# "Sokal Squared" project exposes fraud in academia **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 6, 2019, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645 "2019-03-06T19:36:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/61 "2019-03-07T18:35:10Z")
On a lighter note, _Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality_, > **[Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality - Kindle edition by Ellenbogen,...](https://www.amazon.com/Sadism-Vegetarian-Personality-Glenn-Ellenbogen-ebook/dp/B00CYM1VXC)** > > Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality - Kindle edition by Ellenbogen, Glenn. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Oral Sadism and the... ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/62 "2019-03-07T19:20:10Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > You’re setting up a false dichotomy here. Advanced studies and knowledge are advanced studies and knowledge, regardless of whether you believe as a layman that you are sure you know what should or shouldn’t be obvious. The point is that hard science papers can be hard to read simply because the math is beyond the reach of the layman, and there’s really nothing to be done about that. On the other hand, it seems like many social science papers are hard to read because the authors go out of their way to write them that way, or because they contain so much invented, pointless jargon that seems to have the purpose of baffling with bullshit rather than clarifying difficult concepts. ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Kearsen1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen1)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 7:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/63 "2019-03-07T19:41:57Z")
> [@nelliebly](#): > > Undermining science? Stossel is part of the conservative wingnut movement to undermine higher education. > > [Against Higher Education](https://www.creators.com/read/john-stossel/05/18/against-higher-education) > > [College Has Become a Scam](https://patriotpost.us/articles/35501-college-has-become-a-scam) > > 58% of Republicans and right-leaning independents say college education is [hurting the country.](https://www.thedailybeast.com/pew-most-republicans-view-higher-education-as-bad-for-america). Not coincidentally, Republican voters increasingly are not college-educated. > > Nothing makes conservatives who never went to college feel better about themselves than to believe higher education is all a scam. \*We don’t need no stinkin’ college. And we don’t trust people who use big words and are hard for us to follow. \* Add the carefully nurtured perception that colleges turn students into raging liberals, and you can see what Stossel and his ilk are up to. Wait! Are your links to peer reviewed papers???! And if so , are they real science?! ---
**Author:** ![Cleophus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a88e57/32.png) [@Cleophus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cleophus)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/64 "2019-03-07T20:02:59Z")
There are a lot of people, and I am including the OP and their supporters on this, that seem to believe peer review is the professional version of grading a lab report or term paper; some kind of checking the publication to make sure it’s correct. That isn’t what it is, and it _can’t_ be what it is. An undergraduate lab report is a training exercise, a way of assessing whether the student can apply scientific principles to their observations. Academic publishing is on novel research. There’s no one to say whether the conclusion is “correct”, because that hasn’t been figured out yet. The point of peer review is to check whether the conclusions, _as presented_, are plausible given the data _as presented_. The field, as a whole, and based on the results of many papers, come to a working consensus on what is valid and not. No paper on its own, in any field, is “proof” of anything. That sort of thing is a conclusion arrived over time and seeing the results of various papers reoccur in related research. I have no doubt that those who misunderstand peer review for “letting” “bad” papers through would also complain if peer reviewers explicitly did select papers based on whether they thought the results were “correct”. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/65 "2019-03-07T21:17:23Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > I also don’t necessarily assume that people dealing with bullshit science realize at any level that they are. I would in fact tend to assume that most of them are honestly convinced of the validity of their claims. It’s not difficult to see that many people honestly believe in, say, conspiracy theories or outlandish religious claims and build whole systems of thought around their bullshit beliefs in perfectly good faith. If you’re operating inside an echo chamber, surrounded by people who have swallowed the same bullshit you did, and can figure out some explanation as for why the outside world is out to get you (which wouldn’t be difficult in the realm of social sciences), you can easily spend your life never second-guessing your established beliefs and producing more bullshit, fully convinced that you’re bringing enlightenment to the world. Just follow the money. Your dead on right. Its one big echo chamber and such chambers only want more money and more influence. Heck remember back in the old days when college DIDN’T have “gender studies” and their like. Now they have whole departments and professors making 6 figure salaries and demanding equal respect and funding as the biology department. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/66 "2019-03-07T21:35:01Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > But these journals instead write articles dealing with jobs, family life, shopping, newspapers and other common media. That’s the stuff of everyday life, so their articles should be easy for anyone to understand. Let’s talk about shopping. Trivial thing to write about, correct? Not hardly. We’ve had research on how increasing the number of choices on a supermarket shelf decreases sales. We’ve had research on placement of products. We have data mining of information from loyalty cards for supermarkets. We have WalMart discovering that boxes of hot chocolate and snow shovels should be placed together. My grocery chain clearly is doing marketing experiments by varying Buy X get Y sales to determine which work best. My daughter is a marketing professor and she uses statistical techniques quite out of the reach of Joe and Jane Public. Academic papers dive deeper into fields than the obvious. Papers in softer fields are going to be more in the form of arguments than data collection and analysis. When science was a softer field, before the scientific method, we saw the same thing. Read Aristotle. The father of logic came to some really bullshit conclusions. Even Roman natural philosophers who were right about the existence of atoms were right for all the wrong reasons. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/67 "2019-03-07T21:41:35Z")
> [@nelliebly](#): > > Undermining science? Stossel is part of the conservative wingnut movement to undermine higher education. > > [Against Higher Education](https://www.creators.com/read/john-stossel/05/18/against-higher-education) > > [College Has Become a Scam](https://patriotpost.us/articles/35501-college-has-become-a-scam) > > 58% of Republicans and right-leaning independents say college education is [hurting the country.](https://www.thedailybeast.com/pew-most-republicans-view-higher-education-as-bad-for-america). Not coincidentally, Republican voters increasingly are not college-educated. > > Nothing makes conservatives who never went to college feel better about themselves than to believe higher education is all a scam. \*We don’t need no stinkin’ college. And we don’t trust people who use big words and are hard for us to follow. \* Add the carefully nurtured perception that colleges turn students into raging liberals, and you can see what Stossel and his ilk are up to. I went to college. Hell YES we should challenge academics!!! According to[THIS](https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/)people in the USA have over $1.56 TRILLION in student debt! We have students who were duped by academics into getting crappy degrees they now have to pay on for LIFE. And yes, when one enters a major university today they are REQUIRED to sit thru orientation lectures about how to do this or that. Why? Because incoming freshmen might have some homophobia, racism, or some other ism that I guess, needs to be weeded out like some horrible disease. Of course, every group out there demands acceptance about their grievances. Notice how every college now has a “Diversity Center”. Who pays for it? Check out “[Tunnel of Oppression](https://oma.ku.edu/tunnel-oppression)” as an example. Who pays for programs like that? Yep. The students. Who gets paid to put this stuff on? The “Grievance studies” majors who put out crazy papers. So yes, Academics can very well be a major waste of money. Why is that wrong to point out? ---
**Author:** ![nelliebly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nelliebly/32/5422_2.png) [@nelliebly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nelliebly)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/68 "2019-03-07T21:45:01Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Just follow the money. > > Your dead on right. Its one big echo chamber and such chambers only want more money and more influence. Heck remember back in the old days when college DIDN’T have “gender studies” and their like. Now they have whole departments and professors making 6 figure salaries and demanding equal respect and funding as the biology department. That’s exactly the misperception wingnuts like Stossel promote. About 50% of college instructors are adjunct faculty who make about $2300 per 3-credit course taught. They are rarely full-time and don’t get insurance or retirement benefits. Full professors are increasingly rare, and assistant professors make nowhere near six figures. Some people who never attended college feel a lot better about themselves if they’re told colleges are full of overpaid professors who teach BS courses. Contempt for education is a terrible thing that doesn’t bode well for this country. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/69 "2019-03-07T21:48:31Z")
I’ve not only published and reviewed papers, but I’ve also run the peer review process for journal issues and conferences. You typically have to find reviewers with expertise in your area without conflicts of interest, like being co-authors of papers with the authors of the one under review. They have to have time to do the review and agree. They actually have to do the review. Not so easy, at times. And then some have detailed reviews, some have “it looks good” reviews, some give it to their grad students, and some have bones to pick. We have a category of “Interest” and reviewers in a particular subspecialty always give higher interest scores for papers in their specialties no matter what the other scores are. If you are lucky you are going to get reviewers noticing some results are missing. No one is going to be able to detect falsified results unless they are obviously ludicrous. I try to correct grammar for conference submissions which aren’t going to get copy-edited but most don’t. Add to that that not all journals and conferences are created equal. Tenure committees have lists of the “right” journals, and papers published in lesser journals almost don’t count. The academics involved in my conference like low accept rates which raise the prestige of the conference. Plus, many journals are write-only, with only a few specialists reading beyond the abstract, Many of these are considered to be high quality. So publication is less important than citation counts, and most reproducible results will never be reproduced because no one cares. And as noted there is a presumption of trust. Papers by people with good reputations get rejected, but no one checks for fraud. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/70 "2019-03-07T21:56:12Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > I went to college. > > Hell YES we should challenge academics!!! > > According to[THIS](https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/)people in the USA have over $1.56 TRILLION in student debt! > > We have students who were duped by academics into getting crappy degrees they now have to pay on for LIFE. > > And yes, when one enters a major university today they are REQUIRED to sit thru orientation lectures about how to do this or that. Why? Because incoming freshmen might have some homophobia, racism, or some other ism that I guess, needs to be weeded out like some horrible disease. Of course, every group out there demands acceptance about their grievances. > > Notice how every college now has a “Diversity Center”. Who pays for it? I went to college before there were diversity centers. We could have used one. There are many people going to college from places without a lot of diversity, either racial or religious. Isn’t it better to face the problems they and others might have up front? Isn’t it better to let them know that behaviors which would be unthinkable in their home towns are going to be widespread? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/71 "2019-03-07T21:59:30Z")
> [@Lance\_Turbo](#): > > For general interest, here’s a chunk of a referee report for a mathematics paper submitted to a fairly widely circulated expository journal… Could be one of my reviews on a good day. Not that I do math. I’m sure this one is better, but I see lots of papers with terrible grammar and structure. Lots of authors in my field are not native English speakers, but all the more reason to copy edit. ---
**Author:** ![Cleophus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a88e57/32.png) [@Cleophus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cleophus)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/72 "2019-03-07T22:03:59Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Just follow the money. > > Your dead on right. Its one big echo chamber and such chambers only want more money and more influence. Heck remember back in the old days when college DIDN’T have “gender studies” and their like. Now they have whole departments and professors making 6 figure salaries and demanding equal respect and funding as the biology department. Follow _what_ money? Authors don’t get paid per article. Journal publishers don’t pay authors for their submissions. Universities do not fund research out of tuition. Funding bodies are neither operated by universities nor operated by journal publishers. In fact, if you pick a paper and look at its acknowledgements you’ll find the author(s) funding source listed. For example, I arbitrarily picked this social sciences paper, [To thine own self be true? Clarifying the effects of identity discrepancies on psychological distress and emotions](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298807283_To_thine_own_self_be_true_Clarifying_the_effects_of_identity_discrepancies_on_psychological_distress_and_emotions) out of a few I found with freely available full-text versions. The acknowledgements say: > [@](#): > > **Acknowledgments** > > This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award: SES-1024342). Note that the NSF is neither the author’s host institution (Kent State University Department of Sociology), nor the article publisher (Elsevier). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/73 "2019-03-07T22:07:44Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Well wait. Arent there are thousands of colleges out there with mathematicians? A famous math professor at MIT who didn’t want to waste time teaching offered a seminar every year that was so abstruse that he never got enough math PhD students who qualified for it. So he didn’t have to give it. I suspect an expert in number theory would not do well reviewing topology papers. And vice versa. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/74 "2019-03-07T22:24:40Z")
Likewise, I’m not much use reviewing most chemistry papers. ---
