2 ms·

This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically

This is quite the deja vu: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ As I remembered it, their "fake" (automatically generated) paper was accepted into a conference. They then tried to submit a second paper that was also auto-generated, and that's when they got caught. I may be confusing the two stories, though. In any case, it's very easy to generate your own postmodern gibberish papers - every time you visit this page, it refreshes with a new one: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

mjn 13y ago
Sokal's paper was carefully hand-written, so a somewhat different situation. His goal was to show that if you used scientific jargon in a highly metaphorical way that flattered the ideological views of the editors but was pretty hilariously shallow (e.g. casually analogizing the axiom of choice in mathematics to pro-choice politics), it could get accepted. He didn't aim to show that you could auto-generate such a paper, though, merely that a human could construct one. Unlike the papers here, Sokal's paper is also not really gibberish. It's well-written and coherent in a certain surface-level sense, it's just that what it's arguing is nonsense. It strings together coherent paragraphs out of coherent sentences, in an argument that goes somewhere and which you can follow... but the argument itself is ridiculous, put together out of hilarious non sequiturs and puns masquerading as reasoning. The SciGen papers are gibberish on a much more literal level, in that their paragraphs don't actually make sense, their abstracts don't match the subject in their titles, etc.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  Hm, yeah, I'm definitely confusing them. In any case, I saw this headline and thought, "where is the [2004] tag?", because it was literally exactly the way my friend told me the SCIGen and/or Sokal story back then. Quite a shock to see that this was 2014.

mjn 13y ago

Sokal's paper was carefully hand-written, so a somewhat different situation. His goal was to show that if you used scientific jargon in a highly metaphorical way that flattered the ideological views of the editors but was pretty hilariously shallow (e.g. casually analogizing the axiom of choice in mathematics to pro-choice politics), it could get accepted. He didn't aim to show that you could auto-generate such a paper, though, merely that a human could construct one. Unlike the papers here, Sokal's paper is also not really gibberish. It's well-written and coherent in a certain surface-level sense, it's just that what it's arguing is nonsense. It strings together coherent paragraphs out of coherent sentences, in an argument that goes somewhere and which you can follow... but the argument itself is ridiculous, put together out of hilarious non sequiturs and puns masquerading as reasoning. The SciGen papers are gibberish on a much more literal level, in that their paragraphs don't actually make sense, their abstracts don't match the subject in their titles, etc.

chimeracoder 13y ago
Hm, yeah, I'm definitely confusing them. In any case, I saw this headline and thought, "where is the [2004] tag?", because it was literally exactly the way my friend told me the SCIGen and/or Sokal story back then. Quite a shock to see that this was 2014.