The Sokal Hoax
en.wikipedia.orgIts worth reading the editorial response[1] to the hoax. There's some context that tends to be ignored when this hoax is discussed online. For example, that the journal is non-refereed; that they deliberately publish non-scientific articles including fiction; and that the paper was initially rejected and only reconsidered for a special issue that sought to present the heterogeneous voices of the "science wars".
All the editorial response demonstrates is that the editors understood so little about so many things that they could not understand the difference between an evident satire of a pseudoscientific text and something of substance. Any scientifically reader immediately realizes that the Sokal text was a joke (if someone doesn't, they don't meet my standard for "scientifically educated").
That's not all the response demonstrates. More important is that it demonstrates that the journal is not representative of typical social scientific journals. This context is important because online commenters at times derive from the Sokal hoax general claims about the social sciences.
They're not scientifically educated. They're not a scientific journal. They publish commentary, without judgment, including outright fiction.
Ironically, I suspect that many of the same people criticizing them for accepting the paper would also accuse them of censorship if they'd rejected it. I've seen a great many people stand up for the rights of people to lie and insist that it was obligatory to carry that lie, even if they knew it was false.
The more recent unofficial sequel to the Sokal Hoax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
That one is a bit different because they simply fabricated observational data (in the dog park paper at least).
Focusing on "fabricating observational data" is a cope for the fact that Boghossian et al made the targets of their papers look like absolute fools. The problem with the paper "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" wasn't that the data was wrong.
Sokal and Boghossian's work intended (and succeeded?) to accomplish the same thing: they demonstrated the fact that these academic disciplines are full of bullshit producers and consumers.
Quite like the poet Ern Malley, the authors would have inadvertently written a pretty nice (if a little over the top) paper on human behaviour around dogs' unwanted sexual and violent behaviour, if only they had used actual observational data. It seems quite common-sense to me that you can learn something about people's attitudes towards gay sex from how they react to their dogs having gay sex. I quote:
"In particular, regarding the interaction of human beings and animals both inside of and apart from physical space, humans project their moral beliefs and assumptions onto animals and yet also consider animals ‘outside’ the moral sphere. [...] In animals, we see this inconsistency when applying human moral values to dogs by calling them ‘loyal’ or ‘disobedient’ or when referring to cats as ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘arrogant’ and yet accepting behaviors like fighting and torturing small animals as value-free and ‘natural.’"
Yes! That's a good point and a good motivation for doing this research. The first research question:
"(1) How do human discourses of rape culture get mapped onto dogs’ sexual encounters at dog parks; particularly, how do companions manage, contribute, and respond to ‘dog rape culture’?"
If you are interested in human behaviour then I can see how this is an actually interesting RQ. I think rather too much of the gloating around this paper comes from people who simply don't think any (qualitative) science w.r.t. human behaviour is legitimate.
Their using fake data preempts anyone from biting this bullet which is why it diminishes the force of the hoax a lot, imho.
"We published what we thought was a valid paper on a fat man in red that lives on the north pole and gives presents to children at the end of December. Unfortunately we didn't realize that the aeronautical data on his flying reindeer was falsified. This was clearly data fraud, and has no impact on us being a trustworthy peer-reviewed journal." lol
Seems you simply don't think any qualitative research on human behaviour or culture is valuable.
they demonstrated the fact that these academic disciplines are full of bullshit producers and consumers
That seems like an unwarranted conclusion. They found a gullible journal -- one that nobody has ever heard of except in connection to this hoax. Extending that to "the entire discipline is faulty" sounds like exactly the sort of faulty logic that we scientists are supposed to avoid.
If I wrote a journal article that consisted of one data point and drew a line from it I'd be blacklisted. Why on earth are we patting ourselves on the back for making precisely this mistake?
They found 7 gullible journals that accepted their papers. 4 of which got published before the project was discovered.
and one of the papers got a special prize.
Man there is some real hubris there for James A. Lindsay...
Excellent -- this was news to me. Thanks.
There is a demonstrable reluctance in these comments to confront what the Sokal hoax demonstrated.
