Comment by undefined1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by undefined1 | Hacker News Reader

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Paul's response to this:

"Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.)

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?"

http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

Thought experiments like this may reflect our own attitudes more than reality.

Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences. For example, peer review in CS seems to be highly random, often biased (depending on reviewer and author rather than the paper) and only weakly correlated with quality and impact. Moreover, there seems to be a problem with reproducibility (as well as data accuracy) of many published results in the biological sciences, medicine, and psychology. And "not reproducible" in science may very well mean "not true," and can have harmful consequences such as prescription drugs that don't work.

I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling and usually requires an unimaginable amount of reading (in multiple languages, usually) as well as writing a massive and highly detailed book for a very limited audience. It requires committing yourself to years of intense and often solitary effort for minimal reward and low pay, so I think you have to have remarkable dedication and "grit" as well as a passion or affinity for the discipline. Moreover, actually getting hired into a humanities faculty position is an astonishing achievement in itself.

Will the skills of physicists transfer trivially to the humanities? Perhaps, but I think it would be an interesting study to see how well both sides do switching disciplines.

>Poor review practices in journals are not limited to the humanities and social sciences.

to what extent? surely it's significantly less than that of math and "hard sciences"

>I would also suggest that making it through a Ph.D. program in the humanities is incredibly grueling

working in a sweatshop is grueling work. when you're in a factory for 12 hours a day what's being worked is your obedience, your self-control. not necessarily strength or intelligence.

There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually,in lower-to-middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it.

The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair happened in 2002, before Paul's article in 2004.

Pretty high - has he updated his response yet? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...

This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what happened here.

As long as the French literature professors are allowed to publish on string theory, they're probably fine.

That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.

It's good analogy and it's really much simpler. Physics is grounded in reality. Literary criticism isn't. This is because most of the former is experimentally verifiable, or follows from experimentally verifiable results via a chain of rigorous formal reasoning[0]. In other words: you can't bullshit others as much in physics as you can in literature, and more importantly for being smart, you can't bullshit yourself. You have constant feedback from observable reality, which lets you refine your thinking abilities much better.

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[0] - You'll note that the weirdest, most nonsense things in physics happen in places that are furthest from any experimental verification.

Okay, but there are two responses inline with mine that show physics literature as easily bullshit-able.

Also, no, it's a really bad analogy, for the reasons stated.

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