
Anatomy of a Hoax - mef
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Anatomy-of-a-Hoax/238728?key=bB4GOexLsAk2KfnFOkgPCGZJodsq8kA9po7j3SWdw46rznQiP0fbjiAll6EEXwldVmZKeFJMcVFVNGduaGJGZTllUVZseUhJLWRCaDJwekdXNlZuZm5KdjNEUQ
======
ComputerGuru
Speaking of hoaxes, forgive me for going off on a tangent, but this is my
favorite hoax:
[http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_moun...](http://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_eruption_of_mount_edgecumbe/)

~~~
mabbo
> 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."

------
woodandsteel
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.

~~~
tokai
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.

[0] Last paragraph,
[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/li...](http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html)

~~~
woodandsteel
That's a good point. I need to include it when I write about these issues.

------
ruminasean
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.

------
DanBC
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.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc)

For example: Dolly the Sheep
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mhsdw)

The 1983 Hitler Diaries forgeries:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d8gvj)

The Centre for Alternate Technology:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s393k)

~~~
tomcam
Also the reunification of Berlin:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67YSxB224)

------
ianamartin
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.

~~~
noobiemcfoob
> 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.

~~~
ianamartin
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.

------
bitwize
It's been pointed out before but:

a) _Social Text_ is a pleb-tier journal

b) Sokal pressured them into publishing his junk article

So it's not the home run against postmodernism that Sokal and his fans thought
it was.

~~~
golergka
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?

------
RodericDay
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.

~~~
wolf550e
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.

~~~
RodericDay
What, exactly, do you think "Social Text" is?

> 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.

------
CalChris
You want an anatomy of a hoax? _When Dickens Met Dostoyevsky._

[http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-
do...](http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-dostoevsky/)

------
mcguire
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".

~~~
jccalhoun
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.(...)_

------
samirillian
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?

~~~
Aqueous
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.

~~~
EvilTerran
> 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.

------
grabcocque
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.

~~~
mcguire
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.

------
tsunamifury
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.

~~~
Marazan
Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in.

Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.

~~~
tsunamifury
Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction.

It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames,
and others verifiable in different frames of reference.

~~~
mcguire
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?

