4 ms·

Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the edito

by n4r9 3y ago

Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
The proper response would be: "Sorry, this is the wrong journal to submit to. We don't have any expertise in physics."
wzdd 3y ago
They unquestioningly published literal nonsense and you think there's a case to be made that they don't lack intellectual rigour?
- n4r9 3y ago
  I think "unquestioning" undersells it. They requested that he remove a lot of the pshilosophising and footnotes, but he refused. Then they put it aside until deciding it might be okay to put in a special "Science Wars" issue.
qsort 3y ago
They could have asked someone who did know. If you are the editor of a publication you have editorial responsibility of what gets published, you don't get to abdicate that responsibility because you don't feel like doing your homework. You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).
alphanullmeric 3y ago
There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.
- promiscous 3y ago
  The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    That empirical scientists are in the business of falsification is their view of their work, Feyerabend argues that they delude themselves.
  - alphanullmeric 3y ago
    False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary? Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
- oblmov 3y ago
  I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...
jeroenhd 3y ago
Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards. The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field. This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying. In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT). The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.
- eigenket 3y ago
  They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone. I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour. I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work. The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.
unmole 3y ago
> They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour. The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.
- esrauch 3y ago
  Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others. On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".
renewiltord 3y ago
I suppose that seals it then. What was meant to be science is just priestly words repeated by those anointed priests. It is no sin to simply repeat the words of priests even if what they speak is nonsense. When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.
denton-scratch 3y ago
Thing is, I'm a layman, and Sokal's paper reeks to me of bullshit. I'm neither a physicist nor a sociologist; but that pasaage about the "hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework", with its implication that the axiom of equality is somehow political, is pretty obvious nonsense. I don't hve to understand set theory to see that.
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  May I introduce you to Alain Badiou, a massive and important figure of contemporary philosophy? "Being and Event" is probably the most focused work around ZF theory stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    Thanks; never heard of him before. according to that wikipedia link, Scruton says: "No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics." That seems to be exactly what Sokal was parodying. I have very little time for what the French have been referring to as "philosophy" since roughly 1970. It's a sort of overproof bollocks.
    - beepbooptheory 3y ago
      Thats a pretty sweeping statement for a self-described layman. But either way, got it, have a nice day.
      - denton-scratch 3y ago
        "Layman", i.e. not a physycist or a sociologist. I did a philosophy degree, thankfully not involving any Foucault or Derrida.
        beepbooptheory 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by n4r9 3y ago

DiogenesKynikos 3y ago

The proper response would be: "Sorry, this is the wrong journal to submit to. We don't have any expertise in physics."

wzdd 3y ago

They unquestioningly published literal nonsense and you think there's a case to be made that they don't lack intellectual rigour?

n4r9 3y ago
I think "unquestioning" undersells it. They requested that he remove a lot of the pshilosophising and footnotes, but he refused. Then they put it aside until deciding it might be okay to put in a special "Science Wars" issue.

qsort 3y ago

They could have asked someone who did know. If you are the editor of a publication you have editorial responsibility of what gets published, you don't get to abdicate that responsibility because you don't feel like doing your homework. You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).

alphanullmeric 3y ago

There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.

promiscous 3y ago
The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  That empirical scientists are in the business of falsification is their view of their work, Feyerabend argues that they delude themselves.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary? Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
oblmov 3y ago
I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...

jeroenhd 3y ago

Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards. The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field. This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying. In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT). The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.

eigenket 3y ago
They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone. I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour. I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work. The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.

unmole 3y ago

> They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour. The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.

esrauch 3y ago
Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others. On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".

renewiltord 3y ago

I suppose that seals it then. What was meant to be science is just priestly words repeated by those anointed priests. It is no sin to simply repeat the words of priests even if what they speak is nonsense. When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.

denton-scratch 3y ago

Thing is, I'm a layman, and Sokal's paper reeks to me of bullshit. I'm neither a physicist nor a sociologist; but that pasaage about the "hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework", with its implication that the axiom of equality is somehow political, is pretty obvious nonsense. I don't hve to understand set theory to see that.

beepbooptheory 3y ago
May I introduce you to Alain Badiou, a massive and important figure of contemporary philosophy? "Being and Event" is probably the most focused work around ZF theory stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  Thanks; never heard of him before. according to that wikipedia link, Scruton says: "No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics." That seems to be exactly what Sokal was parodying. I have very little time for what the French have been referring to as "philosophy" since roughly 1970. It's a sort of overproof bollocks.
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    Thats a pretty sweeping statement for a self-described layman. But either way, got it, have a nice day.
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      "Layman", i.e. not a physycist or a sociologist. I did a philosophy degree, thankfully not involving any Foucault or Derrida.
      - beepbooptheory 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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