# 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:** 1\ **Showing post:** 7
**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 […] --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-the-editors-right-to-complain-about-alan-sokals-parody/1025166)._