> Porky's favorite response to the prank came in 1980. He received a letter from an attorney in Denver, inside of which was a clipping from the Denver Post with a photo of Mt. St. Helens erupting. Attached was a note that read, "This time, you little bastard, you've gone too far."
It's important to understand that structuralism-post-structuralism-postmodernism is basically a far-left political movement. When the workers failed to overthrow capitalism, when the Soviet Union turned into a dreary dictatorship, and when the newly-independent colonies of Africa failed turn into social paradises, many leftist intellectuals looked around for a new way to attack capitalism.
What they came up with was a social-constructivist, radical relativist attack that goes back to Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, and ultimately Plato's two-world view of reality. This was supposed to work because the argument for capitalism is based on a belief that reality is such that it works better for increasing human well-being than any other economic system.
What is interesting is that the postmodernists are themselves not really radical relativists. They believe, for instance, that famine is a real phenomenon and that it is truly bad. Their idea was that deconstructionist arguments would cleanse people of their capitalist ideology, and then their minds would be open to see the truths of socialism. Needless to say, this strategy was a failure.
It is also important to understand that the hoax was not a critique of the whole political left. Sokal identify with the left himself.[0] The hoax was aimed at a specific group of left-wing literary scholars.
Wait, does it bother anyone else right off the bat that the fishing line in the pic accompanying the story is tied incorrectly around the eye of the hook? I'm the only photographer here? I'll see myself out.
If you enjoyed reading this you might also enjoy the BBC Radio Four Programme "The Reunion", which reunites a group of people involved in a moment of modern history.
The problem here is that there are, in fact, tons of academic research and publication endeavors that are largely bullshit. But there are overall even more tons that are legitimate.
The arts and humanities don't own all the bullshit, nor do the sciences have a lock on the good stuff.
There are deep problem in the academic world. The incentives are broken, and the pay is quite low.
There have been movements towards "science-ing" (for lack of a better word) almost every area of thought, and the results are not good.
In music theory and composition, there were attempts to "science" music back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For a solid few decades, you couldn't get a job as a music theory or comp professor without subscribing to musical set theory, integrated serialism, or 12-tone row methods of composition.
There was a specific attempt to "elevate" the study of music to the realm of math and science, to use stochastic methods and musical "proofs" to show the perfection of a piece of music.
It was all ridiculous, the music created by these methods was unlistenable and unapproachable, which the proponents of this movement used as an excuse to say, "well, if you understood it better, you'd like it more. But you're an idiot, so you don't get it."
Similar things are happening in a lot of areas. The rise of statistics as a tool and the easy accessibility of software that allows people with no understanding of how these methods are supposed to work let's people who are basically out of ideas to come up with all kinds of pseudo-scientific-sounding thoughts to go p-value fishing and publish papers that are literally garbage.
They don't just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige.
If you're working in the humanities, the fastest way to a raise is to spew some bullshit out on a paper with some numbery-type words, some stats, and a theory that's the falsifiable to begin with, but can't be argued with by your peers because it's all completely unintelligible to begin with.
Your coworkers wont call you on it because they don't want to lose out on the next big thing, and no one else will call you on it because actual scientists won't admit that they don't know enough about humanities buzzwords to tell bullshit from good ideas.
You end up with clowns like Deepak Chopra saying things that almost anyone can tell are utter bullshit, but almost no one will complain about.
The vast majority of academics are like my parents: they teach German or history, they've been doing it well for around 50 years, and they don't pretend to think the world needs new research about der, die, or das when it comes to gender agreement.
And there are the occasional few who look at gender agreement and see an opportunity to get a quick raise by writing about how gender agreement in the German language is sexist according to x percent of people they surveyed on yougov who don't actually speak German.
There is a legitimate problem in certain parts of the humanities, and as someone who only ever studied violin, music theory, and philosophy--now working in the tech world--it's disappointing to see the humanities and liberal arts get a bad rap.
The problem is systemic though. It comes not from a lack of diligence, but from the fact that this kind of irresponsible research is strongly incentivized by the university structure. From pay to collegial respect to tenure: calling bullshit out is not encouraged. It is frowned upon.
If there is a tragedy in American Universities, it is exactly this: a place that promotes tenure as a mechanism to ensure free thought and the mutual exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal has turned into a system where disagreeing with obvious bullshit is a big mistake.
> They don't just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige.
I'd argue far more don't recognize their own work as the problem. Something like "Everyone is a bad driver, but I'm the best!"