There are generally "common wisdom" conclusions from this, that again, does not materially affect how people live their lives.
* If a country has "democratic" in its name, it's not a democracy.
* If an academic field has "science" in its name, it's not a science.
Yes there are of course exceptions... but they are literally small ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic#Global_use...
There are multiple areas of academia which role-play as rigorous scientific study, but in fact, are just people trading mumbo-jumbo which varies in how convincing it looks, and if you drill down, it's not just academia.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ray-dalio-rob-copela...
100% of supplmentary, complementary, and alternative medicine is fake.
Cf.
https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
But that doesn't stop it being a multi-billion-$CURRENCY industry. It is entirely fake, but people will pay to think they feel better.
That is why I used those names in that order.
S. C. A. M.
Gambling does not make you money. It makes gambling companies money. But it's vast.
Stock markets are, largely, gambling, driven by vague feelings, instincts, and herd impulse. I have worked there. They don't really know. It's hunches and friendships and hysteria.
But the world runs on it.
> If an academic field has "science" in its name, it's not a science.
Yeah, suck it materials scientists, your discipline ain't real.
Also turns out half of HN are not scientists either.
That's certainly true though.
You missed the
> Yes there are of course exceptions
... part then?
> There are multiple areas of academia which role-play as rigorous scientific study, but in fact, are just people trading mumbo-jumbo which varies in how convincing it looks, and if you drill down, it's not just academia.
Noam Chomsky says something related in one of his interviews [1][2]
> It’s considered very left wing, very advanced. Some of what appears in it sort of actually makes sense, but when you reproduce it in monosyllables, it turns out to be truisms. It’s perfectly true that when you look at scientists in the West, they’re mostly men, it’s perfectly true that women have had a hard time breaking into the scientific fields, and it’s perfectly true that there are institutional factors determining how science proceeds that reflect power structures. All of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzrHwDOlTt8
[2] http://ozscience.com/philosophy/chomsky-calls-postmodern-cri...
Still sour from being owned by Foucault, I see.
re your username, The War and Peace films are probably the most accurate films based on novels I have ever seen. Everything was recreated down to the smallest detail, the smallest microexpression written by Tolstoy
If you think this could not happen in physics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
(Yes, I'm aware it's different from Sokal, in that the Bogdanov twins were convinced of the validity of their research.)
Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.
> They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.
The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.
Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others.
On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".
They unquestioningly published literal nonsense and you think there's a case to be made that they don't lack intellectual rigour?
I think "unquestioning" undersells it. They requested that he remove a lot of the pshilosophising and footnotes, but he refused. Then they put it aside until deciding it might be okay to put in a special "Science Wars" issue.
Thing is, I'm a layman, and Sokal's paper reeks to me of bullshit. I'm neither a physicist nor a sociologist; but that pasaage about the "hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework", with its implication that the axiom of equality is somehow political, is pretty obvious nonsense. I don't hve to understand set theory to see that.
May I introduce you to Alain Badiou, a massive and important figure of contemporary philosophy? "Being and Event" is probably the most focused work around ZF theory stuff.
Thanks; never heard of him before. according to that wikipedia link, Scruton says:
"No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics."
That seems to be exactly what Sokal was parodying.
I have very little time for what the French have been referring to as "philosophy" since roughly 1970. It's a sort of overproof bollocks.
Thats a pretty sweeping statement for a self-described layman. But either way, got it, have a nice day.
"Layman", i.e. not a physycist or a sociologist. I did a philosophy degree, thankfully not involving any Foucault or Derrida.
Just an aside really, but when I hear comments like this I am always so grateful ending up with the professors I did, at the programs I was at, where effort was made to ignore or constructively address "the divide" of contemporary philosophy. I was probably a year into my MA before I learned how some might think it wrong, or silly to appreciate people like Cavell and Derrida, or Frege and Deleuze, etc. at the same time.
To me, the experience of talking with the true partisans of either the analytic/continental tradition is exhausting and at times absurd. Where else in academia do you have otherwise wonderful scholars being proud of never having read someone?
