> He wanted to clarify how Postmodern theorists were talking nonsense about Physics and Mathematics.
Not really, even though the fact that those are the hardest sciences does help in creating contrast.
He had read a book that claimed some humanities journals would "publish anything as long as it has the proper leftist thought" (or quoted the proper "leftist" thinkers), and wanted to check/prove if it it was true.
> But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
I mean, he's just one guy that did this in his free time. You could if any argue how much Social Text was representative of the field as a whole (and the absolutely shameful grievance studies affair put some higher bound, that if not any today the situation is better) but it seems true there is a deficit of standards. From Derrida getting awarded an honorary doctorate, to this, to even just the damn notion of "objectification" being woefully unclear after half a century of presumed debate.
Also I think that calling it "a hoax" is kinda diverting from the crux? Because even if peer review had happened, that is never meant to catch carefully fabricated data and pending some in-depth formal investigation there has just to be an assumption of good faith (for instance, in the same years The Lancet was publishing Wakefield's MMR autism hoax).
But this was much much worse, because you didn't even need a laboratory or trying to reproduce an experiment to catch the forgery. He just made up the most bizarre word salads that could look still like syntactically correct sentences (including some like gravity being a social construct), and whoever was in charge of publishing called it a day.
> or Kepler's work was called wrong for his reasoning in faith
Back then that was a necessary precondition to be published, I'm not sure why it would matter.
> Sokal in the book, ironically, fails to provide any solutions to the problem which he claims to tackle - that reality is not socially constituted by language alone.
...? Negating that is not entirely socially constructed (as exemplified by his famous quote "I invite to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment") means that at least some parts are not. I don't understand what are the incredible claims here.
> Ironically, by not looking at the main claims of postmodernism and responding to them critically he becomes with his hoax the psuedo-postmodernist.
I have not read his book, and I have no further knowledge about his academical output, but his sting operation having merit or not is separated from his person (which definitively hasn't been the best in the last years, most recently signing a letter in defence of Nathan fucking Cofnas).
Perhaps twenty years ago, I'd have been sympathetic to Sokal's position, i.e., postmodernists talk incoherent gobbledygook, and scientists do not.
Twenty years later, and at the end of my tether with philosophically illiterate science educators routinely talking incoherent, self-contradictory drivel, indeed "educating" the public with their gibberish, my sympathy has waned somewhat. Heard Jerry Coyne or Neil deGrasse Tyson on "truth" in science? Heard Donald Prothero explain how nothing is ever proven in science, then, perhaps two pages later, explain how this, that, and the other has been proven? Wanna hear Youtuber Forrest Valkai explain how the theory of evolution is both right and wrong? Should I go on?
Anyway, for an interesting response to Sokal, see the Mara Beller article linked below. Was Niels Bohr, say, just so deep that lesser mortals (e.g. me) can't make head or tail of his scientific philosophy? Or was he just talking incoherent gibberish of the kind that Frenchmen pride themselves on, and Alan Sokal condemns so sanctimoniously? You decide lol.
It has nothing to do with postmodernists talking incoherent gobbledygook. It's that some postmodernists had simply turned off all their reason and good sense and decided to accept any old crap, without bothering to examine it.
> Was Niels Bohr, say, just so deep that lesser mortals (e.g. me) can't make head or tail of his scientific philosophy?
Nobody in their right mind has elevated anything a physicist ever said about psychology (the most I can think is Penrose with his baloney quantum consciousness theory, but even that has a doctor as the supposed grounding).
Even I (regularly flaming with people mentioning anything about freud or jung) only know this is a thing, because *schizos* regularly bringing up the most awful psychoanalytic bullshit at some late point of already being cooked found their writings and got physics envy.
> When physicists failed to find meaning in Bohr's writings, no matter how hard they tried, they blamed themselves, not Bohr.
That is literally the criticism that Hans Reichenbach makes in first page of The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, about everybody and their aunts genuflecting to everything fucking Hegel wrote.
The difference being that nobody ever hid behind the authority of Bohr, Pauli or Heisenberg to do anything socially heinous (and there's absolutely no university crediting their idiot balls in any shape or form), while dialectics and "unconscious theory" are behind some of the biggest crimes of the 20th century.
