Slashdot Mirror
SF Writers Sting Supposedly Traditional Publisher
deeptrace writes "A group of SF writers all submitted purposely awful stories to a publisher that purported to publish only selected high quality works. They created the worst story they could come up with, and it was accepted for publication." Their press release is pretty funny -- and if you'd like a sample of their insane prose, it's available through the book's Lulu site. (Where, Yes, you could also buy the whole thing.)
How do you think stories get published on Slashdot?
Life in Orange County
I understand that SF can be meant to stand for "Science Fiction," though I don't think I've ever heard anybody say "I like to read a lot of SF." However, when we have virtually unlimited screen real estate, is it really necessary to shorten 'SciFi' to 'SF'? It's just a difference of three letters. Living in the Bay Area, I immediately thought this was an electic group of liberal-minded San Francisco writers publishing something scandalous under a "traditional" publisher. Guess the joke's on me.
Like here at slashdot there isn't a variety of styles mingling. One theory has won the darwinian battle and thus realising it they have gamed that system.
Entropy is a law after all.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The same thing that's been wrong for years: people who don't understand that something that happened a few days ago - even a few weeks ago - is still news.
Great, you heard about it days ago, doubtless you monitor all sorts of websites and cable news channels 24/7 and know everything before the rest of us. Congratulations, you win. But those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I bet some people will buy it just for fun.
It may have seemed plausible, but man was it ever fucking boring. I'm glad I didn't pay to read any of them. I only read the third one because of inertia, something that will never be repeated for the third Dune prequel.
I'm a graduate student, the lowest rung of professional academic, in a hard discipline. Before I submit a paper anywhere, I submit preprints to experts within whatever field I'm writing about. I do this because I know the journals will do the exact same thing, and it's far better on my reputation if my reviewers find them than if the journal finds them. I know that it doesn't matter if my name is Alan Matheson Turing or Paul Erdoes--whatever I or anyone else submits goes through a formal vetting process which involves having experts pore over my paper with a magnifying glass.
The Sokal Hoax had glaring errors, errors so large that a college senior in mathematics, economics or physics could have spotted them--not only spotted them, but conclusively proven them to be false.
Social Text didn't catch this. Does it really matter if they thought the paper was of poor quality? They published it, and by publishing it put their imprimatur on it. "Here," they said to the academic world, "read this, we think it's worth your time."
Social Text was right. It was worth my time, in that it demonstrated to me precisely why I'm going for a Ph.D. in a discipline where rigor and peer review actually mean something.
If we are going to be talking about absolute crap, somebody should mention "The Da Vinci Code".
There is a reason it's called "pulp fiction" people. Pulp is what your brain turns into.
Andrew Burt, the owner of the site which I linked to, wrote one of the chapters in the book we're all talking about. He runs critters, an SF/F critique group, which is also hosted on the site where the PDF is stored.
I'm an author myself, so I'm hardly going to link to illegal copies of books floating around the web.
As the link no longer works, perhaps he and the other authors involved just realised they have a potential best-seller on their hands and asked aburt to remove the PDF so they can cash in. If so, more power to them. On the other hand, perhaps he took the PDF down because their server is melting under a slashdot-induced feeding frenzy. It's almost 600kb, and a few hundred thousand simultaneous downloads would be painful.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Do you understand that the behavior that you're describing from the _Social Text_ editors is the very antithesis of peer review?
An intellectually honest journal will NEVER rely upon the credentials or reputation of a paper's author.
What Sokal did was actually science: he formed a hypothesis ("The _Social Text_ editors don't know what they're talking about"), made a prediction ("so they will accept bogus papers"), and tested that prediction. And then he published his results, much to the _Social Text_ editors' chagrin.
He behaved exactly as scientists do when they wish to investigate something. Had the _Social Text_ editors not been charlatans, they would not have even been harmed by this experiment.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Do you understand that the behavior that you're describing from the _Social Text_ editors is the very antithesis of peer review?
Just for the record, Social Text is not peer reviewed, nor did it ever claim to be. Quite the opposite. However, they could still have checked the science.
The only thing that Alan Sokal's credentials got him (and should have gotten him) was his foot in the door of Social Text. The reason they published his parody was because it pandered to their ideological bias.