In my mind continental people are the worst offenders in this, but I guess your helping balance the scales here.
Thankfully, not everyone in the field is like this. Off the top of my head: Graham Priest and Paul Livingston are two guys doing good work to complicate the party lines here.
I completed my Philosophy degree in London in 1981; the professors strongly favoured the analytic tradition. My papers were on Nietsche and Wittgenstein; I got poor marks. There was some teaching of existentialism (but not Nietche); but no deconstructionists or postmodernists. They wouldn't reach English universities for a few years.
Wow yes indeed! That is surely a vastly different world than the one I am referring to 3 decades on, but either way I bet it was a very good time and place to be doing philosophy!
One thing that cuts through both the divide and the passed time here: it is still quite tough to write on Nietzsche outside of an intro class and get a good grade!
They could have asked someone who did know. If you are the editor of a publication you have editorial responsibility of what gets published, you don't get to abdicate that responsibility because you don't feel like doing your homework.
You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).
Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards.
The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field.
This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying.
In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT).
The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.
They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone.
I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.
I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.
The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.
The proper response would be: "Sorry, this is the wrong journal to submit to. We don't have any expertise in physics."
I suppose that seals it then. What was meant to be science is just priestly words repeated by those anointed priests. It is no sin to simply repeat the words of priests even if what they speak is nonsense.
When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.
There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.
I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...
And like before, if you isolate the philosophy in their work, it’s useless. Philosophy by a mathematician is still philosophy. There is a clear distinction between rigorous proofs and blathering about how people think, or making up a bunch of axioms to prove god (Godel). You don’t get to take credit for contributions from other fields.
How do you isolate the philosophy without engaging in philosophy yourself?
My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.
Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.
Criticizing philosophy is philosophy so it cannot be criticized, the classic philosopher get out of jail free card.
Philosophy is absolutely nothing like math. Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities. Changing how you interpret math doesn’t change the physical world. Philosophers do what is equivalent of arguing that prime numbers aren’t real because base 10 is arbitrary. Philosophers have proven nothing about the universe, those are the contributions of physics. The things philosophers discuss about the universe is more akin to religion and mythology. You, again, keep trying to take credit for the work of other fields.
> Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities.
That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.
Sure thing. Then I'm sure you can evenly distribute seven marbles to four people, or make gold with alchemy. My prejudices must just be wrong.
All of the mathematicians I mentioned believed philosophy was relevant to their mathematical work, and that period of work on the foundations of mathematics was accompanied by extensive discussion of the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Even if we pretend philosophy never involves rigorous proofs, mathematical theorems do not spring out of thin air, and saying "anything that isn't a formal, rigorous proof is useless to mathematics" is like saying "anything that isn't a finished house is useless to the process of building a house". https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236.pdf discusses this in more detail.
Here's a paper by Tarski, widely cited by both mathematicians and philosophers and containing both formal and informal reasoning: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R... I don't know how one could "remove the philosophy" from this work without making it far less useful to mathematicians. The entire reason the T-schema is used in model theory is because of Tarski's philosophical argument that it provides a meaningful definition of truth.
It doesn't matter what they believed. Philosophy never involves rigorous proofs. By adding them you would just end up doing math. A partially finished proof is still math and not equivalent to 20 pages of worthless babble about human understanding. Throwing darts at the page and putting equations where they land will not change that. Philosophers constantly pull from the same small bag of tricks - inserting "science" or "philosophy of <science>" or "meta<science>" into their titles, Sokaling in random disconnected bits of scientific terminology to sound more credible, and trying to claim criticizing philosophy is philosophy to avoid criticism. It's unconvincing and embarrassing to hear from the self declared intellectuals responsible for some of the biggest false beliefs about science in history.
If by "philosophy" you mean work that not only lacks a rigorous proof, but isn't even a step in the direction of a rigorous proof, you'll be happy to hear that many philosophers - sorry, mathematicians who mistakenly consider themselves philosophers - share your opinion of it. When I said "philosophy" I was referring to the academic field, which includes a lot of work that you consider math. While I think complete non-mathematician philosophers like Deleuze have value in their own way, I certainly wouldn't call them rigorous or useful to modern science.
