Skeptic Michael Shermer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“But isn’t the history of science . . . strewn with the remains of failed theories such as phlogiston, miasma, spontaneous generation and the luminous aether? Yes, and that is how we know we are making progress. The postmodern belief that discarded ideas mean that there is no objective reality and that all theories are equal is more wrong than all the wrong [scientific] theories combined.”
–Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic), “At the Boundary of Knowledge,” Scientific American, September 2016
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For an amusing illustration of the pretentious vacuity of postmodernism, see physicist Alan Sokal’s hoax article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which he describes as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense … structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernists he] could find about mathematics and physics.” Sokal approached a prominent — “prestigious” would be inaccurate — academic postmodernist journal, Social Text, which thought highly enough of the piece that they published it in their Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue.
As Richard Dawkins noted in Nature:
Sokal’s paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the ‘post-Enlightenment hegemony’ and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn’t know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature.
For a bit of fun, Communications From Elsewhere has a postmodern text generator, and you can generate your own computer science postmodern masterpiece with the help of an online gibberish generator created by pranksters at MIT. Just fill in the names of the “authors,” and voilá: a correctly formatted “academic” paper that makes sense only occasionally and inadvertently.
I pulled up the generator, fed in the names of a few lesser known cult leaders and serial killers (yes, there is overlap) and came up with a paper titled:
Decoupling the Turing Machine from Consistent Hashing in Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Authored by
Fritz Haarmann, Michel Petiot, Charles Dederich, Ervil LeBaron and Luc Geret
Abstract
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for linked lists, the deployment of the Ethernet might never have occurred. In this paper, we confirm the investigation of Byzantine fault tolerance. In this position paper, we concentrate our efforts on validating that public-private key pairs and Lamport clocks can agree to surmount this grand challenge.
So, there you go. Have fun with the postmodern text generator and the computer-science gibberish generator. (Thanks to UA astronomer Jess Johnson for alerting me to the latter wonderful resource.)
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