It's not very unique either which way. You can find experts in any old field gabbing on about their interpretation of another field. I'm always a bit nonplussed when PhDs in particular do this, because they've been through something that demonstrated the incredible depth of one area, how much hard work it takes to get there themselves, and that it's hard to be an expert slightly outside that area let alone well-outside of it.
Sometimes they have reasonable ideas but they don't have the right language to communicate them. Sometimes it's just pop-interpretations like any other jamoke might have and the, again surprising, lack of awareness that they're in the splash pad of a field that's ocean-deep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In case you're interested, "truth" in science, according to Jerry Coyne at least, is a matter of consensus. If enough of the right people say that X (e.g. the theory of evolution) is true, then X is true. Coyne elaborates, however, by adding that truth in science can be falsified; scientists can discover that something which is true, in fact, is not true. The truth can be discovered to be untrue in other words.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, meanwhile, not to be outdone in the gobbledygook stakes, explains that verification in science is the process by which hypotheses -- which are all untrue initially -- are shown to be true. Verification, then, is the process of establishing that untrue statements are in fact true.
As they say, I am not making this up (links available). And that's just the tip of a very large iceberg of incoherent gibberish indeed. Bring beer and I'll bore you till Christmas with more of the same. :)
I'm not sure that even French postmodernists can compete with this level of gibberish. It might be best to declare a draw!
I don't think he's dumbing things down. He's simply confused. What do you really expect will happen when people lecture on topics they know nothing about?
Asserting, as he does -- indeed "educating" -- that verification is the process whereby untrue hypotheses are shown to be true (!) is not "dumbing it down." It's wrong, it's pig ignorant, and it's about time these buffoons were taken to task for it. Moreover, the aforementioned is just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me started! :)
Coyne's gibberish on truth (among other gibberish) appears in his book "Why Evolution is True," near the start as far as I recall (about pp10-20).
More easily accessed, if you don't have the book, are numerous Youtube vids of himself promoting the abovementioned book. Try this one: " 'Why Evolution Is True' by Jerry Coyne, AAI 2009', (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science).
These vids follow the format of the book. Coyne begins by explaining "how science works," -- i.e. the philosophy of science -- a subject about which he knows nothing. You'll hear him explain at 5:55 (vid above) that truth just is what the majority of scientists say it is. You could spend a year reflecting on the absurd consequences of that statement alone!
Anyway, the theory of evolution, Coyne explains, is one such truth insofar as it satisfies his definition of truth (i.e., it's the majority view). Notice Coyne's definition makes no mention of "correspondence with facts," as truth is normally understood. Thus, for example, as defined by himself, it can be true that there is no life on Mars even if there is life on Mars. The actual facts of what's happening on Mars are irrelevant to Coyne's truth.
Note also, Coyne's position implies, for example, that the statement "The blood is stationary; it does not circulate" once was true. It was not merely believed to be true; it was true. It was the majority view after all. Former executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie Scott, disseminates the same gibberish. She tells us, for example, that it once was a fact that we all have 48 chromosomes. It's not a fact anymore. See her "Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction" for the gory and incoherent details.
Towards the end of Coyne's vids, he invariably presents his audience with a list of potential discoveries which, if actualized, would falsify the theory of evolution. See around 40:00 in the vid above.
A theory which he has already established as being true (= the consensus view), then, may one day be discovered to be untrue. Indeed, it may already be untrue (scientists just haven't found that pre-Cambrian rabbit yet), thus it may actually be an untrue truth.
> You'll hear him explain at 5:55 (vid above) that truth just is what the majority of scientists say it is
This, unfortunately is a very common belief amongst normies. I have coined this "consensism". Its the belief that truth is solely defined by what the expert consensus is. I hate it just as much as you. I think it comes from the way science is taught in schools. Your science teacher will say "this volcano is 20 million years old", and you're just expected to memorize that fact and then recite it for the test. If you ask "how do we know it's 20 million years old", the answer you'll likely get is "because all the experts agree it's 20 million years old". The same thing can be observed in regards to climate change. Every single person you come across who believes in climate change will all cite the same "evidence": "all the experts agree".