Either through poor training or cockiness, they slipped in the method and let assumptions leak into their study. Or, more often, we just haven't figured out all the ways to get the assumptions out. Occasionally, we stumble onto something like Cognitive Anchoring that makes us rethink everything.
Stuffs hard. And it gets frustrating to see sloppy work muddying everything else. But stuffs hard.
I think is is more of an issue in the sciences than it is in the humanities.
There isn't really "a method" for being a history teacher or a language teacher. At least not in the sense of a scientific method. There are, of course, methods of teaching language and history.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are certain things very worthwhile to learn and study, but which don't make any sense to quantify or apply scientific methods to.
Most of the bullshit I see coming from academia and the humanities in particular are things like social sciences and education. They are rebranded versions of psychology and philosophy, but with sciency sounding words, unfalsifiable theories, and some statistics that look good.
Apart from certain categories and departments that are entirely bullshit like these, most academics are remarkably well-behaved in spite of a system that rewards idiocy and bullshit.
The most broken part of academia is that it's willing to classify things as sciences which are absolutely not.
Your points are about the article being admitted in the journal. But wasn't the bigger point of the fraud about the reaction after publication of the article?
How did Sokol manage to pressure the journal? Or did you just make that up out of nothing because you don't want to admit the journal made a mistake all on its own?
The wikipedia page for Sokal Affair has a lovely section called "similar incidents"
> Christoph Bartneck, an Associate Professor in Information Technology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury, was invited to submit a paper to the 2016 International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics organised by ConferenceSeries. With little knowledge of nuclear physics, he used iOS's auto-complete function to write the paper, choosing randomly from its suggestions after starting each sentence,[24] and submitted it under the name Iris Pear (a reference to Siri and Apple).[25] A sample sentence from the abstract for the resulting manuscript was: "The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids"[24] and the 516-word abstract contained the words "good" and "great" a combined total of 28 times (and is available online).[25] Despite making no sense, the work was accepted within three hours of submission and a conference registration fee of US$1099 requested.[24][25] The incident was compared to an earlier case where Peter Vamplew, from Federation University in Victoria, had a manuscript containing only the phrase "Get me off your fucking mailing list" accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.[24][26] ConferenceSeries is associated with the OMICS Publishing Group,[27] which produces open access journals widely regarded as predatory, and has been accused of moving into "predatory meetings".[28] Bartneck said he was "reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science," given the poor quality of the review process and the high cost of attendance.[24]
> "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?": In 2013 John Bohannon wrote in Science about a "sting operation" he conducted in which he submitted "a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable", to 304 open-access publishers.[30] 157 journals accepted the paper. There have been some objections to the sting's methodology and about what conclusions can be drawn from it.[31][32]
> SCIgen program: a paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). The conference announced the prank of having accepted the article as not peer reviewed, despite none of the three assigned peer-reviewers having submitted an opinion about its fidelity, veracity, or accuracy to its subject. The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were ignorant of the Sokal Affair until after submitting their article.
---
It's pretty incredible how years and years on, techies with an axe to grind continue to milk this story to get their "two minutes hate" on liberal arts.
Some journals and conferences have nothing to do with science, just want your money, and find customers in academics who need to show they were published and are willing to pay for it. Exposing a journal that pretends to have scientific rigor as such is a service, but says nothing about the discipline.
If you generate nonsense, tell a physicist that it's a paper on physics and have him read it, he'll say it's nonsense, not physics. If you generate nonsense, tell an avantgarde poetry club that it's avantgarde poetry, and have them read it, they'll agree it's avantgarde poetry. Exposing a scientific discipline as actually an avantgarde poetry club is important.
> Social Text is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, Social Text has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment.
It's just a small college journal that basically prides itself on not judging the things it publishes. The fact that you happily call bad scientific journals and conferences "nothing to do with science", but try to pin this random "Social Text" journal as a perfect representative of liberal arts, is funny to me.
It's not incredible at all; it's reasonable. Peer review should be comprehensive enough to notice if, for example, there are serious numerical errors or if the conclusions can't be drawn from the figures. That some people don't seem to even bother reading the papers is disgraceful. People have a right to know which platforms are farcical and I think the people you cited have provided a public service.
Good article! For those who haven't finished it, here's the bottom line:
"ELLEN SCHRECKER, professor emerita of history, Yeshiva University: What Sokal was showing was the downgrading of academic expertise. Historians go into the archives and we interview people and try to find out what happened from the evidence — rather than relying on secondhand information. Basically it’s a confrontation between a trained mind and a piece of evidence. This is what physicists do, this is what biologists do. This is what literary theorists do, too, but I think what happened to them is they ran out of new documents, and so they began to poach on the rest of us.