**Author:** ![Busy\_Scissors](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d78d45/32.png) [@Busy\_Scissors](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Busy_Scissors)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/75 "2019-03-07T22:26:52Z")
It’s hard to figure out their motivations - three intrepid academics set out to demonstrate that \*Gender, place, and culture \*, and similar journals, are garbage - to be followed by a study on water being wet, night following day, and toast always falls butter-side down. Even if you see it as some sort of internecine squabble within the humanities, like we’re going to shine a light on these charlatans, hard to believe that any serious-minded philosopher or historian, say, would give a fuck about doing that. They’ve done it with humour, though, reading those abstracts - so that counts for a lot. God only knows what a mathematician is doing getting involved in this nonsense, though, suggest he needs some mentoring to understand his position as an aristocrat of the academy. The stunt is illuminating with respect to the relative stature of their own fields (and them). If you tried to pull something smiliar to highlight a problem with scientific publishing - the worryingly high number of high profile life sciences papers that are irreproducible, for example, you’d be insta-fired, career over, and maybe worse on top of that. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/76 "2019-03-07T22:44:24Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > A famous math professor at MIT who didn’t want to waste time teaching offered a seminar every year that was so abstruse that he never got enough math PhD students who qualified for it. So he didn’t have to give it. Ah, yes, _The Mathematics of Wonton Burrito Meals_. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/77 "2019-03-07T22:54:10Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Let’s talk about shopping. Trivial thing to write about, correct? Not hardly. We’ve had research on how increasing the number of choices on a supermarket shelf decreases sales. We’ve had research on placement of products. We have data mining of information from loyalty cards for supermarkets. We have WalMart discovering that boxes of hot chocolate and snow shovels should be placed together. My grocery chain clearly is doing marketing experiments by varying Buy X get Y sales to determine which work best. > . If increasing the number of choices on a supermarket shelf decreases sales, write “Increasing the Number of Choices on a Supermarket Shelf Decreases Sales”. Don’t write “A Poststructural Black Feminist Approach to the Problem of Gender Normative Language on Supermarket Shelves”. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/78 "2019-03-07T23:08:34Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > And, as has been noted in this thread, the corrective measures to mitigate the influence of this flaw have actually worked: they had to pull the plug on their operation early, because their bullshit research was getting identified as such. > > So, despite the fact that even in the hardest of sciences, nobody knows of a comprehensive way to tell legitimate facts from fiction or fraud, even in this case of deliberate and carefully crafted fakery, it was apparently possible to tell valid from invalid research. If anything, that’s a point in favor of the legitimacy of the targeted fields. The papers in this hoax were retracted only after the three hoaxers published online, naming exactly which papers were part of the hoax. Of seven papers published and others in the publication process, only two were eventually noted to be so preposterous that people belatedly began investigating the authorship. And even then, no journal investigated on the grounds that the content of the papers was utterly ludicrous, only on the grounds that they could not confirm the name of the author. If the authors had no clearly told the truth, then by all indications, most of the hoax papers would have never been publicly identified as such. These three authors, or someone else, could have pushed any number of hoax papers into these journals and not announced it, and the papers would just stay there forever. Contrast that with the case of [Brian Wansink](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/cornell-nutrition-scientist-resigns-after-retractions-and-research-misconduct-finding). He published many widely cited papers in the science of nutrition. Eventually observers were able to look at the papers and locate flaws within the papers themselves that proved the fraud. So there is a difference between a real and a phony article in that field. What is the difference between a real and a phony paper in Feminist Geography or Fat Studies? ---
**Author:** ![Cleophus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a88e57/32.png) [@Cleophus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cleophus)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/79 "2019-03-07T23:12:10Z")
Since many of you believe you can tell what is a worthwhile publication based solely on your subjective impression of the title jargon, perhaps you’d like to test yourself in a field apparently considered valid? Two of the three titles below are real journal articles and one of them is something I made up from scratch. [ul] [li]Bispecific Forkhead Transcription Factor FoxN3 Recognizes Two Distinct Motifs with Different DNA Shapes[/li][li]Diffeomorphic RNA Processing in Stationary Phase Tumors Implicates Altered NONO Processing at the Lysosome[/li][li]Missense Variants in the Histone Acetyltransferase Complex Component Gene TRRAP Cause Autism and Syndromic Intellectual Disability[/li][/ul] No Googling. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [March 7, 2019, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645/80 "2019-03-07T23:29:35Z")
No testing people for things they haven’t said. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sokal-squared-project-exposes-fraud-in-academia/830645.md?page=5)