The Sokal Hoax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

by for_i_in_range • 3 years ago

74 92 3 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

thriftwy2• 3 years ago

The funnier thing that Quantum Gravity does seem to be a social construct.

Some people are confident it exists even though it is impossible to observe (as of yet)

austin-cheney5• 3 years ago

A better example is dark matter. Numerous people have staked their entire careers upon dark matter, so the emotions are real, more real than the logic they entertain to qualify positions on the matter. Pun intended.

thicknavyrain• 3 years ago

Everyone always misses the corollary to this "groupthink is why we have dark matter" theory which is that academics are very heavily incentivized to try and overturn conventional dark matter because it would be an absolute career-maker to have a credible alternative (and get credit for upturning a widely accepted theory). And in fact lots of people have tried various MOND theories etc but the reason Lambda-CDM persists for so long is because it still fits the data the best.

psychoslave2• 3 years ago

Do you mean that the weight of their intangible emotions largely exceed the measurable observations they showcase in their scientific decisions? How unbearable!

Steuard3• 3 years ago

I don't mean this unkindly, but I am always so baffled when I see how common this take is. I mean, sure, say this about string theory (the field I was trained in): fine. I don't agree, but I see the point.

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.)

js8• 3 years ago

Angela Collier did a nice video on YT debunking this, about why dark matter is not a theory, but rather a name for a discrepancy in observations. So it's not a social construct, the discrepancy is real.

sgt101• 3 years ago

Heh yup looks that way now, along with a priesthood protecting the discourse. Interesting that people like Neil Turock are using their position to right the ship now though.

eigenket3• 3 years ago

I am very confident that quantum gravity "exists" in some sense. Here is the argument:

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.

thriftwy2• 3 years ago

How do we know they are doing something, and that something is different from localised buckyball behavior? I don't believe we can measure that.

n4r92• 3 years ago

Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

qsort• 3 years ago

They could have asked someone who did know. If you are the editor of a publication you have editorial responsibility of what gets published, you don't get to abdicate that responsibility because you don't feel like doing your homework.

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).

unmole• 3 years ago

They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

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.

esrauch• 3 years ago

Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others.

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".

alphanullmeric7• 3 years ago

There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.

promiscous4• 3 years ago

The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.

oblmov4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...

beepbooptheory7• 3 years ago

You can hear 10,000 positivists rolling in their graves at Cambridge after this comment.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards.

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.

eigenket3• 3 years ago

They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone.

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.

wzdd• 3 years ago

They unquestioningly published literal nonsense and you think there's a case to be made that they don't lack intellectual rigour?

n4r92• 3 years ago

I think "unquestioning" undersells it. They requested that he remove a lot of the pshilosophising and footnotes, but he refused. Then they put it aside until deciding it might be okay to put in a special "Science Wars" issue.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

I suppose that seals it then. What was meant to be science is just priestly words repeated by those anointed priests. It is no sin to simply repeat the words of priests even if what they speak is nonsense.

When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.

DiogenesKynikos• 3 years ago

The proper response would be: "Sorry, this is the wrong journal to submit to. We don't have any expertise in physics."

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

Thing is, I'm a layman, and Sokal's paper reeks to me of bullshit. I'm neither a physicist nor a sociologist; but that pasaage about the "hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework", with its implication that the axiom of equality is somehow political, is pretty obvious nonsense. I don't hve to understand set theory to see that.

beepbooptheory7• 3 years ago

May I introduce you to Alain Badiou, a massive and important figure of contemporary philosophy? "Being and Event" is probably the most focused work around ZF theory stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou

nathias2• 3 years ago

I would argue his article was valid despite his intentions, philosophy does not concern itself with the scientifically correct opinion but explores ideas and their consequences and connections. So he poses a nonsense scientific thesis and explores it, this is the majority case of all past philosophy because scientific theses don't age well, but philosophical theses turn out to be less dependent on science, and a few abstractions removed from it.

Maken• 3 years ago

The point here was not if philosophy is scientifically correct, but if the journal editors could tell apart philosophy from purposely empty babble. This was not an attack on philosophy but on the journal editorial team.

nathias2• 3 years ago

but it isn't empty babble, if you read it in good faith (as you should any philosophical text)

bluescrn• 3 years ago

The more recent unofficial sequel to the Sokal Hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

lproven2• 3 years ago

Excellent -- this was news to me. Thanks.

