# Were the editors right to complain about Alan Sokal's parody? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 26, 2025, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166 "2025-11-26T20:49:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Timz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Timz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Timz)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2025, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/1 "2025-11-26T20:49:21Z")
Question is, should magazine editors be allowed to assume that contributors are sincere? Can we defend the editors of _Social Text_ in the [Sokal Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) in 1996? Say an editor gets a submitted article and he can’t make head nor tail of it. He can tell the writer that, or he can just toss it, but likely he’s humble enough to say: maybe it’s my fault. Maybe this is an advance in human knowledge that’s too deep for me, but if we publish it, someday someone will come along to build on this for a breakthrough. Even if he passes the submission around and everyone agrees it’s drivel, he still hates to toss it. How many geniuses have received unanimous contempt? Much more fun for us to say, what a bunch of clucks. Think that’s fair? ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/2 "2025-11-27T04:07:07Z")
Your asking if a magazine’s editors should be angry that a credible academic submitted a nonsense article to make the editors look like idiots? If I were an editor (and I have been an editor) I probably would have rejected it on the grounds that if I couldn’t understand it, my readers probably couldn’t either. But I wouldn’t have thought that if I didn’t understand it, then it must be a hoax. ---
**Author:** ![Palooka](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/palooka/32/2902_2.png) [@Palooka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Palooka)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/3 "2025-11-27T04:30:00Z")
I remember something similar that was about dogs aligning with the magnetic poles or something and the gotcha was that the journal didn’t replicate the experiment to find out it was all fake. I wouldn’t put that one on the editors because of course they’re not going to re-do people’s experiments. If they publish the manual for the turbo encabulator, that’s on them a bit. Publishing a nonsense paper under your own name to make a point no one is going to care about is more stupid though. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/4 "2025-11-27T06:19:58Z")
> [@Timz](#): > > Maybe this is an advance in human knowledge that’s too deep for me Then you shouldn’t be in that job. If you are an editor of an academic journal you should have sufficient knowledge of the subject that journal specializes in to tell the difference between a nonsense article and a real one. I mean I wouldn’t be able to, but I wouldn’t take a job as an editor for an academic journal of cultural studies ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 10:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/5 "2025-11-27T10:49:47Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > If you are an editor of an academic journal you should have sufficient knowledge of the subject that journal specializes in to tell the difference between a nonsense article and a real one. There are a lot of factors involved here, most notably that the journal in question was not peer-reviewed. As [this 2023 analysis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK598250/) pointed out, > [@](#): > > _Social Text_ , to which Sokal submitted “Transgressing the Boundaries,” was not peer reviewed at the time. No doubt the editors of the journal found it hard to follow the paper’s details, but the major ideas were clear enough: that mathematics is pervaded by ideological assumptions, that postmodern theory helps to dispel these assumptions, that contemporary mathematics provides tools that destabilize fixed meanings. The author was apparently extremely well placed to make these claims: on the one hand, he was a professor of physics at New York University; on the other, he peppered the paper with allusions and citations to influential postmodern thinkers. It’s not mysterious why the editors of _Social Text_ accepted the paper. It doesn’t strike me as groundbreaking – the claims made, for instance the claim that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle undermines the idea of an observer independent reality and therefore reveals physical reality to be a social construction, were commonplaces in some circles – but here they were being made by a bona fide professor of physics. As I argued in the [last section](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/n/wt606122/ch5/), how charitably we read something, and the significance we attribute to its claims, are heavily influenced by the higher-order evidence that knowledge of the author provides us with. I think there’s a strong case for thinking that the editors of _Social Text_ responded appropriately to the evidence they had. ISTM a bit disingenuous to say that editors of a non-peer-reviewed journal should have a sufficiently encyclopedic knowledge of their subject to be able to detect a skilled hoaxer deliberately trying to fool them. Academic publication is just not set up to do that level of self-policing on a routine basis: all journals rely to some extent on collegial trust and scholarly reputation. Indeed, we are finding out from [recent studies of the pervasiveness of fraudulent publications in scientific fields](https://www.science.org/content/article/scientific-fraud-has-become-industry-alarming-analysis-finds) that it’s a lot easier to get fraudulent results into scientific publication than most scientists might like to believe. A lot of scientific researchers who snickered at “postmodernist gullibiliity” in the Sokal-hoax incident have since found out that they’ve been conned themselves at some point or other by a fraudulent publication in their own disciplines. Should scholarly publication in general develop better safeguards against fraud and hoax? Yes, that’s looking more and more necessary. Do editors who accepted a fraudulent or hoaxing paper in good faith nonetheless have a right to complain about the author deliberately trading on their reputation and abusing collegial trust to try to get the fake results published? Yes, I think they do. ---