I'm not clear on whether you think The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages falls into the "actually just mathematics" category or the "making up random equations" category. If the latter, I assure you that Tarski's proofs are sound. Here's a simple explanation of the most famous result from the paper in case you found the original proof inaccessible: https://qubd.github.io/files/TarskiUndefinability.pdf. A more general discussion of Tarski's work and other axiomatic theories of truth can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Mathematics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/
It doesn't matter what you consider yourself. Or who is doing to considering, despite your efforts to emphasize that.
The proofs are math. We've already established that math is sound. This discussion is not about the merits of math, we're talking about philosophy. Things like "The transfer of understanding from one person to another is not automatic. It is hard and tricky. Therefore, to analyze human understanding of mathematics, it is important to consider who understands what, and when." are philosophy. It's not difficult to separate, you're just trying to make it seem like it is to blur the lines between a pseudoscience and actual science. Again, disguising worthless philosophical ramblings with mathematics doesn't make your philosophy any more useful.
I am focusing on mathematics because I am more familiar with mathematics than philosophy and dislike seeing it misrepresented, particularly to use as a cudgel against a related field that I respect.
The passages that you describe as "worthless philosophical ramblings" are part of Tarski's results. He could not have left them out without obscuring the meaning of his proofs. Possibly model theory would not exist today had he done so. It would certainly have taken longer to develop.
Another instructive example is Per Martin-Lof's lectures On the Meanings of the Logical Constants and the Justifications of the Logical Laws: https://www.ae-info.org/attach/User/Martin-L%c3%b6f_Per/Othe.... Unlike Tarski's paper, this contains no formal proofs whatsoever; if the sentence you quote is worthless, then I imagine "There is no evidence outside our actual or possible experience of it. The notion of evidence is by its very nature subject related, relative to the knowing subject, that is, in Kantian terminology." is worse than worthless. Nevertheless these lectures have been of great importance in logic and computer science. You can see some of their impact in the citations here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2483744927635326348
You may be unable to find any useful meaning in this kind of writing, but most mathematicians do not share your difficulty. This is fortunate, since the field would be greatly impoverished if it purged itself of all philosophy and philosophy-adjacent work. I would normally encourage you to read https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-... on the role of non-rigorous big picture thinking in mathematics, but it deals entirely with human understanding of mathematics and is therefore only of interest to Terence Tao and other such pseudoscientists.
The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.
That empirical scientists are in the business of falsification is their view of their work, Feyerabend argues that they delude themselves.
False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary?
Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
You can hear 10,000 positivists rolling in their graves at Cambridge after this comment.
Reminds me of "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct", my favorite hoax paper.
https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.... [pdf]
And the breakdown of the hoax:
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social...
An excerpt:
> We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
From an article of his published a few days ago:
In my parody article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal 1996), I wrote as part of my conclusion:
[P]ostmodern science provides a powerful refutation of the authoritarianism and elitism inherent in traditional science, as well as an empirical basis for a democratic approach to scientific work. For, as Bohr noted, “a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description” – this is quite simply a fact about the world, much as the selfproclaimed empiricists of modernist science might prefer to deny it. In such a situation, how can a selfperpetuating secular priesthood of credentialed “scientists” purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge? (Sokal 1996, 229)
[...]
Alas, PrescodWeinstein makes a similar bald leap at the beginning of her article – albeit this time, apparently, in all seriousness. Her claim is based on general relativity rather than quantum mechanics, but the structure of the logic is almost identical:
Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. ... Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression ... (PrescodWeinstein 2020, 422–423, references omitted)
Fucking hell! I don’t have much sympathy for Sokal but that article he’s criticising is something else. I had to check that it was not a hoax itself. I still cannot decide whether she’s more likely to be a troll or a useful idiot. Or how someone can apparently work in astrophysics whithout having a clue about relativity.
