A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) | Hacker News Reader

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax)

physics.nyu.edu

28 pointspanarky29 comments

A few key things to keep in mind:

1) It was not a blind review. The editors knew Sokal was the author and knew he was an important scientist.

2) The editors asked for some revisions, and Sokal refused. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

  "Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally
  to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philo-
  sophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed
  resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his
  footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in sci-
  ence, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response,
  it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, 
  Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well
  known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish,
  not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if pub-
  lished in the company of related articles."

3) It sat in the offices of the journal until they published a "science wars" edition, and included the article because it was from a scientist. In this sense, the hoax reveals almost nothing about the humanities, but does possibly say interesting things about the role authority plays.

so: 1) In the humanities, what you write doesn't matter. It's all about WHO writes it

2) The editors did not really care if there are errors, if the author insists, he can publish any kind of bs.

3) You are right. It seems in the humanities there is no discourse at all, it's all about who has authority and how social you are

C'mon, a little self doubt won't hurt the "social sciences". The article was rife with complete and utter fancy-looking b.s. Even the title is laughable.

Nothing can excuse the editors of this journal.

A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality.

[1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...

Wow, thanks for that link. IEEE seems to have taken the paper down: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/freesrchabstract.jsp?arnum...

but the Web still has it (PDF link): http://www.tektalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/herbert_sc...

and ACM still lists the reference (perhaps as a snub to IEEE): http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1469852

Amazing! The first line is: The synthesis of fiber-optic cables is a natural quagmire.

And then the first line of the second paragraph is: We prove that cache coherence and IPv7 are often incompatible.

Being accepted as a poster in a conference is a very different thing from being published in a journal, as the comments on the article you posted point out.

The actual difference depends on the journal, conference and field. In some fields (large parts of CS), the most prestigious conferences are more prestigious than most journals. OTOH, in biology, publishing in Cell or Nature may be career-changing.

This indeed made a lot of noise, I still remember quite well the polemic at that time. It should be understood in the context of the "science war" (context which was sometimes missing during the polemic in France, since many French "intelligenstia" are rather ignorant of the American academia). Perhaps ironically, the whole affair has a fundamentally political aspect (one of Sokal's argument was to defend the left against what he feared would become anti-science ideology coming from the universities themselves).

The whole idea of publishing a paper without meaningful content may seem clever, but it really isn't: the same has been done in so called hard science. While amusing, I don't think it proves much. Dawkins forgets to precise that the paper in question was not reviewed and that the authors refused to make changes suggested by the journal which published the paper (not to defend the journal's attitude either).

As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either.

> As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either.

I'll admit I'm biased here. Latan, Irigaray and co. sound like a bunch of charlatans to me. However, you're suggesting that I should try "understanding where they are coming from". So please explain to me where Irigaray is coming from when she suggests that fluid mechanics is neglected because "the problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."

First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work.

As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous.

But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.

That the editors even bothered to contact Sokal to suggest revisions is damning. It isn't that Sokal wrote a sensible-sounding paper filled with mathematical BS. He wrote BS in their own language, in the "field" in which the editors were supposedly experts. It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. If I did that, would you say the VCs were completely competent, and that it was natural I could fool them because I threw some technical terms into my presentation?

Or, to turn the tables, suppose a Harvard Business School professor pitched a business idea to Richard Dawkins to make money by producing flu vaccine through a process entirely made up by stringing together impressive-sounding terminology that the business professor pulled out of biology papers. Suppose Richard Dawkins offered to invest money in the business. Would you say, "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. Richard Dawkins is quite competent at biology. He only mistook an incomprehensible stream of jargon for a plausible way of manufacturing flu vaccine because he was confused by the business plan?"

It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup.

No it wouldn't. In the startup case, there would be a personally significant amount of money involved. All of a sudden, people get a whole lot smarter when money is involved.

>"It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup."

It might just work. Seriously though if you've established yourself and sold a few startups already with good outcomes for investors then you're already in line for the investment aren't you? You would basically have to convince them not to invest that some how you'd had your day.

Given that the journal kept the paper on the back-burner, as they did, it's like an investor coming in to a bit of extra cash and just saying "what the heck, it looks like dkarls's crackers but something might actually work".

There could also be the fame angle - even if they realise it's crackpot it can bring in some extra readers or get some citations because of the famous name. If they get refutations of the famous person's position then that could snowball nicely - "The Journal of Stuff That Looks Sound-ish, they were the ones that printed Sokal's paper where he went mental ...".