“Hand washing and two meters distance will keep a person safe” ( against a a full-a-room-like-smoke virus) … is the majority opinion on transmission to this day. Truth was falsified through a combination of early public health mistake, many governments amplifying that, some embarrassment about being wrong, a feeling that to change a policy would cause chaos and some businesses not being willing to do anything more than place hand-sanitizer and signs.
> Airborne is not the same as "full-a-room-like-smoke".
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/Aerosol-expert-Jose-Luis-Jimenez/99/i1 - Professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Article talks of the smoke model. Oh, help me remember what the hand-washing expert said to the famous Prof Lidia Morawska when she got her conf-call with the WHO in Q2-2020. Darn it, who were the professorial and PhD pettition writers imploring the WHO to adopt fills-a-room-like-smoke transmission mechanisms in 2020.
Descartes used the concept of God to to articulate the Object/Subject distinction at the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Why a question like; Does the Verification principle serve as a new God for the grandchildren of Descartes ? - would not be a worthwhile question to contemplate for the least. Is it because its Unscientific? If someone like Sokal - a globally recognised and established scientist - would answer yes, then its enough for me to see it as a worthwhile question.
The Sokal Hoax is not a big deal in epistemology. It says nothing at all about epistemology and makes no epistemological points. It is a hoax meant to illustrate that certain journals had very sloppy processes that would let utter garbage in. That's it. That's all it is. It says nothing about the underlying fields of thought, except that perhaps some of them had very sloppy methods and needed to clean up their acts.
The rest of your post sounds like whining to defend sloppiness.
It is wanking. But it got people and intellectuals talking about science. Its title after all is Fashionable Nonsense. And ironically, it became Fashionable Nonsense.
>But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
Sokal wrote a follow up article explaining why he did what he did. Is his hoax entirely fair? Not really, but the point is that they were willing to publish something they clearly didn't understand. Yes, he's guilty of over generalising from a single example but it's not a good look for your field when nonsense can get through whatever passes for your review process. I don't think you can just dismiss it as a failure of that particular journal (something which happens all the time) when it's not clear that other similar journals would have done anything different.
This is vaguely analogous to some current drama in literary circles about AI generated books being put forward for major prizes. The focus has been on the authors in these alleged cases but there's a deeper point where your panel can't distinguish between AI writing and something that has been written by a human being. Maybe this just means AI is now "that good" but I doubt it.
>Imagine Plato is called nonsense for exploring the transcendence of mathematics
Plato was writing over two thousand years ago. If some of the things he or Aristotle wrote were new works today they would rightly be dismissed as being nonsensical. That's not a criticism of them, Newton is still held in high regard despite not knowing about Quantum Physics or General Relativity.
I've always taken it to be because very few analytic philosophers actually understand postmodern thought. Many might even understand how to play by the "rules" of writing postmodern text, but the point itself never clicks.
The Sokal hoax is analogous to a middle-ages mathematician axiomatizing the complex numbers just to then call the entire axiomatic approach a hoax because you can't count to i. It demonstrates a certain computational/textual competence, but ultimately betrays a complete lack of understanding of the object of critique.
Not necessarily. We've always had all sorts of bullshit published in journals that are not peer reviewed, so the fact that Sokal published in one already says nothing about the state of actual peer-reviewed journals.
But let's consider a more robust hypothetical case where the aforementioned middle-ages mathematician submits his axiomatization of the complex numbers to some contemporary equivalent of a peer-reviewed journal, his peers accept it, and after his submission is accepted he reveals that he wrote it as a hoax to show that the axiomatic approach is nonsense.
I think this hypothetical case would still say nothing about the state of academia; the fact that the mathematician intended the paper to be a hoax isn't sufficient to make the work itself illegitimate. If this had actually happened, we'd probably still credit this mathematician with first formulating the complex numbers today and muse about the fact that he originally intended it as a prank.
Bringing it back to the Sokal case, even if he had gone through a peer-reviewed route, the fact that his paper got published would not necessarily say anything about the state of academia because it's always possible for someone who writes a hoax like this to have Chinese-roomed themselves into an actual contribution.
