What exactly was bogus about sokal squared? They made stuff up, they got it peer reviewed and they got it published. Yeah the journals weren't great but none of them were publication mills and not everything published gets published in Nature.
In my field we say "it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct".
The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed matter -- removing all the important technical details -- to make it look exciting for a wider audience. For the few hundred people actually in the subfield the best course of action is often to ignore the PR piece in nature and go hunt for the technical paper with all the details that is published in parallel in a "lesser" journal. That is the one the tells what the actual progress was and what you want to consider for your own work.
> The underlying problem with Nature is that they pick the flashy stuff AND present it in a very very condensed
I don't object to the condensed part so much. When I was a physicist, people had a similarly dim view of Nature. But Physical Review Letters also published four-page papers. And PRL was definitely a bigger prize than the long form PR(xyz) papers.
Now if you happened to want to drill in and do work based on someone else's, then you would no doubt prefer the long-form. But if you are keeping up with the field, then the 4-pager is much preferred.
You should be able to lay down what the actual science is in a small space. And if it's a theory paper, that space is enough to have a few equations that the reader could then puzzle out justifications for herself.
"it was published in Nature, but it might still be correct"
We said that in biochemistry as well. Also science. There are some huge stinkers there. When arsenic life came out we were like, of course, it's horsedung, it's in science!!
There's also Andrew Kelman's renaming of PPNAS, the Prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, where Prestige is used instead of Truth.
There were a couple issues with the Sokal Squared hoax. The biggest one was that they relied a lot on their own definition of "obviously absurd" rather than using some form of empirical or unbiased "made stuff up" generator.
In the process, they wrote some papers that, especially if you weren't assuming the person made up the data underlying them, were...middling compelling.
I read one of the papers - the dog park one - and my conclusion was much the same as one of the peer reviewers. That it was an interesting concept, presented slightly too stridently (a common thing with papers written by say...students), and interesting enough as a frame to jump off from.
I must compliment the creativity of defending someone from having published nonsense by claiming that it wasn't sufficiently-scientifically-generated nonsense.
If someone not in the field can write a "middling compelling" paper in a distant field while trying to be absurd, then that still means something. If some jerk (basically) can just scribble a "publishable paper" off in some semi-major discipline while literally doing the opposite of trying, then clearly that semi-major discipline has very little value to it. We're not creating these large infrastructures with journals and university libraries and peer review and the Imprimatur of Scientific Credibility and credentialed university graduate programs and millions of dollars in grants for things any idiot can scribble down. We've got the Internet at large for that already.
If it's by design or somehow correct that peer review can't catch these things, then my opinion of the situation is even worse than if they were merely a demonstration of things slipping through a net, and peer review on any level is apparently utterly worthless.
Your defense may be superficially interesting, but if taken seriously, only deepens the problem.
They weren’t outside the field though. They did a deep dive, learned the language, and relied on a definition of “absurd” rooted in their own ideology rather than reason.
In doing so, they ended up mimicking the field too well.
Again... even that is still pretty serious condemnation. If you can "deep dive" that many fields to the point that you're fooling the gatekeepers, a "deep dive" must not actually be all that "deep".
I mean, we can try to puff up Sokal as some kind of massive genius who got to publication-quality skill levels in multiple fields in less than a year, but... in that case, why shouldn't I accept his take on the results, since he's apparently that much of a genius?
There just isn't a way around it. If it's that easy to get to "publishable", it isn't worth being an academic discipline.
Compare someone in one of those fields trying to publish a particle physics paper by just imitating what they think are the important characteristics.
Note we’re not talking about Sokal, but a separate hoax that decided to call itself that and which was distinctly less impressive. They started, at best, one field adjacent from what they targeted.
I’m not at all surprised they managed, after devoted effort to do so, in having middling success getting papers into some okay journals.