You are mixing different things here. First, I did not take defense of the journal editors: the hoax was indeed a proof of lack of rigor of the journal's editors.

That's the idea that it shows something about the whole field which is nonsense (even though Sokal said himself that this was not is point, he could certainly foresee it would have been read as such). For once, if it did, the same technique could be used to discredit a lot of fields, and not just in humanities: writing pseudo jargon and getting it accepted, especially if you have a famous name, is possible in most fields (see CS papers which were auto-generated and got accepted). In many fields, researchers are unfortunately incapable of judging much more than the surface of the arguments, for various reasons (ultra-specialization, lack of time related to the continuous growth of published papers, etc...). I am not defending it either (that's one of the reason I left academia myself), but the actual meaning of the whole hoax is much more minor that people may think from outside.

>It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup.

Sounds like 1999-2000.

Some people find this disturbing and an indemnification of the humanities. (Being, as a whole, an intellectual fraud). I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities.

The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. That certain non peer reviewed journals are desperate for content and have low standards for publication isn't exactly shocking.

He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, that no one would have even known about, had he not widely publicized it as a 'hoax'.

> The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed.

If wikipedia is to be believed the journal switched to a peer review based process due to the Sokal affair.

> He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal,

Clearly it's a crappy journal, but unfortunately it's associated with some big names like Duke [1] and Columbia [2].

> I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities.

Maybe not Sokal's article, but certainly their books says a lot about the humanities. As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text

[2] http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact

As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a.

Actually, as often as not, it was Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins (and many others) who were talking out of their ass, egregiously and gratuitously misreading (or not reading at all) the "big names in the humanities" they were attacking.

For one particularly well documented instance, see: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.197/plotnitsky....

The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed.

Was it therefore regarded by those in that field at the time as almost a vanity press? Or did they consider it a respectable, reputable journal?

(I think "indictment" is the word you were looking for, because "indemnification" would be an agreement to compensate for damages.)

thank you for correcting me, sometimes I just throw words about recklessly.

Relevant: Richard Dawkins' review of 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobe...

This is more scary than funny. What is even worse, is that the 'fact-less science' folk are winning a war we didn't even know we were in. This suggests that whatever joke the author felt he was committing, was regrettably on him (and the rest of us)!

Sokal notes, "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious," and goes on to describe his anger and sadness. Indeed, he doesn't describe his effort as a hoax, but rather as an experiment. He expresses the intent of exposing intellectual laziness and ideologically-driven reasoning (specifically by the Left, with which he self-associates), so the motivation appears to be more than humor, and I'm confident he would agree with your assessment of "more scary than funny."

The Sokal hoax was effectively a "bitch-slap" to certain philosophical camps that had devolved into a very deep rut of obscurantism. I think that Sokol was perhaps interested in what was going on in those circles but became repulsed by the incomprehensibility of the texts at the time. You really have to (try to) read Derrida, Foucault or Lacan to truly appreciate how FAR from any notion of clarity these dominant philosophers had come.

I take the Sokol hoax as a warning, not just to the humanities, but to any field. At the end of the day if you can't explain the essence of what you're doing to smart 12 year old, you don't understand it yourself and you should be prepared for someone to call "bullshit" like Sokal did.

This got no votes when I submitted it, but anyone reading this may find it interesting.

The Science Wars Redux - Fifteen years after the Sokal Hoax, attacks on “objective knowledge” that were once the province of the left have been taken up by the right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703

FTA: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

He was about 10 years ahead of his time. This is more or less the formula for most blog posts. Even people who should know better throw in some bullshit because they think it will look good. Take the machine learning post that appeared here a bit ago. At the level of precision laid out in the article, model complexity and scalability are at best totally-ordered sets, and there is absolutely no way you can do a regression of any sort. The graphic, however is cute and appears to flatter the reader's intellectual sophistication.

http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderl...

Does anyone have the reviews from the original Sokal submission? It would be useful to know how the reviewers actually viewed the article.

social text is not a peer reviewed journal.

Reading the excerpts from his article, I felt an immediate recognition of the kind of BS I had ground out for my 19th Century Philosophy course. Step into a stuffy, punctuation-laden mode, drop lots of names, and above all focus on metaphors and allusions rather than actual straightforward arguments. "It is clear that" is your best friend :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com