The paper itself is more about parallels between the relationship between general relativity and quantum gravity and the relationship between modern and postmodern dialectics. This is discourse analysis, not physics.
The topic of gibberish passed off as science is a topic I think about a lot. My background is in engineering. We are spoiled in the sense that the word salad gibberish gobblygook is rarely present in out field. In my almost 20 year career, I can confidently say I have never ever utilized word salad to explain anything that I've created, and most other engineers are in the same boat as me. I think this is because as engineers, when we talk, we are describing something we created. In other words, we are describing things that are real. Its easy to explain something real using short sentences.
If someone came to me and told me they had just created a teleportation machine, I would ask them questions about it. If they answered my questions with one sentence that answers my questions, I just might actually believe them. On the other hand, if they answer my questions with a long winded jargon filled diatribe, I would likely assume they are full of shit and they didn't actually build anything.
In other words, in the engineering field, the burden is on the speaker to speak clearly. What I've learned is that on the science end, it's the other way around. When a scientist explains his or her discovery, and their explanation is filled with jargon, no one will ever use that to suggest the discovery is not legitimate. Instead they'll say "will obviously it sounds like gibberish to you, you're just an idiot. The scientists who made that discovery are smart, and they understand it. The fact that you and me don't understand it doesn't matter". The scientists has become accustomed to reading a new paper and only being able to understand 5% of it. In other words, in teh scientific world, the burden is not on the speaker to speak clearly, the burden is on the reader to understand what's there.
Sokal was just punching down because it's easy and gets publicity. I doubt he was actually interested in a deeper discussion, because then he could've held one. It's a shame it got published, but I expect the journal editors were trying to be generous and open minded, and he wasted their time and abused their trust. The real loss is if, in the aftermath, it prevented the publication of actually interesting experimental work.
>But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
there is an expectation of good faith, hijacking that and saying the people who acted in generosity and good faith are stupid for being duped is scumbag behaviour.
mirh | 9 hours ago
> He wanted to clarify how Postmodern theorists were talking nonsense about Physics and Mathematics.
Not really, even though the fact that those are the hardest sciences does help in creating contrast.
He had read a book that claimed some humanities journals would "publish anything as long as it has the proper leftist thought" (or quoted the proper "leftist" thinkers), and wanted to check/prove if it it was true.
> But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
I mean, he's just one guy that did this in his free time. You could if any argue how much Social Text was representative of the field as a whole (and the absolutely shameful grievance studies affair put some higher bound, that if not any today the situation is better) but it seems true there is a deficit of standards. From Derrida getting awarded an honorary doctorate, to this, to even just the damn notion of "objectification" being woefully unclear after half a century of presumed debate.
Also I think that calling it "a hoax" is kinda diverting from the crux? Because even if peer review had happened, that is never meant to catch carefully fabricated data and pending some in-depth formal investigation there has just to be an assumption of good faith (for instance, in the same years The Lancet was publishing Wakefield's MMR autism hoax).
But this was much much worse, because you didn't even need a laboratory or trying to reproduce an experiment to catch the forgery. He just made up the most bizarre word salads that could look still like syntactically correct sentences (including some like gravity being a social construct), and whoever was in charge of publishing called it a day.
> or Kepler's work was called wrong for his reasoning in faith
Back then that was a necessary precondition to be published, I'm not sure why it would matter.
> Sokal in the book, ironically, fails to provide any solutions to the problem which he claims to tackle - that reality is not socially constituted by language alone.
...? Negating that is not entirely socially constructed (as exemplified by his famous quote "I invite to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment") means that at least some parts are not. I don't understand what are the incredible claims here.
> Ironically, by not looking at the main claims of postmodernism and responding to them critically he becomes with his hoax the psuedo-postmodernist.
I have not read his book, and I have no further knowledge about his academical output, but his sting operation having merit or not is separated from his person (which definitively hasn't been the best in the last years, most recently signing a letter in defence of Nathan fucking Cofnas).
