anyone who doesn’t believe in physical reality is invited to jump off his New York high-rise apartment balcony

Recently, John Hempton posted this:

"A call to sensible conservatives who still think the enlightenment was a good idea

Warning: non stock post - just my usual diatribe against people who argue from falsehoods...

I have always admired the Alan Sokal hoax( I DIDN'T, AND HERE'S WHY: FROM INFORMATION PROCESSING:

"Frauds!

Callow postdocs are often the most caustic, but deadly accurate, observers of the scientific world. A postdoc has to be careful about what he or she says to a senior colleague, but get a few together and pretty soon the real scoop will emerge.

One of my buddies from those days, who is now a well known professor in high energy theory, liked (and likes) to use the term "fraud" to describe other physicists who didn't deserve their positions. So and so is a fraud! Did you see his last paper? Have you ever talked physics with the guy?

Of course, the presence of frauds is inevitable given a random component (sheer luck!) or additional factors (e.g., personal charisma, hype) influencing career success. Below is a figure from an old post on success vs ability. Let the vertical axis be career success and the horizontal axis the ability of the individual. Even if the correlation between the two is as high as .85, we'd still expect to see relatively incompetent individuals in high positions. (Or, equivalently, two individuals of vastly different abilities at the same level of success.) In fact, the correlation between ability and success in academic science is probably anomalously high compared to other fields, with the possible exception of competitive sports.



If you are still unconvinced about the existence of frauds among us, see this research article, as summarized below in the Times magazine.

“The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction,” a 1973 article still widely cited by critics of student evaluations, Donald Naftulin, a psychiatrist, and his co-authors asked an actor to give a lecture titled “Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education.” The actor was a splendid speaker, his talk filled with witticisms and charming asides — but also with “irrelevant, conflicting and meaningless content.” Taking questions afterward, the silver-haired actor playing “Dr. Myron L. Fox” affably answered questions using “double talk, non sequiturs, neologisms and contradictory statements.” The talk was given three times: twice to audiences of psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, the last time to graduate students in educational philosophy. In each case, the evaluations by the audience were highly laudatory. To these audiences, Dr. Fox was apparently articulate and intellectual, not a fraud.

Note: the figure is only meant to illustrate the amount of residual scatter present when two variables have a high but not perfect correlation. It does NOT represent any specific data set.

Posted by Steve Hsu at 11:54 AM

I SPENT A VERY LONG TIME LIVING IN AN ACADEMIC COMMUNITY. I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW MANY TIMES THAT I HEARD A SCIENTIST SAY SOMETHING LIKE THIS OR WORSE ABOUT ANOTHER SCIENTIST. THERE IS NOTHING PROFOUND ABOUT INTELLECTUALS BELIEVING OTHER THEORIES TO BE WORTHLESS OR WORSE. THERE WAS NOTHING PROFOUND ABOUT DECONSTRUCTION OR ANY OTHER THEORY DISCOVERED BY THIS HOAX. IT WAS AFTER ALL, INTENDED TO BE A HOAX. BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THEY HAVE EXISTED IN SCIENCE.

Hempton goes on:

" I thought I was a long way to the left of centre – but then I discovered post modernism. Post modernism was a denial of the enlightenment to the extent that it denied the existence of “physical reality”. In the post modernist dialectic no knowledge was superior to any other except the knowledge that no knowledge was superior to any other. Your lying eyes deceived you as to facts – indeed facts were “socially constructed”. If you are not familiar with the Sokal hoax this is the article which was published – and this is the simultaneous article exposing the hoax. It is VERY funny.

Anyway the post-modernist position is absurd. As Alan Sokal points out anyone who doesn’t believe in physical reality is invited to jump off his New York high-rise apartment balcony( THIS REALLY INTERESTED ME. I HAD NO IDEA THAT SKEPTICISM HAD BEEN REFUTED. THE PROOF THAT SOKOL OFFERS REMINDS ME OF DR.JOHNSON'S PROOF:

57. Refutation of Bishop Berkeley
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
Boswell: Life

NOW, THE UPSHOT OF SOKAL'S ARGUMENT SEEMS TO BE THAT THE SKEPTIC MUST CONSIDER HIMSELF IMMORTAL OR INCAPABLE OF DYING. THIS IS SILLY. THE SKEPTIC DOES NOT NEED TO CLAIM THAT THERE IS NO REAL WORLD. ALL THE SKEPTIC NEEDS TO SHOW IS THAT THE EXISTENCE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD CANNOT BE PROVEN. NEITHER SOKAL'S POINT OR DR.JOHNSON'S PROVE ANYTHING. DR. JOHNSON'S POINT IS NOT A PROOF, BUT RATHER AN EXAMPLE OF HIM KICKING A ROCK. SOKAL'S POINT ISN'T A PROOF EITHER. IT SIMPLY CLAIMS THAT THE SKEPTIC MUST BELIEVE THAT HE CAN'T DIE, AND ASKS HIM TO PROVE IT. OF COURSE, THE SKEPTIC DOESN'T DENY HAVING EXPERIENCES. HE DOESN'T DENY THAT HE IS ALIVE. HE DOESN'T EVEN DOUBT THAT HIS EXPERIENCES CAN FOLLOW RULES AND ENTAIL CERTAIN CONSEQUENCES, SUCH AS HIS DEATH. HE MERELY ASSERTS THAT THERE IS NO PROOF THAT THERE IS A REAL WORLD BEHIND AND INDEPENDENT OF HIS PERCEPTIONS, AND, EVEN IF THERE WERE, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO KNOW THAT.

Back to Hempton:

"Now the Sokal hoax had a purpose – which was to try and reground the social sciences in reality( I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS MEANS. IS THIS A CLAIM THAT THE SOCIAL SCIENCES FOLLOW GENERAL LAWS LIKE NEWTONIAN MECHANICS? ARE INTENTIONS REAL? ). Post Modernism has just about self-destructed. Mission sort of accomplished.

But it is not only the left that departed from reality. One of President Bush’s senior advisors derided his critics for being “reality based”. The putative Republican vice presidential candidate in the last election was off with the fairies on evolution. And the right has had its fair share of climate change deniers – long on rhetoric, short on science.

One of the homes of the climate change deniers in Australia has been Quadrant Magazine – the formerly intelligent home of the literate right. I even used to subscribe. Quadrant has been under the editorial control of Keith Windshuttle – a historian who has made the fairly common transition from doyen of the trenchant left to doyen of the trenchant right. He has made a career of questioning other people’s research and particularly other people’s footnotes. Windshuttle was a personal favourite of our esteemed former Prime Minister (John Howard), and Howard was a favourite of Still-President Bush.

Well Keith Windshuttle has been hoaxed. It was a clever little diatribe on genetic engineering which got him – by a bogus author with a bogus argument and little heed to facts. You can read the hoax here and the exposure here. The hoaxer’s identity is now public too - and her politics and her motives are far too left-of-centre for my taste...

Keith Windshuttle has a few dodgy self-defences – one being that Quadrant is not a science journal – and it should not be incumbent on him to check scientific arguments. In which case why does he publish diatribes on the science of climate change?

The main difference I can see between the Sokal hoax and the Quadrant hoax is that in the Sokal hoax the hoax came from the left – and its goal was to remove the vacuous end of the left so that there can be rational debate. Sokal is an old lefty who even taught physics in Nicaragua. The Quadrant hoax came from the left with the goal of exposing the right as vacuous. (PJ O’Rourke – we need a clever right wing hoaxer!)

This is a chance (another one) for the right to clean up its act – and remove the vacuous elements of the right and improving discourse for everyone. Just as Sokal’s hoax improved the quality of left-leaning debate by discrediting anti-enlightenment stupidity – can the right take up the challenge of cleaning itself up?

In Australia a first step would be to sack Windshuttle from the editor’s position at Quadrant. But who to replace him with? Surely the right in the Western world still contains sufficient quality conservative intellect. Or maybe the Bush/Howard era has shattered too many...

Sensible conservatives who still think the enlightenment was a good idea – your time has come…

Please.

Posted by John Hempton at 3:35 PM "

Finally, I want to add one simple point: The fact that people can be fooled helps the skeptic, not the naive realist. It shows that things are often not what they seem. But how do we know that? What if a hoax turned out to be true? What would that prove? Is the hoax then determined by the intent of the author? Namely, to say something false but seemingly true. Or was there never any hoax at all?