An embarrassingly unskeptical article appeared in Skeptic Magazine recently featuring a hoax paper published in a Gender Studies journal by two authors: James Lindsay (past guest of the show) and Peter Boghossian. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and several major figures in the skeptic movement like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins took the conclusion that Gender Studies as a field has been demolished by this hoax. This is incredibly irresponsible. The hoax paper accomplished no such thing, and Eli is here to explain in depth why. Links: Skeptic Magazine Article Other sokal hoaxes:
A US nuclear physics conference accepted a paper written entirely in autocomplete.
A trio of MIT grad students created an algorithm that creates fake scientific papers – in 2013 IEEE and Springer Publishing found 120 published papers had been generated by the program.
A paper entitled “Get me off your fucking mailing list” was accepted for publication by computer science journal.
A 2013 hoax saw a scientific paper about fictional lichen published in several hundred journals.