To my completely untrained mind (in either physics or social studies) it is obvious social studies can not have the rigor of Newtonian physics simply by the difference in running experiments for each discipline. Think about how difficult it is to run, observe, constrict, isolate, etc experiments in social studies by comparison. Ethics limitations too. You really can't take a thousand babies, isolate them and run experiments to see what is a social construct and what is not.
> it is obvious social studies can not have the rigor of Newtonian physics simply by the difference in running experiments for each discipline.
To my mind (trained in statistical Physics), you don’t have to abandon rigour when looking at complex systems. We can build models for things we don’t understand perfectly and we can rationalise experiments even if we don’t control everything (we rarely ever do). I think it’s a difference in degree rather than nature.
The fact that many sociological studies are not reproducible does not mean that we cannot learn anything by observing and investigating correlations. It means that we need to be more serious while doing it.
> You really can't take a thousand babies, isolate them and run experiments to see what is a social construct and what is not.
You’re right. But this means that the emphasis moves from the experimental setup to the data analysis, and also that the results need to be discussed in terms of trends and likelihood more than verified facts. The field could still do away with p-hacking, data fabrication, and dodgy ideologies.
There are plenty of physicists who publish rubbish because they set out to prove a pet theory and become victims of confirmation bias. That tendency is present everywhere, it is just stronger in fields where you cannot control as much the system you observe.
If your research is not based in experimentation then on what foundation can you argue that you're searching for truth? The same foundation that any religion does?
You can observe without experimentation. This is how we initially found evidence for cigarette smoking causing cancer. And then there's stuff like math, philosophy (including logic), and afaik. major parts of astronomy, which are not experimental, and yet produce knowledge.
The funnier thing that Quantum Gravity does seem to be a social construct.
Some people are confident it exists even though it is impossible to observe (as of yet)
I am very confident that quantum gravity "exists" in some sense. Here is the argument:
In quantum physics labs all over the world we can put stuff in superpositions of being in different places. These objects are currently pretty small, but we can do it. Mostly this happens to electrons right now, but it has been demonstrated with "buckyball" molecules made of about 2000 atoms. These objects have mass, and when they're localised in a single position we have a nice description of what their mass does to space-time around them (General relativity).
On the other hand, when such objects are in superpositions of being in different places they do something to space-time around them, but we have absolutely no clue what.
"Quantum gravity" is just the "something" that they do. We don't know what they do, but they do something.
How do we know they are doing something, and that something is different from localised buckyball behavior? I don't believe we can measure that.
Them doing nothing (i.e. having no effect on spacetime at all when in superposition) would be a very wild thing to happen. I can't overstate how incredibly unexpected that would be. We believe (pretty strongly) that objects with mass distort space-time when they aren't in a superposition and superposition is a continuous thing. You can be in a superposition with a very high amplitude somewhere and an arbitrarily small amplitude somewhere else. If they suddenly have no impact on space-time when in superposition something very weird happens when you continuously shift from being localised to being in superposition.
Similarly it doesn't really make sense for them to exhibit the same behaviour when in superposition of different positions to when they are not. Imagine we have an object with mass which can either be in position 1 or position 2, say the positions are a meter apart. Classically we have a description of space-time for the situation where the object is in position 1 and a different description of space-time for the situation where the object is in position 2. Now put the object in an equal superposition of positions 1 & 2. If the space-time is not "different from localised buckyball behavior" which of the two choices does it choose? What happens if it chooses one of them and we move some of the weight of the superposition to the other one?
Heh yup looks that way now, along with a priesthood protecting the discourse. Interesting that people like Neil Turock are using their position to right the ship now though.
A better example is dark matter. Numerous people have staked their entire careers upon dark matter, so the emotions are real, more real than the logic they entertain to qualify positions on the matter. Pun intended.
Everyone always misses the corollary to this "groupthink is why we have dark matter" theory which is that academics are very heavily incentivized to try and overturn conventional dark matter because it would be an absolute career-maker to have a credible alternative (and get credit for upturning a widely accepted theory). And in fact lots of people have tried various MOND theories etc but the reason Lambda-CDM persists for so long is because it still fits the data the best.
