Global Warming

Michael Press said:

"My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on
publicly available sources, all of which I have
meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and
all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are
invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't
believe his own argument. But why should that matter?
The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity
and interest of ideas, without regard for their
provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals
practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Text editors
find my arguments convincing, then why should they be
disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more
deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of
technoscience'' than they would care to admit?"

"I say this not in glee but in sadness.

So okay. This is a really dead story, but I don't
believe this. I mean that he wasn't gleeful.
I also think it's an ethical violation to submit an
article that you don't believe. I've refereed plenty
of papers, and while a referee must check for
correctness, and the Social Text people screwed up,
I also know that a referee cannot detect fraud,
unless it's grossly incompetent fraud. There's an
element of trust of the author, and Sokal abused that.

Also, Sokal has never acknowledged (AFAIK) that the
editors of the journal went back and forth with him
to try to make the article clearer, and he refused
to revise it substantially, so they finally accepted
it as is. They thought they were doing him a favor.
I think the fact that he never mentions the requests
for revision indicates that he was taking a cheap shot.

Obviously, they should have run it past some
physicist, but it was an article seemingly about
physics, not an article doing physics (if I'm making
the difference clear). It wasn't a physics journal.
If someone wrote a real article on the intellectual
structure of modern physics, it might have to be
reviewed by a philosopher of science, not a working
physicist. We don't know what we do, but we know
how to it - like riding a bike.

Anyway, I don't think physics was ever in danger
of being run over by scary deconstructionists, and
it still boggles me that people thought that was
a problem. As long as you can make stuff (cars,
computers etc) with what comes out of physics and
engineering departments, English profs are never
going to wipe them off the campus. Fortunately, the
rise of new creationists and the like has drawn more
attention to the real anti-science brigade.

Ben

In article
<[email hidden]
egroups.com>,
"[email hidden]" <[email hidden]>

Quoted message said:

Michael Press said:

"My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on
publicly available sources, all of which I have
meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and
all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are
invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't
believe his own argument. But why should that matter?
The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity
and interest of ideas, without regard for their
provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals
practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Text editors
find my arguments convincing, then why should they be
disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more
deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of
technoscience'' than they would care to admit?"

"I say this not in glee but in sadness.

So okay. This is a really dead story, but I don't
believe this. I mean that he wasn't gleeful.
I also think it's an ethical violation to submit an
article that you don't believe. I've refereed plenty
of papers, and while a referee must check for
correctness, and the Social Text people screwed up,
I also know that a referee cannot detect fraud,
unless it's grossly incompetent fraud. There's an
element of trust of the author, and Sokal abused that.

Also, Sokal has never acknowledged (AFAIK) that the
editors of the journal went back and forth with him
to try to make the article clearer, and he refused
to revise it substantially, so they finally accepted
it as is. They thought they were doing him a favor.
I think the fact that he never mentions the requests
for revision indicates that he was taking a cheap shot.

Obviously, they should have run it past some
physicist, but it was an article seemingly about
physics, not an article doing physics (if I'm making
the difference clear). It wasn't a physics journal.
If someone wrote a real article on the intellectual
structure of modern physics, it might have to be
reviewed by a philosopher of science, not a working
physicist. We don't know what we do, but we know
how to it - like riding a bike.

Anyway, I don't think physics was ever in danger
of being run over by scary deconstructionists,

Elsewhere he says exactly this.

Quoted message said:

and
it still boggles me that people thought that was
a problem. As long as you can make stuff (cars,
computers etc) with what comes out of physics and
engineering departments, English profs are never
going to wipe them off the campus. Fortunately, the
rise of new creationists and the like has drawn more
attention to the real anti-science brigade.

The overtly anti-science factions are
unlikely to pose a threat, in my opinion.

--
Michael Press

Ryan Cousineau said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

We should recruit these guys to come and troll in rbr in July.

In article <[email hidden]>,

Donald Munro said:

Ryan Cousineau said:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

We should recruit these guys to come and troll in rbr in July.

They pretty notoriously used sock puppets (including impersonating
famous physicists) in their online debates. Who says they aren't here
already?

I'm thinking...Gene Daniels? Ben?

--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"My scenarios may give the impression I could be an excellent crook.
Not true - I am a talented lawyer." - Sandy in rec.bicycles.racing

Ryan Cousineau said:

Unfortunately, at the outer limits of theoretical physics, we're
dangerously close to being in the land of nonsense anyways, since large
chunks of the current attempts to create a Grand Unified Theory (aka
Theory of Everything) are essentially untestable with current
instruments.

That may soon change:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/11/14/scisurf114.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

Surfer Dude ftw.

Ryan Cousineau said:

"Fraud"? In the context of academic papers, fraud may refer to
plagiarism or faking data. Sokal did neither.

I'm saying that a referee can rarely detect when a
clever author knows that what he is saying is not true.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

I think the fact that he never mentions the requests
for revision indicates that he was taking a cheap shot.

Bad faith? Maybe. But the journal's editors chose to publish. As the
kids say these days, FAIL.

Sokal pwned them. Nobody should deny this. He did
in a way to guarantee maximum humor, embarrassment,
and publicity value too.

But after pwning them, Sokal embarked on a campaign
(which was pretty much devoid of the previous humor)
to claim that this showed the emptiness of an entire
field, made sweeping statements about where
philosophers and litterateurs ought not to tread,
and so on. He wrote a book about it. Or maybe
more than one. This is where I think he tripped
over from prankster into ideologist, and where his
disingenuity about struggling with the editors to
get the paper accepted was a problem.

Quoted message said:

At the time the Sokal Hoax went down, liberal arts types were actively
and routinely discussing whether or not the Scientific Method was
essentially a social construct, with no effective claim to empiricism.

Now, I'm enough of a clever boy to recognize both the compelling claims
of relativism in this way, and to recognize that entire college
faculties have not only recognized those claims, but accepted it whole
as virtually axiomatic in their fields. But I think those claims have
actively devastated the abilities of those fields of knowledge to
actually produce any new knowledge. I'm looking at you, English
literature.

Sokal et al understood the ramifications of that sort of thinking in the
hard sciences: bad.

However, practicing scientists mostly don't worry
about whether science is or is not a social construct.
They just do it, like riding a bike.

So I disagree that creeping relativism would have endangered
the hard sciences. You might want to argue that it would
endanger philosophy of science departments. I'd argue
that the books of people like Bruno Latour and Peter Galison
indicate that you can do interesting studies of how
science is done by networks of people in a society
(sort of a social construct) and not lead to 2+2=5.
FWIW, both of those guys are more substantial than
Andrew Ross, the editor of Social Text - although even
Ross didn't deserve all the hate mail he got.

BTW, there are people out there who will tell you
that string theory is math, and therefore not a science.
I don't know - I'm too dumb to understand it, so like
the editors of Social Text, I don't know whether it's
science or not.

Ben

<[email hidden]> wrote in message
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Quoted message said:

Ryan Cousineau said:

"Fraud"? In the context of academic papers, fraud may refer to
plagiarism or faking data. Sokal did neither.

I'm saying that a referee can rarely detect when a
clever author knows that what he is saying is not true.

I wonder if you've ever served on a jury when both prosecutor and
defendant's attorney know that they're both lying through their teeth
because the prosecutor couldn't care less whether someone is guilty or
innocent but is only interested in whether he can convict someone or not.