emerita of history, Yeshiva University: What Sokal was showing was the downgrading of academic expertise. Historians go into the archives and we interview people and try to find out what happened from the evidence — rather than relying on secondhand information. Basically it’s a confrontation between a trained mind and a piece of evidence. This is what physicists do, this is what biologists do. This is what literary theorists do, too, but I think what happened to them is they ran out of new documents, and so they began to poach on the rest of us. [...] "What really bothered me was the inability of Alan Sokal and the other people who were responding to him to realize how this was playing out in the larger world. The hoax was very clever. But then he should have made the broader point about what’s really happening out there. I don’t think that things would have changed if he hadn’t written it, but he didn’t look around him and see that academic expertise was already under attack. Today is the culmination of 40 years of attacks on academic expertise. It’s fine if you want to make fun of deconstruction, but it’s not fine if you make fun of climate change. "BÉRUBÉ: It’s widely accepted now that among the most controversial things you can do on a campus is deal with gender and sexuality, the Middle East, or climate change. I mean, they’re not exempt, the scientists. I didn’t think they would be, but it took some years for my argument to take hold. I said, the forces that are this anti-intellectual and this skeptical of what we do on campus, they’ll get wind of you soon enough. "SOKAL: There is in American culture a persistent anti-intellectual current, which looks down on the pointy-headed professors and is happy to pick up on any excuse to have a laugh at them. That was the negative side. "BÉRUBÉ: The echo chamber that publishes Sokal’s essay is so much less pernicious than the echo chamber that believes Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of a pizza parlor. Now we’re talking something well beyond epistemic closure and something much more like total batshit. "SCHRECKER: What we’re reaping is an incredible moment of anti-intellectualism in American life, and it’s dangerous." My take is that Sokal wanted to attack a specific, limited movement, although he didn't necessarily understand the nuances of who he was attacking. However, the result of his hoax was to give a freakin' big stick to them as want to attack those ivory tower eggheads with things like, "a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us".

10y ago

RodericDay 10y ago

The wikipedia page for Sokal Affair has a lovely section called "similar incidents" > Christoph Bartneck, an Associate Professor in Information Technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited to submit a paper to the 2016 International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics organised by ConferenceSeries. With little knowledge of nuclear physics, he used iOS's auto-complete function to write the paper, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence,[24] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple).[25] A sample sentence from the abstract for the resulting manuscript was: "The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids"[24] and the 516-word abstract contained the words "good" and "great" a combined total of 28 times (and is available online).[25] Despite making no sense, the work was accepted within three hours of submission and a conference registration fee of US$1099 requested.[24][25] The incident was compared to an earlier case where Peter Vamplew, from Federation University in Victoria, had a manuscript containing only the phrase "Get me off your fucking mailing list" accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.[24][26] ConferenceSeries is associated with the OMICS Publishing Group,[27] which produces open access journals widely regarded as predatory, and has been accused of moving into "predatory meetings".[28] Bartneck said he was "reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science," given the poor quality of the review process and the high cost of attendance.[24] > "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?": In 2013 John Bohannon wrote in Science about a "sting operation" he conducted in which he submitted "a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable", to 304 open-access publishers.[30] 157 journals accepted the paper. There have been some objections to the sting's methodology and about what conclusions can be drawn from it.[31][32] > SCIgen program: a paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). The conference announced the prank of having accepted the article as not peer reviewed, despite none of the three assigned peer-reviewers having submitted an opinion about its fidelity, veracity, or accuracy to its subject. The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were ignorant of the Sokal Affair until after submitting their article. --- It's pretty incredible how years and years on, techies with an axe to grind continue to milk this story to get their "two minutes hate" on liberal arts.

ComputerGuru 10y ago

Speaking of hoaxes, forgive me for going off on a tangent, but this is my favorite hoax: http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_mount_edgecumbe/ http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_moun...

mabbo 10y ago
> Porky's favorite response to the prank came in 1980. He received a letter from an attorney in Denver, inside of which was a clipping from the Denver Post with a photo of Mt. St. Helens erupting. Attached was a note that read, "This time, you little bastard, you've gone too far."

samirillian 10y ago

Always have mixed feelings about this debacle, leaning towards positive dislike for Sokal's little trick. Despite his claims to the contrary, I simply don't believe he's serious. Plenty of articles come through HN criticizing the manner in which the scientific community legitimizes bad research, or vice versa. Sokal's critiques always seem to involve the least charitable possible interpretation of a philosopher's words, or simple misconstrual. For example, is it really so unreasonable to analogize Einstein's theories of relativity to epistemological/moral relativity?

