Comments on: Fake science

By: Chris L

Chris L — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 01:36:25 +0000

Alex: that makes sense. The paradox is that big names often get published without editorial scrutiny anyway– it has little to do with general principles of rigor.

Jason makes sense too– it’s why the Sokal publication really didn’t mean anything!!

I still maintain that those who used Sokal as a means to try to discredit contemporary theory should be using this to discredit hard science publications– it would demonstrate their equal wrong-headedness… not doing so simply shows that they were driven solely by existing ideology…

By: jason

jason — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 12:05:33 +0000

Suggesting that the fact that a % of papers gets through a system stands for proof of anything is shocking regardless of whether you’re qual or quan, or bi. Or a journalist. I think your analysis of the vanity conference based on the configuration of the conference tells us much more. As for computer generated papers, we should be more concerned with research and design errors in the papers that are legitimately produced, IMHO.

By: Chheng Hong

Chheng Hong — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 03:56:22 +0000

Actually, I felt very nervous when I saw this news – since my writing is not so far away from the automatic computer-generated texts, will the faculties here doubt that I use this program to generate my final paper?

By: Alex Halavais

Alex Halavais — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 14:46:52 +0000

The difference, I think, is that Social Text was seen as a central organ of American cultural studies, published by a university press, with a pretty well-respected (within the field) editorial board. It published people like Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Michel de Certeau, Gayatri Spivak, Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Fraser, Lawrence Grossberg, Cornel West, Donna Haraway, Henry Giroux, (our own, sort of) Ernesto Laclau, and of course, Stanley Aronowitz, among others. It was a peer-reviewed journal with a serious editorial board, and publication of the Sokal article strongly suggested that a group of peer reviewers thought it was worthy. WMSCI, on the other had, despite their website and *very* widely spread CFP, is not a reputable conference (let alone a journal). The authors of the program that authored the paper suggest that one good use of the program is to "auto-generate submissions to 'fake' conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end." If you look over the organizing committee for the conference, I doubt you will recognize any of the names, and it is not clear if any of them have institutional affiliations. So, in the former case, it's clear the intent was to show that the emperor had no clothes. That wasn't the intent, and I don't think it was the outcome, of the latter. If you wanted a similar target for the latter, you would need to show that a "fake" paper could get into, say, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, or Artificial Intelligence. Note that I'm not saying doing so is impossible. In fact, I think it is pretty likely you could. After all, academic publishing is built on the assumption of integrity, which in some ways invalidates Sokal's attempt to discredit cultural studies.

By: Chris L

Chris L — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 06:28:45 +0000

I’m not so sure that the difference you are pointing out between the MIT paper and the Sokal hoax (which was the first thing I thought of when I heard of it, Reuters notwithstanding) is a distinction that makes any real difference.

Sokal’s hoax was to discredit a particular publication, with the intention of making it the stand-in for a much larger school of thought. He elaborates on this ad-nauseum in his incredibly wrong-headed and tedious book.

My point is that scads of folks who never read Social Text *anyway* used the Sokal publication as a way to jab at post-structuralist literary theory with their rather limp sabres, sure that Sokal’s success was a sign of the apocalypse.

I find the robotic turnabout to be eminently fair play– and rather amusing to boot.