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Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

> I feel there is a conspiratorial aspect to the anti-pomo movement

Keep in mind that at least the Sokal prank wasn't an attack on pomo per se. It was an inkling and subsequent confirmation that pomo editors could not tell the difference between highly technical jargon that drives home a larger theoretical point, on the one hand, and highly technical jargon engineered specifically to serve no purpose whatsoever.

Imagine submitting a large patch to the Linux kernel that references various files and line numbers but makes no additions or subtractions to any of those files. If you could feed such a patch all the way up the chain and get Linus to accept it, you'd have a pretty good argument that something is fundamentally wrong with then intellectual endeavor of Linux kernel development.

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That is a fairly ridiculous argument. Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indictment of a single journal. To say all editors of all postmodern journals are unable to distinguish crock is an insane extrapolation.

I feel a more apt metaphor for the Sokal Hoax is a security researcher purposely submitting a backdoor to a random driver. If the commit gets accepted, the failure is not a result of code review being a flawed process or Linux itself being a failed project, but the driver maintainer who did not catch the vulnerability. Even then, mistakes happen.

One can also put some of the burden of responsibility on the security researcher herself, since code review/peer review is generally faulty when one acts in bad faith. Similarly, the Sokal Hoax is a great example of bad faith used to justify an ideological position through point scoring rather than legitimate criticism.

> Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indictment of a single journal.

Well, the problem is "pomo" being such an ambiguous term for the two of us to be likely talking at cross purposes.

There is an outstanding set of academic journal writing in the humanities whose jargon includes casual references to the jargon of the hard/soft sciences. By casual, I mean the relevance of the scientific jargon is left as an exercise to the reader.

The implication in this writing is that the argument put forth is of such profundity that nothing but the scientific concepts will do to elucidate it.

Sokal submitted an article to a journal full of that kind of writing. In his article he removed the argument and left the referents. The editor didn't notice. End of prank.

That is as legitimate a criticism of this journal as getting a fake journal to accept an article written by a python script. It has nothing to do with point scoring.

The prank extends to any other "pomo" journals, articles, and books which utilize the same type of causual science jargon. Sokal wrote a book that gives more examples of such writing.

>Imagine submitting a large patch to the Linux kernel that references various files and line numbers but makes no additions or subtractions to any of those files. If you could feed such a patch all the way up the chain and get Linus to accept it, you'd have a pretty good argument that something is fundamentally wrong with then intellectual endeavor of Linux kernel development.

Did not the Sokal paper have only one person review it - namely the editor? It was not published in a peer review journal.

If someone submitted a patch to a non-notable repository in Github, and only one developer reviewed it and accepted it, I would not say something is fundamentally wrong with software development.

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