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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

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

[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...

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Its 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.

Thanks! I never knew that aspect of the Sokal story. Not surprised it's not repeated since it makes the story less entrancing.

Lame 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

I don't know about "schizophrenic", but Nature has published various weird things in their sub-journals.

I'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.

In 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.2449...

The 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?

Shrugs. 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.).

I 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.

I would view it more in the lines of this

https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1320

It is fairly common for "serious scientific journals" to publish stuff occasionally which is explicitly not part of their normal formal peer reviewed content, but nevertheless they think is likely to be interesting for their readers.

The Science Wars issue was different from the business as normal publications of the journal, and explicitly contained stuff that they wouldn't usually publish.

Yeah, right. Once caught with an egg on their face they just say "it's a prank bro!". Ecyclopedia.com take on what the so called Science Wars was: "The term science wars refers to a complex of discussions about the way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice. These discussions came to be called a "war" in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority."

Does it sound to you like some tongue-in-cheek discussions and joking around?

The special issue certainly wasn't a matter of joking around, but it also wasn't a normal issue of the journal. After he submitted it they wrote to him (wikipedia quotes them): "We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes."

They stuck it in the special issue after he refused to make these changes.

It doesn't matter what issue they put his nonsense in. What matters is that his article was designed on purpose to look 'intellectual' but was made up of total nonsense to prove his point that the editors will allow any junk to be published as long as it looks 'sophisticated'. And he indeed proved it. That's it. They would be better off just admitting that they made a mistake but noo, instead they pretend that nothing happened and it is all just a misunderstanding. And you completely unnecessary carry water for them.

"lack of intellectual rigour in contemporary post-modern cultural studies"

Is putting it rather kindly.

It’s formal in places and certainly rigorous, but I don’t find it difficult.

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