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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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You know, my mind pre-emptively went to "I'm gonna have to defend the Sokal or Sokal^2 Hoaxes aren't I?"

I donno. Personally, if it isn't clear already, I would never wage that sort of information war, for any reason, period. It's not in my nature to lie or deceive in such a premeditated, Machiavellian manner. Although sometimes my friends tell me I exaggerate for comedic effect. Then again, one time I was telling a story about how fat the people at Gencon were, and my friends thought I had to be exaggerating. Then they came the year after and apologized for ever doubting me.

I think a stronger case can be made for the Sokal hoaxes, in that an institution is claiming to process papers with rigor. You need to stress test that from time to time, like when internal agents try to get a bomb past the TSA.

The TSA nearly always fails too.

I think it's a lot less defensible when you can convince internet randos, even internet randos of some notoriety or influence, of nonsense. Then you are just acting like a run of the mill troll off Something Awful, 4chan or KiwiFarms. Especially when it's of specific false instances of things that are absolutely actually happening elsewhere.

Going back to the TSA example, it's almost like the test was not "Can we get a bomb through the TSA" but "Wouldn't it be funny if we convinced the TSA something was a bomb that wasn't actually a bomb?" Well no, that just makes you an asshole.

That last bit reminds me of this kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident

Yeah, that would have been my answer too. Scientific institutions ought to be held to a higher standard than random people screenshotting bad behavior of the other side.

There's definitely overlap in framework that they're all pissing in the drinking water, so to speak, but I think there are layers of issues, here:

  • Sokal's hoax was pretty self-evidently not real, and the editors, at least theoretically, had the capability to check that. Even if they didn't, they could have asked almost anyone with a physics background for a sanity check. There's little, if any, evidence they felt it necessary.
  • (Sokal also published under his own name, and while that was part of how he exploited Social Text's vulnerabilities, it also meant that he was somewhat more vulnerable to counteraction: had Social Text noticed the paper was bunk and either reported him pre-publication or published with a disclaimer of some kind, it could have absolutely wrecked his career. Sokal Squared and Sokal III didn't, and at least a couple of the Sokal Squared articles weren't clearly wrong so much as just stupid, so I'd put them lower down the scale.)
  • The LoTT hoax was not sufficiently supported by the evidence. Trace's cover story could provide quite a large variety of explanations why any gaps or weirdness in the existed, but could not provide any way to confirm the story. To a rationalist should be a very good cautionary tale! And I'm absolutely an advocate of validating information no matter how expert the speaker is! But it's also a high standard in a context where a) it's very likely that a 'real' story would have been extremely hard to verify or disprove, b) his coexperimenters further provided support for his claims in ways that would have made even that marginal. (The cover story and rdrama community's laissez faire approach to preregistration of experiments also made this vulnerable to publication bias.)
  • Gerard's work here isn't really about testing the institutions, and to a much larger extent about making the checks not exist; checking his work was not just hard, unlikely, or practically impossible, but impossible at a logical level. At most, someone opposed to his edits could argue that he shouldn't be the one posting them (WP:COI) or try to argue that whole sites are unreliable. Wikipedia's tools for handling bad or marginal sources are ad hoc and kinda the crux of various contradictions between WP:OR and the impossibility of outsourcing evaluation of evidence, and in many cases Gerard had a pretty heavy thumb on the scales for those backup tools, too. That's... not just a difference in quantity, but of quality.

I'm not a fan of any of them -- I've pointed in the past to nydrwaku as an example of trolling aimed at people I hate that I still think is pretty damned bad for mainstream discourse, and I pushed back on the LoTT hoax contemporaneously -- but I think Sokal is less bad, and Gerard more so.

I mean, up front, I think I was clear I don't think Tracing is as bad as Gerard. At least not to my knowledge. Nobody has put together a comprehensive manifesto covering 30 years of his internet history yet. I was pointing out that they both have engaged in information war against their political opponents, and it doesn't sound like you dispute that?

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