Group think is not the problem. Certainty is.
Dark matter arose because of gaps in the current particle theory. These gaps grow the further out we observe and become significant enough to disqualify gravity as a constant for the formation of galaxies. Dark matter provides an incomplete solution to these gaps just as dark energy is an incomplete stop gap to Einstein’s cosmological constant.
The logic is as follows:
* There are gaps in current models that otherwise invalidates math and disqualifies observed measures.
* Dark matter/energy provide a partial solution that may or may not exist but are sufficient to performed qualified measures across observed space.
* Therefore dark matter/energy provide utility value that for conducting measures that otherwise observationally contradict.
* Therefore dark matter/energy must be because they are qualified as such by the math.
This problem is syllogistic wherein a series of propositions are individually true and linked so therefore the conclusion of such linkage must be true, but it isn’t. In physics truths exist as proofs. The problem isn’t that dark matter exists or not, but that incomplete logic demands it must exist.
Again, it is a confidence problem, that it must exist and anything to the contrary should be censored to hell. People have staked their entire professional reputations on this confidence built on logic, not observation.
The actual physics problem that produces all this mess in the first place is observational limitation. Already the JWST is slowly peeling back some reliance on magic solutions allowing for alternate considerations and better math. Ultimately we will need to observe the universe from outside the solar system and it’s internal distortions.
I don't quite understand the words you're using in your "the logic is as follows" list. (What are "gaps that otherwise invalidates math and disqualifies observed measures"? Really, what are "observed measures"? What does it mean to "performed qualified measures"? etc.)
To a substantial extent, it kinda feels like what you're describing is literally the scientific method. We discover observations that are inconsistent with existing models, so we develop a new model that (within their realm of validity) correctly match the data, and when we continue to find that the new model successfully describes new observations our confidence in the model goes up (and eventually rises to the level of saying "this seems to be a correct description of reality").
Maybe if I understood the exact meaning of your words here, I'd understand how what you're talking about differs from that and what your concerns are. But as I've said elsewhere, I really don't see where this is a "confidence problem", and I've never had reason to believe that alternatives are "censored to hell". There are people who've built entire careers publishing papers studying MOND, after all. It just doesn't seem to work as well as dark matter (Lambda-CDM) to explain the copious data that we now have.
And I'll definitely push back (again) against calling the case for dark matter "an observational limitation". These are quantitative, positive observations that demand some model to explain them. The specific quantitative amounts and distributions of dark matter necessary to explain galaxy rotation curves also turned out to be the same specific details necessary to explain gravitational lensing observations. As new observations have come in over the years, the case for dark matter has gotten stronger. (That's why it's become a dominant belief among experts.) So I genuinely don't have any idea what you're getting at with those comments.
No, your position is invalid so long as you claim dark matter is a physics model. It’s a substance (or not), but not a model.
what are MOND and lambda-CDM?
I’m no specialist of the question, but from what I got, ok the standard model doesn’t match what we can observe in astronomic features, unless we suppose some untrackable heavy weight is there though not measurable with our contemporary tools.
So the basic paths are, we admit there is indeed some entity like this, or we need a new model that can also encompass these observations without new object type.
> what are MOND and lambda-CDM?
MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) is a minority (not mainstream) theory in physics, that maybe Newton's law of gravity doesn't work the same over galactic distances. After all, we have only tested the law in length scales smaller than our own solar system.
You also have to know, that the observed rotation speeds of galaxies do not fit with estimated amount of visible stars (and their mass) in the galaxy. We basically can not explain why galaxies rotate at the speeds they do.
MOND suggests that the shape of the gravity law changes, over very large distances.
The mainstream explanation is Dark Matter: Galaxies have more mass than we can see, and that makes them rotate differently that what their number and mass of stars would suggest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
Lambda-Cold-Dark-Matter: Lambda is the name of the cosmological constant, cold dark matter is about the simplest possible model for the unseen dark matter: It is cold (no fast moving particles, meaning no particles like photons that move at relativistic speeds), dark (we cannot see it), and it is matter (provides gravity).