[...]
"What really bothered me was the inability of Alan Sokal and the other people who were responding to him to realize how this was playing out in the larger world. The hoax was very clever. But then he should have made the broader point about what’s really happening out there. I don’t think that things would have changed if he hadn’t written it, but he didn’t look around him and see that academic expertise was already under attack. Today is the culmination of 40 years of attacks on academic expertise. It’s fine if you want to make fun of deconstruction, but it’s not fine if you make fun of climate change.
"BÉRUBÉ: It’s widely accepted now that among the most controversial things you can do on a campus is deal with gender and sexuality, the Middle East, or climate change. I mean, they’re not exempt, the scientists. I didn’t think they would be, but it took some years for my argument to take hold. I said, the forces that are this anti-intellectual and this skeptical of what we do on campus, they’ll get wind of you soon enough.
"SOKAL: There is in American culture a persistent anti-intellectual current, which looks down on the pointy-headed professors and is happy to pick up on any excuse to have a laugh at them. That was the negative side.
"BÉRUBÉ: The echo chamber that publishes Sokal’s essay is so much less pernicious than the echo chamber that believes Hillary Clinton was running a child-sex ring out of a pizza parlor. Now we’re talking something well beyond epistemic closure and something much more like total batshit.
"SCHRECKER: What we’re reaping is an incredible moment of anti-intellectualism in American life, and it’s dangerous."
My take is that Sokal wanted to attack a specific, limited movement, although he didn't necessarily understand the nuances of who he was attacking. However, the result of his hoax was to give a freakin' big stick to them as want to attack those ivory tower eggheads with things like, "a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us".
My perspective is biased since I am in the Humanities and I have seen people bring up the Sokal hoax many times. So, for me, the three most important quotes are:
Social Text is not a refereed journal — if one of the founders was there and wanted it, it was probably going to go in.(...)
The hoax gave people who had never read any postmodernist discourse, and didn’t have the slightest idea of what postmodernists like Derrida or Lyotard or Foucault and others were trying to do, an easy way to dismiss that project. All they thought they had to do was to invoke the Sokal hoax. That would be, in their mind, a totally sufficient put-down.(...)
The hoax was not all particularly about science studies. It was about an academic culture. People in the humanities, especially people who were particularly ambitious, were aware that the fortunes of the sciences were rising in academia, and the fortunes of the humanities were declining. So to have a scientist sign on to poststructuralism was such a coup that they didn’t bother to read his article carefully.(...)
> However, the result of his hoax was to give a freakin' big stick to them as want to attack those ivory tower eggheads with things like, "a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us".
This is just my own opinion, but I think you are 100% wrong here and the reality is precisely the opposite what you're claiming. The weapons used against science by the current anti-intellectual climate are the same ones created by the postmodernist/poststructuralist crowd that Sokal was trying to expose as frauds. His only crime was being too little too late. Even some figures in that sphere admit that things like the Strong programme laid the foundations for the current bad-faith attacks on science. Here's Bruno Latour:
"[they] are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?"
Claiming that Sokal was the problem, instead of the guy fighting the problem, is a pretty cruel twist on top of our current mess.
Always have mixed feelings about this debacle, leaning towards positive dislike for Sokal's little trick. Despite his claims to the contrary, I simply don't believe he's serious. Plenty of articles come through HN criticizing the manner in which the scientific community legitimizes bad research, or vice versa. Sokal's critiques always seem to involve the least charitable possible interpretation of a philosopher's words, or simple misconstrual.
For example, is it really so unreasonable to analogize Einstein's theories of relativity to epistemological/moral relativity?
I agree that Sokal's point of view was uncharitable to the majority of post-structuralists, but I can attest to the fact there is a definite strain of radical relativism on today's campuses. It goes hand in hand with a reflexive questioning of authority, an attitude that views all authority as illegitimate, even when that authority is derived from legitimate learning and knowledge. And when that attitude confronts science, it becomes a rationalization to challenge or deny universal theories that have been proven repeatedly by experiment as somehow merely a 'local' knowledge framework, or 'culturally constructed' or 'patriarchal' and therefore something to be suspicious of. This opens the door to treating all scientific assertions as equivalent and suspect. And you can draw a straight line from that to the anti-intellectualism that dominates our social discourse today.
As to your question, in many ways calling Einstein's theory 'relativity' was a misnomer because it was actually a statement about the absolute laws of physical reality - laws that don't change with perspective or reference frame. For example, for special relativity, the absolute laws of electrodynamics require the speed of light to remain constant in every reference frame. And these laws entail that space and time must change with reference frame in order for the laws of physics to remain absolute. For these reasons, the relativity of physics bears little resemblance to moral relativism.
