5 ms·
Bourbaki's textbooks are notoriously formal, rigorous, and plain difficult. This gave rise to a cute inside joke in the Sokal hoax [0], where physicist Alan So
by FabHK 3y ago
Bourbaki's textbooks are notoriously formal, rigorous, and plain difficult.
This gave rise to a cute inside joke in the Sokal hoax [0], where physicist Alan Sokal aimed to demonstrate the lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies and produced a nonsensical "paper" (Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity) [1] that was promptly published in Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
At any rate, in that article, there's a footnote (to the hilarious statement that "More recently, Lacan's topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism.") that reads:
> For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki (1970).
Any competent peer reviewer reading the paper carefully would have fallen of the chair laughing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...
- eigenket 3y agoIts worth mentioning that the journal originally refused to publish the Sokal paper, and eventually put it in a special non-peer reviewed issue they were making called "Science Wars". The aim of the Science wars issue was to have as many different points of view represented as possible. I find it amusing, given the context of the discussion, that people often fail to point this out.
- nicolas_t 3y agoThanks! I never knew that aspect of the Sokal story. Not surprised it's not repeated since it makes the story less entrancing.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoLame cop out. The article was a complete nonsense. It wasnt something like an unortodox view of things or passable article that missed some citations or whatnot. It would be like Nature publishing ramblings of some schizofrenic and when called out on it explaining that it wasnt peer reviewed
- Vecr 3y agoI don't know about "schizophrenic", but Nature has published various weird things in their sub-journals.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoI'd like to see an example on the same level as the Sokal article. That is a completely made up gibberish that is full of difficult words to look complicated and sophisticated.
- cygx 3y agoIn 2014, Springer and IEEE had to retract 120 comp-sci papers that were gibberish generated with SCIgen. The problem persists as of May 2021[1], and given the advancements in LLMs, I wouldn't be surprised if things are getting worse... [1] https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.24495 https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.2449...
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoThe Sokal article wasn't retracted and the editors still claim that they didn't make any mistake allowing his nonsense to be published. Can you see the difference?
- cygx 3y agoShrugs. It's an issue, but not necessarily as extreme as some people make it sound, and not entirely limited to the social sciences (see e.g. the justification of the physicist who approved Igor Bogdanov's thesis back in the day: All these were ideas that could possibly make sense. It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask.).
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoI agree, in the grand scheme of things it's really nothing. It doesn't really bother me that someone somewhere published some nonsense. It only irks me the persistent defense of these obviously wrong decisions. Just admit you fucked up and move on. If the publishers did just that it would long have been forgotten.
- hermitcrab 3y ago"lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies" Is putting it rather kindly.
- Koshkin 3y agoIt’s formal in places and certainly rigorous, but I don’t find it difficult.