Alex WellersteinVerified account

So, about that academic hoax: I think people who are saying it's no big deal to get shoddy papers published in journals of varying quality are missing the point. The problem is that there are no objective criteria to distinguish between shoddy and sound work in this fields.

There's no doubt that shoddy science gets published in "hard" science journals, but it's usually possible at least in principle to weed it out. But when your paper is based on opinion rather than statistics or data, my guess about its merit can be as good as yours.

1) There are different standards of evidence in different fields, including different fields of science. 2) These fields aren't pretending to be science (unlike some fields...). 3) Peer review sucks for catching deliberate fraud, including in hard sciences.

But I think part of the question here is precisely regarding the definition of those standards; if they are so all over the place that it's virtually impossible to even define what a "good" and a "bad" paper is, then isn't your field in trouble? The 2nd point I am sympathetic to.

I don't think one can conclude from a few editors being fooled by deliberate frauds that these fields have truly no sense of what makes a good paper — this is an epistemological and sociological claim that well exceeds the evidence.

Do you feel the same way about the original Sokal hoax?

Even more so, to be honest. Social Text deliberately took a non-gatekeeper approach, relying exclusively on the notion that Sokal's merit was based in his expertise as a physicist. He abused that.

Agree that an entire field cannot be critiqued based on a stunt like this, but personally I find value in occasionally stirring the pot to get a good conversation going and more rigorously examining the basic ideas.