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.

meepmorp• 3 years ago

If an academic field has "science" in its name, it's not a science.

Yeah, suck it materials scientists, your discipline ain't real.

xdavidliu2• 3 years ago

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.

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...

beepbooptheory7• 3 years ago

Man there is some real hubris there for James A. Lindsay...

bondarchuk4• 3 years ago

That one is a bit different because they simply fabricated observational data (in the dog park paper at least).

asguy3• 3 years ago

Focusing on "fabricating observational data" is a cope for the fact that Boghossian et al made the targets of their papers look like absolute fools. The problem with the paper "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" wasn't that the data was wrong.

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.

trabant00• 3 years ago

To my completely untrained mind (in either physics or social studies) it is obvious social studies can not have the rigor of Newtonian physics simply by the difference in running experiments for each discipline. Think about how difficult it is to run, observe, constrict, isolate, etc experiments in social studies by comparison. Ethics limitations too. You really can't take a thousand babies, isolate them and run experiments to see what is a social construct and what is not.

cdot2• 3 years ago

If your research is not based in experimentation then on what foundation can you argue that you're searching for truth? The same foundation that any religion does?

promiscous4• 3 years ago

You can observe without experimentation. This is how we initially found evidence for cigarette smoking causing cancer. And then there's stuff like math, philosophy (including logic), and afaik. major parts of astronomy, which are not experimental, and yet produce knowledge.

kergonath2• 3 years ago

it is obvious social studies can not have the rigor of Newtonian physics simply by the difference in running experiments for each discipline.

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.

deng• 3 years ago

If you think this could not happen in physics:

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.)

promiscous4• 3 years ago

Its worth reading the editorial response[1] to the hoax. There's some context that tends to be ignored when this hoax is discussed online. For example, that the journal is non-refereed; that they deliberately publish non-scientific articles including fiction; and that the paper was initially rejected and only reconsidered for a special issue that sought to present the heterogeneous voices of the "science wars".

[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf

bigbacaloa• 3 years ago

All the editorial response demonstrates is that the editors understood so little about so many things that they could not understand the difference between an evident satire of a pseudoscientific text and something of substance. Any scientifically reader immediately realizes that the Sokal text was a joke (if someone doesn't, they don't meet my standard for "scientifically educated").

promiscous4• 3 years ago

That's not all the response demonstrates. More important is that it demonstrates that the journal is not representative of typical social scientific journals. This context is important because online commenters at times derive from the Sokal hoax general claims about the social sciences.

jfengel2• 3 years ago

They're not scientifically educated. They're not a scientific journal. They publish commentary, without judgment, including outright fiction.

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.

3seashells• 3 years ago

The hoax proofed a lack of scientific on the side of the social sciences.

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.

kgwgk• 3 years ago

From an article of his published a few days ago:

  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)

“White Empiricism” and “The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics”: A Critical Analysis https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/260

kergonath2• 3 years ago

Fucking hell! I don’t have much sympathy for Sokal but that article he’s criticising is something else. I had to check that it was not a hoax itself. I still cannot decide whether she’s more likely to be a troll or a useful idiot. Or how someone can apparently work in astrophysics whithout having a clue about relativity.

jjgreen2• 3 years ago

It seems sad to me that someone who could have spent his time doing, you know, actual physics, instead has frittered away his life shooting social-scientists in a barrel. How many books on this now? Yeah yeah, we'll all agree that social scientists aren't proper scientists, now will you move on already?

tgv• 3 years ago

One of the problems is that we can't agree on what proper science is. Another one is that even if we do agree, we don't know how to do it. Yet another is one is that many people listen to social scientists and take their word. Economy is a pretty clear example, but there are also cases of statements by social scientists taken as authoritative by the general public, ranging all the way from mental health to (social) injustice.

samirillian• 3 years ago

It's well-known that the hard sciences are awash with fake papers, but apparently when a hard science journal gets fooled, it proves nothing.

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.

beepbooptheory7• 3 years ago

One fun thing to do is to prompt passages from the original article to ChatGPT and see it just run with it. It is a very strong Sokal Hoax generator.

BiteCode_dev• 3 years ago

The follow up book is very much worth a read. It deconstruct so much BS in so called "great thinkers" works.

junon• 3 years ago

Reminds me of "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct", my favorite hoax paper.

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.

The Sokal Hoax

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