This is the traditional, mainstream cosmological model in its simple form.
I don't mean this unkindly, but I am always so baffled when I see how common this take is. I mean, sure, say this about string theory (the field I was trained in): fine. I don't agree, but I see the point.
But dark matter? You think we wanted this "weird particle or something very like it that we persistently can't find" situation? No! The reason that the overwhelming majority of cosmologists and astrophysicists pretty solidly believe that dark matter exists (after a whole lot of skepticism when it was first proposed) is that there is very strong evidence for it from at least three radically different sets of experimental data. [Patterns in how galaxies rotate (the original), gravitational lensing to locate and quantify mass in galaxy clusters (including cluster collisions like the "Bullet Cluster"), and the overall history of cosmological evolution.] And not only do all three lines of evidence indicate "dark matter exists", but as I understand it, they all independently indicate a consistent amount of dark matter (relative to the observable ordinary matter).
People have tried to come up with modified theories that eliminate the need for dark matter for years and years (once they gave up suggesting the observations themselves might be faulty): it would be so much more satisfying, especially in light of our continued failure to find any sort of "stuff" that the dark matter might be made of. But as I understand it, every modification of basic theory that's so far been proposed to give a different explanation of one of those pieces of evidence has had nothing at all to say about the other two. And while maybe you could come up with a different theory modification to account for each line of evidence separately, at that point the coincidence starts to seem far less plausible even than "particle we can't find". ("Our otherwise solidly established theories are wrong in three very specific but unrelated ways, each tuned to match the effects we'd see from the exact same amount of dark matter.")
And yet somehow, the notion has taken root among a whole bunch of non-experts that this is all somehow a conspiracy or a group delusion or a stubborn self-interested refusal to consider other answers. I'll never pretend that science is perfect or immune to groupthink! But for goodness sake, aim that skepticism in some direction where the observational evidence is less overwhelming. (And before you just pick another field to go after, maybe first think carefully about what factors led you to disagree with the experts on this one where it really, really wasn't justified.)
The problem is not group think or conspiracies as you believe. I suspect you believe that must be the counter-position due to emotional investment and low empathy.
The problem is misplaced confidence. The accuracy of opinions/predictions is almost always inversely proportional to the confidence of the claimant. If there were observational evidence then that would alone be a sufficient qualifier and overstated confidence wouldn’t be necessary. It’s bad logic that I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38203818
> The accuracy of opinions/predictions is almost always inversely proportional to the confidence of the claimant.
I recognize the sort of phenomenon you're pushing back against here, and there's legitimate value in consciously trying to counterbalance the all too human tendency to nod along to overconfident proclamations of truth.
But even so, the claim you're making here is absurd when treated as a general rule. Expertise is a real thing that people can have. Yes, there are countless places where a genuine expert will express caution and give carefully qualified statements about what is "true", and that's good. It's especially common for topics close to the frontiers of human knowledge. But there are also a whole lot of places where an expert will be willing to say "it's basically safe to take ____ as true", and where if asked they'll be able to back that up with copious explanations and evidence.
If I tell you that tomorrow morning the sun will rise in the east rather than the west, I will say it very confidently, and I will be right. If I tell you as a physicist that this bowling ball I'm about to drop from the second floor window will accelerate toward the ground at a rate very close to 9.8 m/s^2 (maybe only a smidge less due to air resistance, given the short time involved), I will be right. You trust your life every day to countless engineers who have at some point said, "The design and fabrication process we have implemented has involved enough rigor and enough quality control and enough margin of safety that I'm willing to stake my career on it being safe." And the vast majority of the time, for each essential bolt in your car and each fuel line on your airplane and each support beam in your office building, they are right.