AchillesSinatra | 16 hours ago
Perhaps twenty years ago, I'd have been sympathetic to Sokal's position, i.e., postmodernists talk incoherent gobbledygook, and scientists do not.
Twenty years later, and at the end of my tether with philosophically illiterate science educators routinely talking incoherent, self-contradictory drivel, indeed "educating" the public with their gibberish, my sympathy has waned somewhat. Heard Jerry Coyne or Neil deGrasse Tyson on "truth" in science? Heard Donald Prothero explain how nothing is ever proven in science, then, perhaps two pages later, explain how this, that, and the other has been proven? Wanna hear Youtuber Forrest Valkai explain how the theory of evolution is both right and wrong? Should I go on?
Anyway, for an interesting response to Sokal, see the Mara Beller article linked below. Was Niels Bohr, say, just so deep that lesser mortals (e.g. me) can't make head or tail of his scientific philosophy? Or was he just talking incoherent gibberish of the kind that Frenchmen pride themselves on, and Alan Sokal condemns so sanctimoniously? You decide lol.
https://hps.elte.hu/~gk/Sokal/Sokal/Beller.html
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
It has nothing to do with postmodernists talking incoherent gobbledygook. It's that some postmodernists had simply turned off all their reason and good sense and decided to accept any old crap, without bothering to examine it.
mirh | 9 hours ago
> Was Niels Bohr, say, just so deep that lesser mortals (e.g. me) can't make head or tail of his scientific philosophy?
Nobody in their right mind has elevated anything a physicist ever said about psychology (the most I can think is Penrose with his baloney quantum consciousness theory, but even that has a doctor as the supposed grounding).
Even I (regularly flaming with people mentioning anything about freud or jung) only know this is a thing, because *schizos* regularly bringing up the most awful psychoanalytic bullshit at some late point of already being cooked found their writings and got physics envy.
> When physicists failed to find meaning in Bohr's writings, no matter how hard they tried, they blamed themselves, not Bohr.
That is literally the criticism that Hans Reichenbach makes in first page of The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, about everybody and their aunts genuflecting to everything fucking Hegel wrote.
The difference being that nobody ever hid behind the authority of Bohr, Pauli or Heisenberg to do anything socially heinous (and there's absolutely no university crediting their idiot balls in any shape or form), while dialectics and "unconscious theory" are behind some of the biggest crimes of the 20th century.
joe12321 | 9 hours ago
It's not very unique either which way. You can find experts in any old field gabbing on about their interpretation of another field. I'm always a bit nonplussed when PhDs in particular do this, because they've been through something that demonstrated the incredible depth of one area, how much hard work it takes to get there themselves, and that it's hard to be an expert slightly outside that area let alone well-outside of it.
Sometimes they have reasonable ideas but they don't have the right language to communicate them. Sometimes it's just pop-interpretations like any other jamoke might have and the, again surprising, lack of awareness that they're in the splash pad of a field that's ocean-deep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[OP] daking90 | 14 hours ago
Thanks
AchillesSinatra | 13 hours ago
In case you're interested, "truth" in science, according to Jerry Coyne at least, is a matter of consensus. If enough of the right people say that X (e.g. the theory of evolution) is true, then X is true. Coyne elaborates, however, by adding that truth in science can be falsified; scientists can discover that something which is true, in fact, is not true. The truth can be discovered to be untrue in other words.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, meanwhile, not to be outdone in the gobbledygook stakes, explains that verification in science is the process by which hypotheses -- which are all untrue initially -- are shown to be true. Verification, then, is the process of establishing that untrue statements are in fact true.
As they say, I am not making this up (links available). And that's just the tip of a very large iceberg of incoherent gibberish indeed. Bring beer and I'll bore you till Christmas with more of the same. :)
I'm not sure that even French postmodernists can compete with this level of gibberish. It might be best to declare a draw!
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
Tyson is a popularizer. Take everything with that grain of salt. He's dumbing things down immensely.
AchillesSinatra | 8 hours ago
I don't think he's dumbing things down. He's simply confused. What do you really expect will happen when people lecture on topics they know nothing about?
