A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax)

Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by boredguy8 on Monday March 07, 2011 @11:54AM (#2297704)

A few key things to keep in mind:

1) It was not a blind review. The editors knew Sokal was the author and knew he was an important scientist.

2) The editors asked for some revisions, and Sokal refused. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

  "Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally
  to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philo-
  sophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed
  resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his
  footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in sci-
  ence, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response,
  it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, 
  Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well
  known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish,
  not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if pub-
  lished in the company of related articles."

3) It sat in the offices of the journal until they published a "science wars" edition, and included the article because it was from a scientist. In this sense, the hoax reveals almost nothing about the humanities, but does possibly say interesting things about the role authority plays.

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Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by ignifero on Monday March 07, 2011 @01:18PM (#2298079)

so: 1) In the humanities, what you write doesn't matter. It's all about WHO writes it

2) The editors did not really care if there are errors, if the author insists, he can publish any kind of bs.

3) You are right. It seems in the humanities there is no discourse at all, it's all about who has authority and how social you are

C'mon, a little self doubt won't hurt the "social sciences". The article was rife with complete and utter fancy-looking b.s. Even the title is laughable.

Nothing can excuse the editors of this journal.

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Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by icandoitbetter on Monday March 07, 2011 @01:55PM (#2298236)

A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality.

[1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...

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Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by mayank on Monday March 07, 2011 @02:13PM (#2298295)

Wow, thanks for that link. IEEE seems to have taken the paper down: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/freesrchabstract.jsp?arnum...

but the Web still has it (PDF link): http://www.tektalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/herbert_sc...

and ACM still lists the reference (perhaps as a snub to IEEE): http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1469852

Amazing! The first line is: The synthesis of fiber-optic cables is a natural quagmire.

And then the first line of the second paragraph is: We prove that cache coherence and IPv7 are often incompatible.

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Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by emmett on Monday March 07, 2011 @02:14PM (#2298297)

Being accepted as a poster in a conference is a very different thing from being published in a journal, as the comments on the article you posted point out.

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Re:A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) by cdavid on Monday March 07, 2011 @06:08PM (#2299120)

The actual difference depends on the journal, conference and field. In some fields (large parts of CS), the most prestigious conferences are more prestigious than most journals. OTOH, in biology, publishing in Cell or Nature may be career-changing.

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