The grandparent poster unfortunately has let the academic apologists of Social Text brainwash her (or him), rather than examine the evidence objectively.
Had the _Social Text_ editors not been charlatans, they would not have even been harmed by this experiment.
Had they not been charlatans, they would have admitted their goof and engaged in some self reflection. Instead, they circled the wagons.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
It's easy to forget that there are real people whose dreams are being taken advantage of here. Not the publish america people- but their authors. Some of the rationalizations they come up with to explain the sting:
http://www.publishamerica.com/cgi-bin/pamessageboSo maybe you're getting more hip than the Slashdot crowd. I'm not joking here.. I think Slashdot has been slipping for a while. It may happen slowly, but face it--the Slashdot maintainers are milking their site and NOT investing the time they really should into the project. Article quality is simply one result. Look at the site design, it has been mostly static for years and the look is very aged at this point. Still uses tables, doesnt it?
Slashdot had all this momentum behind it, but our Dear Leaders here sort of took their money and abandoned the project. They've never taken a view of constant improvement, but more often a view of good enough and maximum profit. The only real design changes have been the addition of ads and subscriptions.
So you use sites like Boing Boing to get your news now... so do lots of us. I do wish, however, that Boing Boing would reduce the number of sex ads and tone down some of the other advertising.
They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
But that's the whole point of peer review: you find someone who is expert enough to judge the new work.
Your drivel is written like a true postmodernist. On the one hand, you feel in a position to make pronouncements about subjects you know nothing about. And on the other hand, you deflect all criticisms of postmodernism, on the grounds that they are made by non-experts. Funny how postmodernists claim that science is a cultural construct, but tend to be recalcitrant about applying the same conclusion to their own analyses.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
What matters isn't that they felt something was up, but that they published it. If they 'smelled the fish was bad' they shouldn't have published. There's not exactly a lot of integrity in rushing to press because the article was written by a scientist. If the standards of Social Text were anything like a decent scientific journal, reviewers would have taken it out to the trash until it was at least evaluable.
The tenets of postmodernism can change or not. From what standpoint are you going to argue that they are 'true'? If I accept these tenets, there's no point in them. If I don't accept them, it's pretty clear that postmodernist attacks on science are just penis envy from a pseudofield which has no purpose except to give people jobs. Truth is, there are real criticisms of every particular scientific study or conclusion, which have nothing to do with privilege or dogma, but which require some kind of literacy to deal with. But why bother if you can just spout some general blanket claim about science without even grasping the point? Postmodernism is a great existence proof for 'fooling some of the people all of the time,' though.
Might have been written by computer, but it reads like it was translated through The Fish a few times...
c.
Log in or piss off.
As other posters have already shown, my characterization of the Sokal Hoax was entirely accurate. The only deception on the part of Sokal was that he did not explicitly inform the editors of Social Text, at the time he submitted the paper, that he did not sincerely believe in its content. That was of course necessary in order to carry out his experiment. Since the good of demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes outweighs a minor and temporary deception, I consider his behavior to have been ethical. The paper wore its falsehood on its sleeve. The errors in it were not subtle but would easily be detected by anyone with a basic knowledge of science. The quotations of and references to, postmodern writings were all genuine and accurate, from major figures.
There is no evidence that Sokal does not understand "science studies", nor is there any evidence other than the self-serving post hoc whining of the editors, that they did not consider the paper to be credible but published it anyway. If this is true, they failed in their duty as editors, which is either only to publish work that they believe to be credible or, in the event that special circumstances motivate publication of something that they do not believe to be credible, to publish it with a disclaimer.
The ignorance of science and the philosophy of science exhibited by the editors of Social Text is not atypical. I have had the misfortune of having to deal directly with such people in my own (not current) department. One such person, who taught graduate courses on "fundamentals" and purported to be an expert on the philosophy of her field, turned out to be familiar ONLY with postmodern critiques of science. She has never read any of the work that she and they criticize, nor even works that she cites, such as those of Feyerabend. Postmodern "science studie" have the same relationship to serious philosophy and history of science as Creationism does to real biology.
Wikipedia is very useful, but this is an excellant example of how it can be corrupted by fanatics.