Asserting, as he does -- indeed "educating" -- that verification is the process whereby untrue hypotheses are shown to be true (!) is not "dumbing it down." It's wrong, it's pig ignorant, and it's about time these buffoons were taken to task for it. Moreover, the aforementioned is just the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me started! :)
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
Now that you pull out the strict logical construction, I see what you mean.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
In that light, Tyson seems to be unable to free himself of the fallacy of the excluded middle and adopt the possibility of "undetermined".
AchillesSinatra | 7 hours ago
It gets a lot worse, believe me. Look into his theory of "three kinds of truth" . . . if you dare. :)
You'll find it in his "Starry Messenger" or countless Youtube presentations thereof.
timwest780 | 12 hours ago
"Truth in science can be falsified."
Do you have a citation? Hypotheses can be falsified: truth cannot.
crusoe | 4 hours ago
truth and Truth
I don't think science can ever certainly deal with Truth. But then no one can.
But science can say something is 'true' in so far as their experiments and experience have supported it so far.
Science truth != the idea of Truth in philosophy. But I suspect philosophy has failed to uncover and prove Truth as well.
One helps builds cellphones the other pads academic resumes.
crusoe | 4 hours ago
I mean look at how many systems of philosophy there have been over the centuries. Has there been any progress or agreement on Big T Truth?
AchillesSinatra | 11 hours ago
Coyne's gibberish on truth (among other gibberish) appears in his book "Why Evolution is True," near the start as far as I recall (about pp10-20).
More easily accessed, if you don't have the book, are numerous Youtube vids of himself promoting the abovementioned book. Try this one: "
'Why Evolution Is True' by Jerry Coyne, AAI 2009', (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science).
These vids follow the format of the book. Coyne begins by explaining "how science works," -- i.e. the philosophy of science -- a subject about which he knows nothing. You'll hear him explain at 5:55 (vid above) that truth just is what the majority of scientists say it is. You could spend a year reflecting on the absurd consequences of that statement alone!
Anyway, the theory of evolution, Coyne explains, is one such truth insofar as it satisfies his definition of truth (i.e., it's the majority view). Notice Coyne's definition makes no mention of "correspondence with facts," as truth is normally understood. Thus, for example, as defined by himself, it can be true that there is no life on Mars even if there is life on Mars. The actual facts of what's happening on Mars are irrelevant to Coyne's truth.
Note also, Coyne's position implies, for example, that the statement "The blood is stationary; it does not circulate" once was true. It was not merely believed to be true; it was true. It was the majority view after all. Former executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie Scott, disseminates the same gibberish. She tells us, for example, that it once was a fact that we all have 48 chromosomes. It's not a fact anymore. See her "Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction" for the gory and incoherent details.
Towards the end of Coyne's vids, he invariably presents his audience with a list of potential discoveries which, if actualized, would falsify the theory of evolution. See around 40:00 in the vid above.
A theory which he has already established as being true (= the consensus view), then, may one day be discovered to be untrue. Indeed, it may already be untrue (scientists just haven't found that pre-Cambrian rabbit yet), thus it may actually be an untrue truth.
French postmodernists, eat your hearts out!
freework | 4 hours ago
> You'll hear him explain at 5:55 (vid above) that truth just is what the majority of scientists say it is
This, unfortunately is a very common belief amongst normies. I have coined this "consensism". Its the belief that truth is solely defined by what the expert consensus is. I hate it just as much as you. I think it comes from the way science is taught in schools. Your science teacher will say "this volcano is 20 million years old", and you're just expected to memorize that fact and then recite it for the test. If you ask "how do we know it's 20 million years old", the answer you'll likely get is "because all the experts agree it's 20 million years old". The same thing can be observed in regards to climate change. Every single person you come across who believes in climate change will all cite the same "evidence": "all the experts agree".
paul_h | 10 hours ago
“Hand washing and two meters distance will keep a person safe” ( against a a full-a-room-like-smoke virus) … is the majority opinion on transmission to this day. Truth was falsified through a combination of early public health mistake, many governments amplifying that, some embarrassment about being wrong, a feeling that to change a policy would cause chaos and some businesses not being willing to do anything more than place hand-sanitizer and signs.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
Let me guess, your "knowledge" of epidemiology and virology consists of youtube videos.
paul_h | 8 hours ago
> Let me guess, your "knowledge" of epidemiology and virology consists of youtube videos.