**Author:** ![sunacres](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4491bb/32.png) [@sunacres](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sunacres)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/6 "2025-11-27T12:18:14Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Do editors who accepted a fraudulent or hoaxing paper in good faith nonetheless have a right to complain about the author deliberately trading on their reputation and abusing collegial trust to try to get the fake results published? Sokal wasn’t publishing fake or fraudulent results, he was demonstrating that woo is dangerous nonsense. Good point about abusing collegial trust though. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/7 "2025-11-27T13:52:54Z")
> [@sunacres](#): > > Sokal wasn’t publishing fake or fraudulent results Well yeah, he was, although with the non-fraudulent intention (subsequently realized) of exposing them himself after publication, rather than maintaining the deception. It’s the planned post-publication reveal that makes “hoax” different from “fraud”, although the deceptive content is equally fake in both cases. > [@sunacres](#): > > he was demonstrating that woo is dangerous nonsense. Sokal didn’t really do anything of the sort, though. He simply demonstrated that technical details of a very technical subject such as quantum physics can easily be faked well enough to deceive a nonspecialist who doesn’t know the subject. (It might even be argued that instead it’s the scientific technicalities themselves that are “dangerous”, because their prestige as highly verified esoteric findings of authoritative STEM disciplines makes it easy for knowledgeable fakers to deceive nonspecialists about them.) The Social Text editors during the publication process were pretty candid about the fact that they didn’t understand the technical exposition, and accepted the paper on the assumption that such a recognized physics researcher knew what he was talking about, even if the specialist technicalities of his paper were beyond their comprehension. And, of course, in accordance with the usual ethical standards of academic publication, they expected him not to be deliberately trying to trick them. As [I remarked on this issue over a quarter-century ago](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fear-of-mathematics/21654/48) (wow): > [@Kimstu](#): > > Oddly enough, it seems to me, Sokal’s hoax actually had the effect of confirming one of the observations that the “science studies” people are always making: namely, that the effective power of science for most people lies much more in its cultural authority than in its epistemological validity. With a good degree and a respectable teaching position, you can put together a piece of complete BS and if it sounds technically impressive, nine out of ten quite intelligent people will believe you […] ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/8 "2025-11-27T14:17:43Z")
If the editors of a sociology journal get a submission about quantum gravity, they should at least conclude that they’re the wrong journal for that paper. I don’t expect them to know enough about quantum gravity to see the nonsense, but I do expect them to know that they don’t know enough about quantum gravity. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/9 "2025-11-27T14:30:44Z")
Any discussion of the Sokal Hoax today should acknowledge that the postmodern theory Sokal was lampooning has largely fallen out of favor except in certain esoteric corners of academia. It’s certainly not something the average undergraduate ever encounters, and surprisingly easy to avoid as a humanities grad student. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/10 "2025-11-27T14:56:42Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I don’t expect them to know enough about quantum gravity to see the nonsense, but I do expect them to know that they don’t know enough about quantum gravity. Like I said, the editors of Social Text were not claiming to be competent to evaluate the technical statements made about quantum gravity in Sokal’s article. The article purported to be a good-faith attempt to develop a social theory of Sokal’s research area and related fields in physics. He sold it to the editors as a STEM specialist researcher’s efforts to put a specialized technical discipline into the context of cultural studies. If you feel that no academic discipline or publication should ever attempt an interdisciplinary study of that nature, then fine. But if you consider these sorts of issues in any way a legitimate subject for academic discourse, then there are bound to be situations where similar mismatches of technical expertise will arise in evaluating research. > [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](#): > > Any discussion of the Sokal Hoax today should acknowledge that the postmodern theory Sokal was lampooning has largely fallen out of favor except in certain esoteric corners of academia. Yeah, popular perceptions of “postmodernism” strongly resemble conservative caricatures of “Critical Race Theory”. In both cases, the caricature is presented as a totally pernicious attempt to overthrow all standards of common sense and academic rigor, thus destroying whole valuable fields of study in the process. In reality, what the fearmongers are ranting about is a fairly specialized theoretical perspective on particular aspects of methodology. And in both cases, the implied message that is really provoking the insecurity and resentment of the denouncers is something along the lines of _“People tend to be overconfident in the social structures that purport to produce ethical impartiality and fairness, scientific objectivity and authority, etc., when in fact those structures are often systemically influenced by bias and preconceptions of various kinds.”