I shared this on Quora. We miss you over there but I told them they could find you over here. This is a necessary cautionary tale. Good to get the word out both for science and those laypeople discerning truth.
Great post. As always. Essential reading for anyone wanting to publish their work. Another outdated system. Not fit to help science progress. And stop silly and fraudulent research. Thanks
As a youngster going to graduate school without any real first-hand knowledge of the publishing industry, this is very helpful info to have. I would just caution against using the Sokal affair. There is quite a lot wrong with the Sokal affair, enough to make it essentally useless as the type of critique it claims to be. The following YouTube video digs into the details better than I could. Let me steal a comment from the YouTube user DahVoozel under that video (because it is good and I am tired) that summed up it's argumentation quite well if you do not have the time / are not interested in watching it:
So is Sokal actually an evergreen example of confirmation bias strangling social sciences and political thinking because all of the people using Sokal's work as a "gotcha" of the "woke postmodernites" [he originally tried to use his single data-point to discredit the whole field of postmodern thought] didn't read his article, didn't examine the journal it was published in [the journal was not peer-reviewed], didn't examine the context in which it was published [his paper was originally rejected and only later published in less serious context related to highlighting “less conventional” multidisciplinary perspectives], and uncritically accept Sokal's crowning of his own experiment a success because it agrees with thier worldview?
The video is well worth a watch if you are interested in hearing someone with more knowledge of the matter really dig into the details.
Thank you for that. If you read my post, you’ll see that my Sokal reference was largely an aside. As I explain in my very first Substack post https://drjo.substack.com/p/mostly-wrong my take on Science is quite different from both Sokal’s and the ‘postmodern’ view.
Dr Fatima is articulate in criticising Sokal (and in fact covers several topics I’ll bring up in subsequent posts about the inadequacy of peer review and other checks). At the end of the day, Sokal’s article is a humorous piss-take that seems to have garnered the reaction he wanted. (He certainly managed to get up Derrida’s nose). This is an interesting sociological observation, but I suspect most people have moved on, and the so-called “culture wars” of the ‘90s have subsided to a large degree.
She does rather bang on a bit, without counterbalancing this with a description how incoherent a lot of ‘postmodern’ constructs are. I’m not sure that she adequately articulates her position, which is something I’d be interested in. A lot of people miss the nuance here, and have a dichotomous take: you are either realist (in the Platonic sense) or ‘everything is arbitrary’, both of which are of course a bit daft.
I shared this on Quora. We miss you over there but I told them they could find you over here. This is a necessary cautionary tale. Good to get the word out both for science and those laypeople discerning truth.
Thank you for referencing this :)
From time to time I post links, but usually Quora ignores them, so I don’t spend much time on that.
Dr Jo
Great post. As always. Essential reading for anyone wanting to publish their work. Another outdated system. Not fit to help science progress. And stop silly and fraudulent research. Thanks
As a youngster going to graduate school without any real first-hand knowledge of the publishing industry, this is very helpful info to have. I would just caution against using the Sokal affair. There is quite a lot wrong with the Sokal affair, enough to make it essentally useless as the type of critique it claims to be. The following YouTube video digs into the details better than I could. Let me steal a comment from the YouTube user DahVoozel under that video (because it is good and I am tired) that summed up it's argumentation quite well if you do not have the time / are not interested in watching it:
So is Sokal actually an evergreen example of confirmation bias strangling social sciences and political thinking because all of the people using Sokal's work as a "gotcha" of the "woke postmodernites" [he originally tried to use his single data-point to discredit the whole field of postmodern thought] didn't read his article, didn't examine the journal it was published in [the journal was not peer-reviewed], didn't examine the context in which it was published [his paper was originally rejected and only later published in less serious context related to highlighting “less conventional” multidisciplinary perspectives], and uncritically accept Sokal's crowning of his own experiment a success because it agrees with thier worldview?
The video is well worth a watch if you are interested in hearing someone with more knowledge of the matter really dig into the details.
https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk?si=HHxQbSRa8h8L09DT
Thank you for that. If you read my post, you’ll see that my Sokal reference was largely an aside. As I explain in my very first Substack post https://drjo.substack.com/p/mostly-wrong my take on Science is quite different from both Sokal’s and the ‘postmodern’ view.
Dr Fatima is articulate in criticising Sokal (and in fact covers several topics I’ll bring up in subsequent posts about the inadequacy of peer review and other checks). At the end of the day, Sokal’s article is a humorous piss-take that seems to have garnered the reaction he wanted. (He certainly managed to get up Derrida’s nose). This is an interesting sociological observation, but I suspect most people have moved on, and the so-called “culture wars” of the ‘90s have subsided to a large degree.
She does rather bang on a bit, without counterbalancing this with a description how incoherent a lot of ‘postmodern’ constructs are. I’m not sure that she adequately articulates her position, which is something I’d be interested in. A lot of people miss the nuance here, and have a dichotomous take: you are either realist (in the Platonic sense) or ‘everything is arbitrary’, both of which are of course a bit daft.
As an interesting aside, Bohannon’s “sting paper” has also garnered a fair bit of criticism on PubPeer: https://pubpeer.com/publications/E902004AA49A4636D480087B2A6BE8
Cheers, Dr Jo