The Sokal Squared hoax

Here is coverage from The Chronicle, the bottom line is that a number of humanities journals were trolled by phony submissions, and yes the journals accepted some absurd articles.

For varying perspectives, here is Henry, and here is Jonathan Rauch.  Here is Yascha Mounk.  Here is Bryan.

I would frame the matter somewhat differently, and perhaps more cynically.  Not every undergraduate major can have majors as smart and as rigorous as we find say in mathematics.  And yes I do mean some of the humanities majors.  In the resulting equilibrium, the rigor and smarts of associated faculty vary across fields as well.  The top people in quantum mechanics have passed through some pretty tough filters.  But again, we cannot usefully generalize those filters across all fields and majors to a country where such a high percentage of people attend college.  (Slow improvement can come from K-12 progress, of course, and we should fight for that.)  Some of the majors have to be easier than others, no names will be named.  By the way, don’t assume that basket-weaving is such an easy skill!

So simply calling for higher standards in the fields you object to begs the question.  Instead ask “what are those fields for?”  And “might I prefer a different kind of error process in those fields?”  And “Might I want those fields to be (partly) bad in a very different way?”  You probably have to compare bad against bad, not bad against “my personal sense of what clearly would be better.”

After such inquiries, you still will find that too much bogus work is being researched and published in journals.  The most rigorous fields in turn tend to have too much irrelevant or overspecialized work — is all of string theory or for that matter game theory so much to be envied?

Many of you will be inclined to call for fewer subsidies.  I won’t tackle that larger question right now, I’ll just note that any system-wide subsidies — especially egalitarian ones — also will boost the less rigorous fields and majors, and in some manner you need to be prepared to live with the not entirely rigorous consequences of that.

Overall I view bad pieces in the humanities as a potential profit opportunity, rather than something to just whine about.  You don’t like those troll-published pieces?  Get to work!

Addendum: You will note that the sociology journals were not fooled by the troll submissions.  By many outsiders sociology is a much-underrated field.