_ 😱 Destructive! Dangerous woo! Revisionism! Nonsense! Unscientific! Unpatriotic! Etc. etc. etc. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/11 "2025-11-27T15:00:38Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > If you feel that no academic discipline or publication should ever attempt an interdisciplinary study of that nature, then fine. No publication should ever publish anything that they can’t evaluate. If a paper involves two disciplines sufficiently separated that no one person can evaluate all of it, then the publishers need to form a team of reviewers including experts in all of those fields. > [@Kimstu](#): > > In both cases, the caricature is presented as a totally pernicious attempt to overthrow all standards of common sense and academic rigor, thus destroying whole valuable fields of study in the process. But in this case, the editors had, in fact, overthrown all standards of common sense and academic rigor. Maybe there were other postmodern journals that didn’t do that, but in this specific case, the criticism is absolutely justified. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/12 "2025-11-27T15:07:13Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > the major ideas were clear enough: that mathematics is pervaded by ideological Ok so that is not how I understood the hoax. That does seem less fair to the editors. I thought it just a content-free word salad that got through purely because it had a well known author. That should have been caught by the editors. Instead it was a apparently genuinely believed claim, that was just utter bullshit. That’s different, it’s not an editors job to make that distinction, if this was a “hard science” journal they could evaluate the scientific procedure used (as well assigning a peer to review who was an expert in that specific area and could say “yes, this is bullshit”). But none of that (I would assume) would apply to social sciences. But equally this isnt true either: > [@Timz](#): > > Maybe this is an advance in human knowledge that’s too deep for me This wasn’t the editor just accepting it because it was too deep for them. It was was the editor assuming this article and it’s claim, despite sounding a bit dubious, was a genuinely held opinion that deserved airing in the social sciences community. You could argue that they probably wouldn’t have accepted it from an unknown phd student, but that’s life. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/13 "2025-11-27T15:22:46Z")
Though had it been blind peer reviewed, they might have, had it met the reviewers’ standard for publication criteria. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/14 "2025-11-27T15:27:46Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > No publication should ever publish anything that they can’t evaluate. If a paper involves two disciplines sufficiently separated that no one person can evaluate all of it, then the publishers need to form a team of reviewers including experts in all of those fields. Okay, that’s a not unreasonable take, in and of itself. That’s basically saying that no academic publishing of any kind should ever be anything less than rigorously peer reviewed. > [@Chronos](#): > > But in this case, the editors had, in fact, overthrown all standards of common sense and academic rigor. Well, are you sure that you’re not maybe making some over-sweeping judgements based on insufficient knowledge of the circumstances? The editors themselves pointed out that top-research-journal levels of academic rigor were never actually part of their publication model. (Which is why they weren’t, you know, peer reviewed in the first place.) From [a subsequent discussion of the publication process by the editors](https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf): > [@](#): > > As a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis produced by an editorial collective […] _Social Text_ has always seen its lineage in the “little magazine” tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic domain, and so we often balance diverse editorial criteria when discussing the worth of submissions, whether they be works of fiction, interviews with sex workers, or essays about anti-colonialism […] > > Having established an interest in Sokal’s article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him a) to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and b) to excise most of his footnotes. […] Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a “difficult, uncooperative author,” a category well known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish, not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if published in the company of related articles. > > Some time after this impasse was reached, the editors did indeed decide to assemble a special issue on the topic of science studies. We wanted to gauge how science critics were responding to the attacks of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, and other conservatives in science. Contributions were solicited from across the field of knowledge; from humanists, social scientists and natural scientists […] In other words, this publication was a non-peer-reviewed hybrid of essay, opinion, fiction, social theory and academic analysis, which decided to put together a special issue on scholars’ reactions to the “Science Wars” phenomenon. There appears to have been no intention to limit submissions to rigorously reviewed research findings. You may choose to argue that no academic publication should ever even contemplate producing any output with such low standards of rigor. But I think that might be a bit too draconian for the ultimate health of scholarly discourse? No, I think mostly what happened here is that Alan Sokal deliberately chose a low-rigor type of publication that would trigger the anti-“postmodernism” reflexes of his intended audience (_“Social Text”! “The left”! “Anti-colonialism”! “Cultural analysis”! “Social theory!”_ 😱). And he fooled them into believing he was trying to make a good-faith contribution to their conversation. And then he spun the outcome to his audience as though he had heroically breached the rotting defenses of the very citadel of academic humanities research. Uh-huh. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/15 "2025-11-27T15:47:56Z")