Canada’s SARS commission 2006 findings that the provinces that approached SARS as airborne and not droplets fared better.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
Airborne is not the same as "full-a-room-like-smoke".
paul_h | 7 hours ago
> Airborne is not the same as "full-a-room-like-smoke".
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/Aerosol-expert-Jose-Luis-Jimenez/99/i1 - Professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Article talks of the smoke model. Oh, help me remember what the hand-washing expert said to the famous Prof Lidia Morawska when she got her conf-call with the WHO in Q2-2020. Darn it, who were the professorial and PhD pettition writers imploring the WHO to adopt fills-a-room-like-smoke transmission mechanisms in 2020.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 7 hours ago
Let me guess, you want to drink ivermectin.
[OP] daking90 | 13 hours ago
Descartes used the concept of God to to articulate the Object/Subject distinction at the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Why a question like; Does the Verification principle serve as a new God for the grandchildren of Descartes ? - would not be a worthwhile question to contemplate for the least. Is it because its Unscientific? If someone like Sokal - a globally recognised and established scientist - would answer yes, then its enough for me to see it as a worthwhile question.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
The Sokal Hoax is not a big deal in epistemology. It says nothing at all about epistemology and makes no epistemological points. It is a hoax meant to illustrate that certain journals had very sloppy processes that would let utter garbage in. That's it. That's all it is. It says nothing about the underlying fields of thought, except that perhaps some of them had very sloppy methods and needed to clean up their acts.
The rest of your post sounds like whining to defend sloppiness.
[OP] daking90 | 7 hours ago
Sokal wrote a book about a Hoax. Then another book about Beyond the Hoax.
Apparently, for a Physicst at NYU its a big deal.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 7 hours ago
So? I know a homeless guy for whom the color of mustard and the planet Venus are a big deal.
[OP] daking90 | 7 hours ago
Read the book.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 6 hours ago
I have. It's wanking.
[OP] daking90 | 3 hours ago
It is wanking. But it got people and intellectuals talking about science. Its title after all is Fashionable Nonsense. And ironically, it became Fashionable Nonsense.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 2 hours ago
Still no more than the homeless guy and mustard.
mirh | 2 hours ago
Nobody read the book, the hoax in and of itself is what got people talking.
bunker_man | an hour ago
Also, from what I gather he hoped more reputable journals would accept it but it got punted to some lower one.
DharmaPolice | 12 hours ago
>But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
Sokal wrote a follow up article explaining why he did what he did. Is his hoax entirely fair? Not really, but the point is that they were willing to publish something they clearly didn't understand. Yes, he's guilty of over generalising from a single example but it's not a good look for your field when nonsense can get through whatever passes for your review process. I don't think you can just dismiss it as a failure of that particular journal (something which happens all the time) when it's not clear that other similar journals would have done anything different.
This is vaguely analogous to some current drama in literary circles about AI generated books being put forward for major prizes. The focus has been on the authors in these alleged cases but there's a deeper point where your panel can't distinguish between AI writing and something that has been written by a human being. Maybe this just means AI is now "that good" but I doubt it.
>Imagine Plato is called nonsense for exploring the transcendence of mathematics
Plato was writing over two thousand years ago. If some of the things he or Aristotle wrote were new works today they would rightly be dismissed as being nonsensical. That's not a criticism of them, Newton is still held in high regard despite not knowing about Quantum Physics or General Relativity.
Master-Rent5050 | 6 hours ago
Newton was one of the greatest scientists that ever lived: but most of his output is garbage.
bunker_man | an hour ago
Didn't he send it to multiple journals though until one accepted it? So clearly every journal isn't taking it.
Keikira | 15 hours ago
I've always taken it to be because very few analytic philosophers actually understand postmodern thought. Many might even understand how to play by the "rules" of writing postmodern text, but the point itself never clicks.
