Global Warming

Ryan Cousineau wrote:


Unfortunately, at the outer limits of theoretical physics, we're
dangerously close to being in the land of nonsense anyways, since large
chunks of the current attempts to create a Grand Unified Theory (aka
Theory of Everything) are essentially untestable with current
instruments.

That may soon change:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...-mostviewedbox

http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

Surfer Dude ftw.

On Nov 15, 12:51 am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:

"Fraud"? In the context of academic papers, fraud may refer to
plagiarism or faking data. Sokal did neither.

I'm saying that a referee can rarely detect when a
clever author knows that what he is saying is not true.

I think the fact that he never mentions the requests
for revision indicates that he was taking a cheap shot.

Bad faith? Maybe. But the journal's editors chose to publish. As the
kids say these days, FAIL.

Sokal pwned them. Nobody should deny this. He did
in a way to guarantee maximum humor, embarrassment,
and publicity value too.

But after pwning them, Sokal embarked on a campaign
(which was pretty much devoid of the previous humor)
to claim that this showed the emptiness of an entire
field, made sweeping statements about where
philosophers and litterateurs ought not to tread,
and so on. He wrote a book about it. Or maybe
more than one. This is where I think he tripped
over from prankster into ideologist, and where his
disingenuity about struggling with the editors to
get the paper accepted was a problem.

At the time the Sokal Hoax went down, liberal arts types were actively
and routinely discussing whether or not the Scientific Method was
essentially a social construct, with no effective claim to empiricism.

Now, I'm enough of a clever boy to recognize both the compelling claims
of relativism in this way, and to recognize that entire college
faculties have not only recognized those claims, but accepted it whole
as virtually axiomatic in their fields. But I think those claims have
actively devastated the abilities of those fields of knowledge to
actually produce any new knowledge. I'm looking at you, English
literature.

Sokal et al understood the ramifications of that sort of thinking in the
hard sciences: bad.

However, practicing scientists mostly don't worry
about whether science is or is not a social construct.
They just do it, like riding a bike.

So I disagree that creeping relativism would have endangered
the hard sciences. You might want to argue that it would
endanger philosophy of science departments. I'd argue
that the books of people like Bruno Latour and Peter Galison
indicate that you can do interesting studies of how
science is done by networks of people in a society
(sort of a social construct) and not lead to 2+2=5.
FWIW, both of those guys are more substantial than
Andrew Ross, the editor of Social Text - although even
Ross didn't deserve all the hate mail he got.

BTW, there are people out there who will tell you
that string theory is math, and therefore not a science.
I don't know - I'm too dumb to understand it, so like
the editors of Social Text, I don't know whether it's
science or not.

Ben

wrote in message
...
On Nov 15, 12:51 am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:

"Fraud"? In the context of academic papers, fraud may refer to
plagiarism or faking data. Sokal did neither.

I'm saying that a referee can rarely detect when a
clever author knows that what he is saying is not true.

I wonder if you've ever served on a jury when both prosecutor and
defendant's attorney know that they're both lying through their teeth
because the prosecutor couldn't care less whether someone is guilty or
innocent but is only interested in whether he can convict someone or not.