So it’s OK that they gave up on any pretense of rigor, because they were already unrigorous in the first place? An academic journal that will accept any nonsense that they don’t understand shouldn’t be calling itself an academic journal in the first place. If you want to be a casual blog, then call yourself that. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/16 "2025-11-27T16:10:01Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > So it’s OK that they gave up on any pretense of rigor, because they were already unrigorous in the first place? ?? I’m not sure I quite understand your question. Do I think that a publication ought **not** to be making any “pretense” of being more rigorous in its publication standards than it actually is? Um, yes I do? Don’t you? > [@Chronos](#): > > An academic journal that will accept any nonsense that they don’t understand shouldn’t be calling itself an academic journal in the first place. Well, it appears that what _Social Text_ called itself was “a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis”. That sounds to me like a sufficiently informative indication of their approach to rigor in contribution screening, particularly the “non-refereed” part. And remember, Sokal’s article wasn’t in fact just some “any nonsense” “content-free word salad” such as @griffin1977 had initially believed it to be. Sokal had carefully crafted it to sound like a plausible attempt by a research physicist to engage with social theory as a perspective on his own field, with the bullshittery in the technical details of the physics deliberately incomprehensible to nonphysicists. Honestly, it sounds like you’re possibly just kind of miffed to discover that Sokal’s purported triumphant exposé of alleged catastrophic intellectual corruption in humanities “research” turned out to involve such trivially low-hanging fruit. Wow, a physicist willing to exploit his own reputation as a respected physics researcher to lie about the technical details of his own discipline can fool non-physicists into believing him. Imagine my astonishment. ---
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2025, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/17 "2025-11-27T21:13:19Z")
It’s not entirely clear who has read the paper and who hasn’t, nor who has the best grip on the context. I have read Sokal’s book about the subject, which includes the text of the paper, but it was many years ago. As I recall, Sokal was incensed by the pseudo-physical drivel being published by respected names in philosophy and the social sciences. In particular he was exercised by the adoption and abuse of language and concepts from quantum physics to discuss wholly incongruous subjects. If I recall correctly, he selected _Social Text_ because it had published some of the offending work. I’ll try to locate the book tonight if I don’t forget. ---
**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:** [November 28, 2025, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/18 "2025-11-28T03:09:00Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Honestly, it sounds like you’re possibly just kind of miffed to discover that Sokal’s purported triumphant exposé of alleged catastrophic intellectual corruption in humanities “research” turned out to involve such trivially low-hanging fruit. Wow, a physicist willing to exploit his own reputation as a respected physics researcher to lie about the technical details of his own discipline can fool non-physicists into believing him. Imagine my astonishment. I remember the controversy, but I don’t recall having heard that the “journal” was not peer reviewed or one that had no standards of rigor. I suspect I’m not alone, since it shouldn’t be shocking that you can get crap into publications that don’t audit for crap. There are conferences that accept anything. A long time ago some people from MIT created a paper generator (long before LLMs) and got a paper accepted into one of these. Not at all surprising. I write a column in an IEEE magazine which is not peer reviewed (to put it mildly.) I have written parodies, and if anyone treats my parody as a paper they deserve what they get. I wonder what the rating of this journal is in terms of citation counts and importance for tenure. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/19 "2025-11-28T03:22:57Z")
Even just the word “journal” suggests that they have at least some standards. But any standards at all would result in them rejecting this paper. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2025, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166/20 "2025-11-28T05:27:22Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > But any standards at all would result in them rejecting this paper. Suppose a famous poet convinced the New England Journal of Medicine to print his poem (in the letters page, say) and then he said “Surprise! You printed a terrible poem.” Would that prove that the NEJM has no standards? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166.md?page=2)