So here, in the case of dark matter, the community of astrophysicists and cosmologists has assembled over the past 50-ish years a tremendous array of evidence from multiple independent directions that all seems to paint a consistent picture of some type of matter with quite specific properties. Many of them were highly skeptical at first, and there are still some actively looking for radically different explanations. But the vast majority of those experts have considered all of this positive evidence for "dark matter" and have become convinced that something very close to the Lambda-CDM model must be more or less true.
It's not at all clear to me what more you want from them. I mean, heck, the gravitational lensing results (especially as applied to something like the Bullet Cluster) could be considered a successfully tested prediction of the dark matter model, since those measurements weren't even possible until well after most of the community had become reasonably convinced that dark matter was real. The fact that we haven't yet answered the question "how does dark matter fit with the rest of our understanding of particle physics and astronomy?" is fascinating, but the existence of open questions doesn't on its own mean that all that observational data somehow doesn't count!
Sigh. The cosmological model came into being after several years of academic discussions and finally crystallized around 1978, I believe. Plans for the Hubble didn’t even exist then. All people knew is what they could see from Earth surface and it was fine until later observations became absurdly contradictory comparing the math to known physics from agreed upon physics almost a century earlier. So… you solve for the math. You aren’t going to get a better cosmological model by observing distant galaxies from Earth surface. The only other options are abandoning the entirety of the cosmological model without a replacement or abandoning Einstein physics, which is worse.
That still does not make something entirely without evidence thrust into existence. It certainly doesn’t explain the level of emotional investment. Your only arguments supporting your position are purely social conduct: expertise, agreement, confidence, and apparent sadness. These are not observations. They are not physics proofs. They aren’t even measurements. They are the equivalent of the church calling Galileo a heretic. You call my opinion absurd only because it, according to your own words, inconveniences you, god forbid.
Actual science has been slowly chipping away at the social stupidity of this subject. Here is yet another potential example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38215274
Angela Collier did a nice video on YT debunking this, about why dark matter is not a theory, but rather a name for a discrepancy in observations. So it's not a social construct, the discrepancy is real.
If that's true it should be renamed to something less likely to mislead people into thinking it's a theory, e.g. "mass distribution anomaly".
Do you mean that the weight of their intangible emotions largely exceed the measurable observations they showcase in their scientific decisions? How unbearable!
One fun thing to do is to prompt passages from the original article to ChatGPT and see it just run with it. It is a very strong Sokal Hoax generator.
I would argue his article was valid despite his intentions, philosophy does not concern itself with the scientifically correct opinion but explores ideas and their consequences and connections. So he poses a nonsense scientific thesis and explores it, this is the majority case of all past philosophy because scientific theses don't age well, but philosophical theses turn out to be less dependent on science, and a few abstractions removed from it.
The point here was not if philosophy is scientifically correct, but if the journal editors could tell apart philosophy from purposely empty babble. This was not an attack on philosophy but on the journal editorial team.
but it isn't empty babble, if you read it in good faith (as you should any philosophical text)
The follow up book is very much worth a read. It deconstruct so much BS in so called "great thinkers" works.
It seems sad to me that someone who could have spent his time doing, you know, actual physics, instead has frittered away his life shooting social-scientists in a barrel. How many books on this now? Yeah yeah, we'll all agree that social scientists aren't proper scientists, now will you move on already?
One of the problems is that we can't agree on what proper science is. Another one is that even if we do agree, we don't know how to do it. Yet another is one is that many people listen to social scientists and take their word. Economy is a pretty clear example, but there are also cases of statements by social scientists taken as authoritative by the general public, ranging all the way from mental health to (social) injustice.
The hoax proofed a lack of scientific on the side of the social sciences.
As a result, projects who's funding was based upon publishing with the magazine should have to hand that funding to the creator of the hoax. Make science grant hunts real hunts, make hunting down fakes profitable for the scientific minded project.
It's well-known that the hard sciences are awash with fake papers, but apparently when a hard science journal gets fooled, it proves nothing.
Honestly, I hate this. It's a stunt and bad manners. All the extenuating circumstances are known at this point. Philosophical inquiry is of course by its nature susceptible to charlatans, that's unavoidable.