I'm not sure I agree. In his own words, he had to ship around for a respected authority so that it would be taken seriously.
Once he had that, the journal have a bullshit response that it was passed two months since the original article was published, and so not eligible for publication. Sokal through his connections, went to the CEO to get that decision over ruled (edit: by threatening that the journal would be humiliated by refusing to publish it). The original debunker would never have got that far on his own.
To me, this sounds like a process that is far from some sort of egalitarian "judge ideas on their merit rather than the person presenting them." If he hasn't got Sokal involved, I wonder if this would have gotten published at all.
Edit: also, this casts a pretty negative light on the field, given that it's been cited 350+ times in this field. Not one of those other papers dug into the content (or understood it) enough to question it, and/or raise the alarm bells. It's one thing Its one thing if this was some obscure paper that never got eyes on it, but that is obviously not the case.
I agree completely with criticisms of the journal - clearly their process is flawed in a multitude of ways. But regarding "shopping around for a respected authority to be taken seriously" - I think this is actually an important lesson.
The problem with the vision of an egalitarian meritocracy in science (or any other field, honestly) is that reviewing, understanding and critiquing someone else's work has a non-zero cost - actually quite a large cost if done correctly. Also, the people most qualified to do this analysis generally loathe doing it, as they'd rather be spending time on their own original work. Inevitably, people develop heuristics to estimate the credibility of every new email or article that comes across their desk, to decide which is even worth reading.
Understandably, one of those heuristics is credentials/authority - the ratio of good articles published by non-experts in their field is extremely small and massively outweighed by crackpots. So what does a smart non-expert with a good idea do to hack this system? "Bootstrap" your authority, by first finding someone with more credentials than yourself, but not so much notoriety that they're too busy to read your email. If you can convince them, they'll bring it up the chain to the next-highest authority they can convince, and eventually it'll have some important names behind it and people will pay attention. Brown was able to accomplish this with only two collaborators, so I consider him a master bootstrapper for this :)
Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days. On the internet, a non-expert trying to rapidly gain credibility on their own is indistinguishable from social media hucksterism/"influencing". If you want to break into a new field, find some experts in that field and work with them!
"Everyone wants to be the patent clerk slaving away in isolation who pops out with a new revolutionary theory of the universe, but it's just not realistic these days."
And note that that patent clerk wasn't just some patent clerk. He had published four papers (plus a bunch of reviews) and finished his dissertation by 1905.
Juxtaposing this to Nakamoto's creation of bitcoin and original use cryptography, it makes no sense to me how anyone would have ever paid even an ounce of attention to what some random, supposedly unkown guy on the internet has to say about ... anything.
Or how Perelman even got someone to even eant to verify his solution. Maybe not so much Perelman since he had some important figures knowing him already.
Bitcoin received early support from high-reputation folks in the cryptography community, including Hal Finney and Nick Szabo. (As a result, some people thought that one or both of them were Nakamoto.)
Regardless of who Nakamoto actually was, it does appear that Finney and Szabo played a similar role that Sokal did in this story; getting support from high-rep folks was essential to getting Bitcoin off the ground.
Perelman was widely known as a math prodigy (he won gold for the USSR at the International Mathematical Olympiad) and studied at the Leningrad University, so he could approach pretty much any of his former professors to take a look. He was definitely not an outsider in the field. A recluse, yes, but that is different from being a no-name.
Yeah Bitcoin is such an interesting exception! I think some ideas are viral enough on their own to go from zero to front-page on HN/reddit/etc. even when posted by an anonymous user - but it's rare to go beyond that, they usually run out of momentum.
Bitcoin had a few things going for it - the whitepaper is concise and well-explained, in perfect academic prose and typeset in LaTEX, which lends it an air of credibility. It came with an implementation, so hackers could experiment with it immediately, plus it sort of has implicit libertarian anti-government undertones, both of which encouraged follow-on blog posts.
Once the ball got rolling, another kind of heuristic took over - the money heuristic. People put money into the thing, which made other people go "oh look at how much money they put in, this is a real serious investment thing!" and put in their money, in a sick feedback loop that continues to this day...
> Not one of those other papers dug into the content (or understood it) enough to question it, and/or raise the alarm bells.
Quite the opposite, the article itself found out that many of them did question it (and quotes three such researchers), however, "raising the alarm bells" and disputing such claims requires exceptional diligence (more than the original article did) and lots of thankless work (like Nick Brown and his two collaborators did) that's not likely to be rewarded (you'd be lucky if you can even get it published in an appropriate venue); so they quite reasonably went on with their own research agendas instead of letting their actual work languish while doing a debunking campaign.
Science can only be as good as the people doing it.
The problem is that most papers, especially on very complicated topics, are not science and just serve the purpose of proving a point or helping someone's career.
Even without taking easy jabs at psychology (you would need full brain understanding of its inner workings and evolution over a lifetime, to have a 100% clear picture of what's happening - we probably have 0.0001% - it's all based on observations and interpretations), the reproducibility crisis is affecting a lot of areas.
Hopefully with more time and more people getting involved in the field, we'll get more and more science.
If I think about nutrition / fitness, between 40-20 years ago and now we made great progress: we went from "Fats are bad and make you fat" (pure propaganda to sell processed sugars), "BULK on a 4000 diet" to any video of Jeff Nippard quoting incredibly detailed studies about minutiae of nutrition and building muscle.
The journal publishers (similar to FB et al) are commercial entities designed to make money from desperate academics trying to publish. They thrive on novelty and readership, but also "respect" (rather than ads and "engagement") from not having their occasionally outrageous papers questioned. Sometimes to stoke or avoid scandal and increase readership they might include a debunking paper, but it's important to remember these are not bought by individuals but by departments who won't stock "less respected" journals.
Now, if perhaps there were a respected public psychology paper service like psyarXive at the time that might have made things slightly better.
I'm not sure I agree. In his own words, he had to ship around for a respected authority so that it would be taken seriously.
I don't see how that contradicts the person you are replying to. Ze is saying there is a path to contradicting established science. Ze didn't say that it was easy, or that it didn't involve working with people who are in "the establishment" - just that jumping on podcasts and talk shows and spouting off as an outsider with no credibility isn't the best way.
If your goal is to try and reform from within then sure, spending months waiting for BS replies from journals is the best/only way.
If your goal is to spread the word that psychology is unreliable and you don't care much about what psychologists themselves think, then podcasts and talk shows are a far more effective strategy.
Psychology isn't really a very harmful field - bad claims in psychology mean maybe some people waste time on a useless self help method, or don't get proper psychiatry when maybe they should. But a lot of low level damage still adds up, and there's a lot of people who listen to psychologists. If you go the media (NB: which is what Brown is doing here), then you can potentially have a more positive impact on balance.
Once he had that, the journal have a bullshit response that it was passed two months since the original article was published, and so not eligible for publication. Sokal through his connections, went to the CEO to get that decision over ruled (edit: by threatening that the journal would be humiliated by refusing to publish it). The original debunker would never have got that far on his own.
To me, this sounds like a process that is far from some sort of egalitarian "judge ideas on their merit rather than the person presenting them." If he hasn't got Sokal involved, I wonder if this would have gotten published at all.
Edit: also, this casts a pretty negative light on the field, given that it's been cited 350+ times in this field. Not one of those other papers dug into the content (or understood it) enough to question it, and/or raise the alarm bells. It's one thing Its one thing if this was some obscure paper that never got eyes on it, but that is obviously not the case.