The Sokal hoax is analogous to a middle-ages mathematician axiomatizing the complex numbers just to then call the entire axiomatic approach a hoax because you can't count to i. It demonstrates a certain computational/textual competence, but ultimately betrays a complete lack of understanding of the object of critique.
Master-Rent5050 | 6 hours ago
If a well respected mathematical journal published such a thing,we should ask hard questions about the state of mathematics in academy
Keikira | 5 hours ago
Not necessarily. We've always had all sorts of bullshit published in journals that are not peer reviewed, so the fact that Sokal published in one already says nothing about the state of actual peer-reviewed journals.
But let's consider a more robust hypothetical case where the aforementioned middle-ages mathematician submits his axiomatization of the complex numbers to some contemporary equivalent of a peer-reviewed journal, his peers accept it, and after his submission is accepted he reveals that he wrote it as a hoax to show that the axiomatic approach is nonsense.
I think this hypothetical case would still say nothing about the state of academia; the fact that the mathematician intended the paper to be a hoax isn't sufficient to make the work itself illegitimate. If this had actually happened, we'd probably still credit this mathematician with first formulating the complex numbers today and muse about the fact that he originally intended it as a prank.
Bringing it back to the Sokal case, even if he had gone through a peer-reviewed route, the fact that his paper got published would not necessarily say anything about the state of academia because it's always possible for someone who writes a hoax like this to have Chinese-roomed themselves into an actual contribution.
Master-Rent5050 | 5 hours ago
Ah I understood your example better. But it's quite different from sokal: his work was bullshit about physics.
Keikira | 4 hours ago
The paper itself is more about parallels between the relationship between general relativity and quantum gravity and the relationship between modern and postmodern dialectics. This is discourse analysis, not physics.
kogun | 4 hours ago
Yeah, you missed the point unless you are purposely avoiding it in favor of a stawman.
freework | 2 hours ago
The topic of gibberish passed off as science is a topic I think about a lot. My background is in engineering. We are spoiled in the sense that the word salad gibberish gobblygook is rarely present in out field. In my almost 20 year career, I can confidently say I have never ever utilized word salad to explain anything that I've created, and most other engineers are in the same boat as me. I think this is because as engineers, when we talk, we are describing something we created. In other words, we are describing things that are real. Its easy to explain something real using short sentences.
If someone came to me and told me they had just created a teleportation machine, I would ask them questions about it. If they answered my questions with one sentence that answers my questions, I just might actually believe them. On the other hand, if they answer my questions with a long winded jargon filled diatribe, I would likely assume they are full of shit and they didn't actually build anything.
In other words, in the engineering field, the burden is on the speaker to speak clearly. What I've learned is that on the science end, it's the other way around. When a scientist explains his or her discovery, and their explanation is filled with jargon, no one will ever use that to suggest the discovery is not legitimate. Instead they'll say "will obviously it sounds like gibberish to you, you're just an idiot. The scientists who made that discovery are smart, and they understand it. The fact that you and me don't understand it doesn't matter". The scientists has become accustomed to reading a new paper and only being able to understand 5% of it. In other words, in teh scientific world, the burden is not on the speaker to speak clearly, the burden is on the reader to understand what's there.
KittyKablammo | 16 hours ago
Sokal was just punching down because it's easy and gets publicity. I doubt he was actually interested in a deeper discussion, because then he could've held one. It's a shame it got published, but I expect the journal editors were trying to be generous and open minded, and he wasted their time and abused their trust. The real loss is if, in the aftermath, it prevented the publication of actually interesting experimental work.
Master-Rent5050 | 6 hours ago
In science you punch down: you take a weak theory and torn it to shreds. The weak get discarded and the strong survives.
BoneSpring | 5 hours ago
Scientists do not suffer fools, but they do occasionally make fools suffer,
ababababababacus | 10 hours ago
>But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
there is an expectation of good faith, hijacking that and saying the people who acted in generosity and good faith are stupid for being duped is scumbag behaviour.
Temporary_Stranger39 | 8 hours ago
Peer review has very good reasons to use.
Master-Rent5050 | 6 hours ago
A reviewer and an editor are supposed to catch nonsense.