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        general >> truth >> bizarre affair
        
(Message started by: BenVitale on Jul 2^nd, 2008, 11:13pm)

Title: bizarre affair
Post by BenVitale on Jul 2^nd, 2008, 11:13pm

Here is a little summary from wikipedia

Quote:

Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions

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

How do we determine what is BS ?

Sokal wrote

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by towr on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 12:27am

on 07/02/08 at 23:13:20, BenVitale wrote:

How do we determine what is BS ?

You read it and consider whether it has any concern for reality. (Both lies and truths concern themselves with reality, but bullsh*t ignores its importance entirely.)
Or you test whether it makes good fertilizer for your rose bed.

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by BenVitale on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 8:57am

I read it several times and I understand with the help of a couple of philosophy major students that it is nonsense. But the thing is I read Sokal's letter already knowing that it was a hoax. I tried to pretend that I was reading somebody's letter, but I couldn't pretend, fool myself. I took a couple of semesters of philosophy classes, I had good grades, but I didn't really enjoy philosophy, mainly because of the amount of stuff I was required to read.

Going back to Sokal's hoax. It tells me 2 things:

(1) The relative emptiness of the whole post-modernist idea, especially when some sociologists invokes quantum mechanics without the faintest notion of what they are talking about.

(2) The second thing is the intentionally impenetrable writing style. I fully understand the need for technical terms, the definitions of which are defined and agreed upon by people engaged in the discussion.

It also revealed that the readership frequently has no idea what the writer is saying.

I didn't understand it on my own, I had a discussion with a couple of philosophy major students.

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by towr on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 9:17am

It reminds me a bit of something I read a while ago

(partial quote from http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000024.html )

Quote:

Can Derrida be "even wrong"?

This recent interview (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/066649.html) with Jacques Derrida reminds me of a parlor game that a colleague of mine claims to have played, back in the day when it was easier to find academics who took Derrida seriously.

My colleague would open one of Derrida's works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida's admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise. On this view, as Wolfgang Pauli once said of someone else, Derrida is "not even wrong.".

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by BenVitale on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 10:15am

Good link, towr.

That's philosophy. I care more about math and physics, especially determining hoaxes, wrong perspectives in math and physics.

Consider the following:

In the Journal of Theoretics

http://d1002391.mydomainwebhost.com/JOT/Links/links-theory.htm

there's Tsolkas Christos claiming that The Theory of Relativity is Wrong. See link

http://www.tsolkas.gr/

I don't have enough time now to go through his explanations, but I will as soon as time allows me. I have math assignments in Number Theory to worry about

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by towr on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 1:04pm

on 07/03/08 at 10:15:44, BenVitale wrote:

That's philosophy. I care more about math and physics, especially determining hoaxes, wrong perspectives in math and physics.

Well, if you consider the Solkas affaire, the context is really philosophy of science.
And of course they're both cases of incomprehensibly dense texts that no one really wants to admit not understanding. It's like the Emperor's new clothes, no one wants to be the first to say he's naked.

Whether Solkas also really succeeds in his intended criticism that people in those fields don't understand the scientific concepts they refer to; well, I'm not so sure.

Quote:

there's Tsolkas Christos claiming that The Theory of Relativity is Wrong.

I've seen a similar person that even started his own journal so he could publish his crackpot ideas.

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by BenVitale on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 1:31pm

Sure, but what about the Journal of Theoretics? Isn't it a reliable Journal?

Title: Re: bizarre affair
Post by towr on Jul 3^rd, 2008, 1:55pm

on 07/03/08 at 13:31:35, BenVitale wrote:

Sure, but what about the Journal of Theoretics? Isn't it a reliable Journal?

Looking at the link, I would doubt it.
I'd try to find out who cites it and how often.

I don't know a good site to check citation, to be frank. But doing a search at the nature website, "journal of theoretics" give 0 hits, and "wikipedia" gives 125.
And, as some people frequently point out, wikipedia is not a reliable academic resource^*. So that implies something about journal of theoretics.
But as I said, that wasn't a proper search for citations.

*) to be fair most hits seem to be more about wikipedia, than a reference to information there; although there's at least one in the first 10 hits.