Ironically, I suspect that many of the same people criticizing them for accepting the paper would also accuse them of censorship if they'd rejected it. I've seen a great many people stand up for the rights of people to lie and insist that it was obligatory to carry that lie, even if they knew it was false.
Sokal and Boghossian's work intended (and succeeded?) to accomplish the same thing: they demonstrated the fact that these academic disciplines are full of bullshit producers and consumers.
There is a demonstrable reluctance in these comments to confront what the Sokal hoax demonstrated.
There are generally "common wisdom" conclusions from this, that again, does not materially affect how people live their lives.
* If a country has "democratic" in its name, it's not a democracy.
* If an academic field has "science" in its name, it's not a science.
Yes there are of course exceptions... but they are literally small ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic#Global_use...
There are multiple areas of academia which role-play as rigorous scientific study, but in fact, are just people trading mumbo-jumbo which varies in how convincing it looks, and if you drill down, it's not just academia.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ray-dalio-rob-copela...
100% of supplmentary, complementary, and alternative medicine is fake.
Cf.
https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
But that doesn't stop it being a multi-billion-$CURRENCY industry. It is entirely fake, but people will pay to think they feel better.
That is why I used those names in that order.
S. C. A. M.
Gambling does not make you money. It makes gambling companies money. But it's vast.
Stock markets are, largely, gambling, driven by vague feelings, instincts, and herd impulse. I have worked there. They don't really know. It's hunches and friendships and hysteria.
But the world runs on it.
Yeah, suck it materials scientists, your discipline ain't real.
Noam Chomsky says something related in one of his interviews [1][2]
> It’s considered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzrHwDOlTt8
[2] http://ozscience.com/philosophy/chomsky-calls-postmodern-cri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
(Yes, I'm aware it's different from Sokal, in that the Bogdanov twins were convinced of the validity of their research.)
The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.
On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".
You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).
The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field.
This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying.
In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT).
The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.
I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.
I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.
The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.
When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.
https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.... [pdf]
And the breakdown of the hoax:
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social...
An excerpt:
> We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
In my parody article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal 1996), I wrote as part of my conclusion:
[P]ostmodern science provides a powerful refutation of the authoritarianism and elitism inherent in traditional science, as well as an empirical basis for a democratic approach to scientific work. For, as Bohr noted, “a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description” – this is quite simply a fact about the world, much as the selfproclaimed empiricists of modernist science might prefer to deny it. In such a situation, how can a selfperpetuating secular priesthood of credentialed “scientists” purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge? (Sokal 1996, 229)
[...]
Alas, PrescodWeinstein makes a similar bald leap at the beginning of her article – albeit this time, apparently, in all seriousness. Her claim is based on general relativity rather than quantum mechanics, but the structure of the logic is almost identical:
Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. ... Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression ... (PrescodWeinstein 2020, 422–423, references omitted)
To my mind (trained in statistical Physics), you don’t have to abandon rigour when looking at complex systems. We can build models for things we don’t understand perfectly and we can rationalise experiments even if we don’t control everything (we rarely ever do). I think it’s a difference in degree rather than nature.
The fact that many sociological studies are not reproducible does not mean that we cannot learn anything by observing and investigating correlations. It means that we need to be more serious while doing it.
> You really can't take a thousand babies, isolate them and run experiments to see what is a social construct and what is not.
You’re right. But this means that the emphasis moves from the experimental setup to the data analysis, and also that the results need to be discussed in terms of trends and likelihood more than verified facts. The field could still do away with p-hacking, data fabrication, and dodgy ideologies.
There are plenty of physicists who publish rubbish because they set out to prove a pet theory and become victims of confirmation bias. That tendency is present everywhere, it is just stronger in fields where you cannot control as much the system you observe.
Some people are confident it exists even though it is impossible to observe (as of yet)
In quantum physics labs all over the world we can put stuff in superpositions of being in different places. These objects are currently pretty small, but we can do it. Mostly this happens to electrons right now, but it has been demonstrated with "buckyball" molecules made of about 2000 atoms. These objects have mass, and when they're localised in a single position we have a nice description of what their mass does to space-time around them (General relativity).
On the other hand, when such objects are in superpositions of being in different places they do something to space-time around them, but we have absolutely no clue what.
"Quantum gravity" is just the "something" that they do. We don't know what they do, but they do something.
But dark matter? You think we wanted this "weird particle or something very like it that we persistently can't find" situation? No! The reason that the overwhelming majority of cosmologists and astrophysicists pretty solidly believe that dark matter exists (after a whole lot of skepticism when it was first proposed) is that there is very strong evidence for it from at least three radically different sets of experimental data. [Patterns in how galaxies rotate (the original), gravitational lensing to locate and quantify mass in galaxy clusters (including cluster collisions like the "Bullet Cluster"), and the overall history of cosmological evolution.] And not only do all three lines of evidence indicate "dark matter exists", but as I understand it, they all independently indicate a consistent amount of dark matter (relative to the observable ordinary matter).
People have tried to come up with modified theories that eliminate the need for dark matter for years and years (once they gave up suggesting the observations themselves might be faulty): it would be so much more satisfying, especially in light of our continued failure to find any sort of "stuff" that the dark matter might be made of. But as I understand it, every modification of basic theory that's so far been proposed to give a different explanation of one of those pieces of evidence has had nothing at all to say about the other two. And while maybe you could come up with a different theory modification to account for each line of evidence separately, at that point the coincidence starts to seem far less plausible even than "particle we can't find". ("Our otherwise solidly established theories are wrong in three very specific but unrelated ways, each tuned to match the effects we'd see from the exact same amount of dark matter.")
And yet somehow, the notion has taken root among a whole bunch of non-experts that this is all somehow a conspiracy or a group delusion or a stubborn self-interested refusal to consider other answers. I'll never pretend that science is perfect or immune to groupthink! But for goodness sake, aim that skepticism in some direction where the observational evidence is less overwhelming. (And before you just pick another field to go after, maybe first think carefully about what factors led you to disagree with the experts on this one where it really, really wasn't justified.)
As a result, projects who's funding was based upon publishing with the magazine should have to hand that funding to the creator of the hoax. Make science grant hunts real hunts, make hunting down fakes profitable for the scientific minded project.
Honestly, I hate this. It's a stunt and bad manners. All the extenuating circumstances are known at this point. Philosophical inquiry is of course by its nature susceptible to charlatans, that's unavoidable.