[star]The American Mind[star]

April 16, 2005

Sokal Redux

The infection of post-modern gibberish has spread beyond the humanities and the social sciences. Some MIT students put their research paper-generating computer program to work and got a fake paper accepted to a computer science conference. Alan Sokal pulled a similar stunt. He threw a figurative pie on the face of the "academic" journal Social Text in 1996 with his fake paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." (You're in good shape if you toss "hermeneutics" around liberally.) When Sokal told the world his paper was a hoax he wrote:

What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance.

A computer-generated paper like that by Jeremy Stribling et al show that at least one computer science conference either has incredibly lax standards or the subject has gotten so convoluted at the academic level its research is useless.

"MIT Students Pull Prank on Conference" [via Wizbang]

Posted by Sean Hackbarth in Culture at 01:33 AM | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)