Aqueous 10y ago
I agree that Sokal's point of view was uncharitable to the majority of post-structuralists, but I can attest to the fact there is a definite strain of radical relativism on today's campuses. It goes hand in hand with a reflexive questioning of authority, an attitude that views all authority as illegitimate, even when that authority is derived from legitimate learning and knowledge. And when that attitude confronts science, it becomes a rationalization to challenge or deny universal theories that have been proven repeatedly by experiment as somehow merely a 'local' knowledge framework, or 'culturally constructed' or 'patriarchal' and therefore something to be suspicious of. This opens the door to treating all scientific assertions as equivalent and suspect. And you can draw a straight line from that to the anti-intellectualism that dominates our social discourse today. As to your question, in many ways calling Einstein's theory 'relativity' was a misnomer because it was actually a statement about the absolute laws of physical reality - laws that don't change with perspective or reference frame. For example, for special relativity, the absolute laws of electrodynamics require the speed of light to remain constant in every reference frame. And these laws entail that space and time must change with reference frame in order for the laws of physics to remain absolute. For these reasons, the relativity of physics bears little resemblance to moral relativism.
- samirillian 10y ago
  But that's just the thing, I don't think post-structuralism and platonism are mutually exclusive, and neither would, say, deleuze. "Things are absolutely relative to their frame of reference." I would consider that formulation perfectly consistent with plenty of, say, morally relativist interpretations. And Kant's "Newtonian" lack of relativism is exactly the shortcoming his categorical imperative.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

CalChris 10y ago

You want an anatomy of a hoax? When Dickens Met Dostoyevsky. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-dostoevsky/ http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-do...

ianamartin 10y ago

The problem here is that there are, in fact, tons of academic research and publication endeavors that are largely bullshit. But there are overall even more tons that are legitimate. The arts and humanities don't own all the bullshit, nor do the sciences have a lock on the good stuff. There are deep problem in the academic world. The incentives are broken, and the pay is quite low. There have been movements towards "science-ing" (for lack of a better word) almost every area of thought, and the results are not good. In music theory and composition, there were attempts to "science" music back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For a solid few decades, you couldn't get a job as a music theory or comp professor without subscribing to musical set theory, integrated serialism, or 12-tone row methods of composition. There was a specific attempt to "elevate" the study of music to the realm of math and science, to use stochastic methods and musical "proofs" to show the perfection of a piece of music. It was all ridiculous, the music created by these methods was unlistenable and unapproachable, which the proponents of this movement used as an excuse to say, "well, if you understood it better, you'd like it more. But you're an idiot, so you don't get it." Similar things are happening in a lot of areas. The rise of statistics as a tool and the easy accessibility of software that allows people with no understanding of how these methods are supposed to work let's people who are basically out of ideas to come up with all kinds of pseudo-scientific-sounding thoughts to go p-value fishing and publish papers that are literally garbage. They don't just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige. If you're working in the humanities, the fastest way to a raise is to spew some bullshit out on a paper with some numbery-type words, some stats, and a theory that's the falsifiable to begin with, but can't be argued with by your peers because it's all completely unintelligible to begin with. Your coworkers wont call you on it because they don't want to lose out on the next big thing, and no one else will call you on it because actual scientists won't admit that they don't know enough about humanities buzzwords to tell bullshit from good ideas. You end up with clowns like Deepak Chopra saying things that almost anyone can tell are utter bullshit, but almost no one will complain about. The vast majority of academics are like my parents: they teach German or history, they've been doing it well for around 50 years, and they don't pretend to think the world needs new research about der, die, or das when it comes to gender agreement. And there are the occasional few who look at gender agreement and see an opportunity to get a quick raise by writing about how gender agreement in the German language is sexist according to x percent of people they surveyed on yougov who don't actually speak German. There is a legitimate problem in certain parts of the humanities, and as someone who only ever studied violin, music theory, and philosophy--now working in the tech world--it's disappointing to see the humanities and liberal arts get a bad rap. The problem is systemic though. It comes not from a lack of diligence, but from the fact that this kind of irresponsible research is strongly incentivized by the university structure. From pay to collegial respect to tenure: calling bullshit out is not encouraged. It is frowned upon. If there is a tragedy in American Universities, it is exactly this: a place that promotes tenure as a mechanism to ensure free thought and the mutual exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal has turned into a system where disagreeing with obvious bullshit is a big mistake.

bitwize 10y ago

It's been pointed out before but: a) Social Text is a pleb-tier journal b) Sokal pressured them into publishing his junk article So it's not the home run against postmodernism that Sokal and his fans thought it was.

golergka 10y ago
Your points are about the article being admitted in the journal. But wasn't the bigger point of the fraud about the reaction after publication of the article?
mikeash 10y ago
a) is an excellent point, but why is b) relevant? If they'll bow to outside pressure to publish nonsense, that's still bad.
woodandsteel 10y ago
How did Sokol manage to pressure the journal? Or did you just make that up out of nothing because you don't want to admit the journal made a mistake all on its own?

woodandsteel 10y ago

It's important to understand that structuralism-post-structuralism-postmodernism is basically a far-left political movement. When the workers failed to overthrow capitalism, when the Soviet Union turned into a dreary dictatorship, and when the newly-independent colonies of Africa failed turn into social paradises, many leftist intellectuals looked around for a new way to attack capitalism. What they came up with was a social-constructivist, radical relativist attack that goes back to Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, and ultimately Plato's two-world view of reality. This was supposed to work because the argument for capitalism is based on a belief that reality is such that it works better for increasing human well-being than any other economic system. What is interesting is that the postmodernists are themselves not really radical relativists. They believe, for instance, that famine is a real phenomenon and that it is truly bad. Their idea was that deconstructionist arguments would cleanse people of their capitalist ideology, and then their minds would be open to see the truths of socialism. Needless to say, this strategy was a failure.

tokai 10y ago
It is also important to understand that the hoax was not a critique of the whole political left. Sokal identify with the left himself.[0] The hoax was aimed at a specific group of left-wing literary scholars. [0] Last paragraph, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/li...
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  That's a good point. I need to include it when I write about these issues.