> you can draw a straight line from that to the anti-intellectualism that dominates our social discourse today
Really? Could you elaborate?
From my perspective, the two groups you connect seem more opposed than anything. The prevailing strains of anti-intellectualism despise what they perceive as ivory-tower academia, and the sorts of people who dabble in poststructuralism & the like tend to be the very model of the anti-intellectuals' villain. To, say, the average climate change denier, the social sciences aren't "real science", they're only good for jobs at Starbucks - and if critical theory's even on their radar, it's as an enemy, lumped in with the "cultural marxism" bogeyman.
But that's just the thing, I don't think post-structuralism and platonism are mutually exclusive, and neither would, say, deleuze. "Things are absolutely relative to their frame of reference." I would consider that formulation perfectly consistent with plenty of, say, morally relativist interpretations. And Kant's "Newtonian" lack of relativism is exactly the shortcoming his categorical imperative.
You mean the difference between space as a medium in which things sit as opposed to space as constituted but the objects that populate it? I would say the perspectivism implied by the latter.
I'm not sure Einstein's theory says that, actually. The equations have solutions without any matter or electrical fields, yet where gravity twists itself into nontrivial shapes. It's more accurate to say that stuff can affect space and vice versa, not that space is defined by stuff.
Given that, for various reasons, a majority of published research is wrong, and given that academics inhabit a very rarefied and solipsistic reality rather different from most of us, you might well ask why you'd think academics would be well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. If anything I'd suggest quite the opposite.
By and large, nobody is well suited to sniffing out hoaxes. This particular example is rather egregious, since it involves the "critical studies" people, who were meandering around in territory that they were completely ill-equipped to navigate. But there are plenty of other examples from academia and elsewhere, where the recipients of the hoax were supposed to thoroughly understand the details.
Further, those hoaxes outside academia, such as Theranos and Bernie Madoff, tend to be directly harmful rather than merely embarassing---one would think the victims would have been more careful.
Just from reading the summary, it feels like his joke had some strains of truth to it, and his fear of the impact of what it would mean to take that seriously caused him to frame it sarcastically instead.
What a shame he chose to not take the idea of rebuilding science in post-truth philosophical world and instead made it a crude joke.
There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article:
"NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective.
[...]
"HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so.
"STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies.
"WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that.
"What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position."
In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
You should read the rest of the article; the history involved does a pretty good job of explaining what happened and why:
"ALAN SOKAL: In the spring of 1994, I saw a reference to the book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. My first thought was, Oh, no, not another one of those right-wing diatribes that tell how the Marxist deconstructionist professors are taking over the universities and brainwashing our children. There had been a whole spate of such books in the early 1990s — Dinesh D’Souza and others.
"My second thought was "academic left and its quarrels with science"? I mean, that’s a little weird. I’m an academic leftist. So I decided to read it. I learned about a corner of the academy where people were employing either deconstructionist literary theory or extreme social constructivist sociology of science to make comments about both the content of science and the philosophy of science, often in gross ignorance of the science. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the library and check out the original works that Gross and Levitt were criticizing to see whether they were being fair. I found that in about 80 percent of the cases, in my judgment, they were."
...
"I thought, well, I could write an article to add to the Gross and Levitt critique, and it would probably disappear into a black hole. So I had the idea of writing an article that would be both a parody and an admittedly uncontrolled experiment: I would submit the article to a trendy journal and see whether it would be accepted."
...
"BARBARA EPSTEIN, professor emerita, history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz: A friend of mine at UC-Davis said that she wanted to tell me about something if I would promise absolute secrecy. She said there is a physicist at NYU who has written an article that purports to be by a scientist who has converted to poststructuralism, and actually, it’s a hoax.
"She said he wants to find a humanist who knows something about poststructuralism, can’t stand it, is a leftist and feminist, to work with. He wanted to write a piece outing himself, and explaining why he had done it. I said, "Absolutely. Sign me up.""
...
"EPSTEIN: ...By that time [after the article was published, but before Sokal's second article exposing the hoax], I really was persona non grata. It was very clear that I was a minority in my department, and not only a minority but a target. I had an article in Socialist Review in which I criticized poststructuralism. It had become a crusade and an orthodoxy and a juggernaut, and the more I was part of that culture, the more I disliked it. The emotional atmosphere around this wasn’t that different than the emotional atmosphere around the election right now. People on two sides of the fence were barely talking to each other."
