An Elaborate Academic-Journal Hoax

Representative quote:

> "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."

This wasn't a hoax it was social commentary and an experiment in prejudice. That nazi language can be published under a progressive guise should be chilling to anyone who is a vehicle for these ideals.

Representative quotes:

"Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?" tweeted the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

"Three intrepid academics," wrote Yascha Mounk, an author and lecturer on government at Harvard, "just perpetrated a giant version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals. Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia."

It's not just the humanities, computer science is also susceptible to hoaxes built from jargon.

SCIgen works like an academic "Mad Libs" of sorts, arbitrarily slotting in computer-science buzzwords like "distributed hash tables" and "Byzantine fault tolerance."

http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scien...

That's what stuck out to me as well. This quote: "I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it."

Isn't the ability to separate out the quality work from the garbage the point of the peer review system? If the system was working as intended, the reviewers even with the assumption that they aren't being defrauded should have been able to sort the papers into the garbage pile.