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Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of when Alan Sokal wrote a paper full of buzzwords and co-opted scientific language and name-dropping then submitted it to a prestigious cultural studies journal [1]. Thesis: quantum gravity is merely a social and linguistic construct.

Accepted.

The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

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> The humanities are still trying to recover from that one.

In much the same way that 'science' is still recovering from prestigious journals publishing results that mysteriously fail to replicate[1] and software engineering is still recovering from the fact that there are 85 randomly generated papers published by the IEEE[2], yes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

[2] http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/71/35/55/PDF/0-FakeD...

The randomly generated talks here are just as hilarious:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#talks

But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better.

Then again, the same thing can be said for any of us reading Ph.D. dissertations outside our fields.

Or I imagine getting an expert to describe their process for fixing large industrial machinery.

Reminds of Reggie Watt's "unpredictably brilliant" parody of a Ted Talk.

[Skip to 0:54 for English] http://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_...

I wouldn't recommend skipping anything, it's all very carefully rehearsed, and worth watching from end to end.

The transition itself was pretty brilliant.

Is is actually recording beats live, and then mixing them in playback immediately after?

"But the sad thing is, you could probably show stuff like this on a TV series as a "this is what research produces" and the majority of people wouldn't know any better."

It's not unlike what we have in France with the Bogdanov brothers [1]. They are pretty much scientific impostors but they are still quite popular and sell a lot of unintelligible books.

I don't blame people for being duped. But rather the medias and journalists that put them in the spotlight instead of competent and honest scientists.

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

The second paper references the Sokal Affair, as a matter of fact - the authors of the paper are from the (obviously fake) "Sokal Institute of Technology, Pune". :)

In fact, it references verbatim dialogues from "My Cousin Vinny", "Sholay" (a superhit Bollywood film), the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the author's wife and her movie-review website and whole lot of other nonsense. :(

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