Thursday, December 03, 2015

Bullshit!

There is a new gauntlet thrown to the ground, an academic challenge to the greatly under-appreciated Sokal paper, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, that appears in the latest issue of the hitherto relatively still waters of the open-access journal, Judgment and Decision Making:



















We can't tell if this is bullshit or not, but it declares itself (in fifteen journal pages), to be an academic study of bullshit.

The primary author, Gordon Pennycook, a Ph.D. candidate in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Waterloo, appears to have already published over two dozen articles.

We thank Bernard Cleyet for bringing this to the attention of the Phys-L community.

Our personal opinion is that the trail-blazing work of Sokal has set a standard that will be extremely difficult to match, let alone exceed, despite the many noble attempts reported in the invaluable Journal of Improbable Research.

I, for one, am always appreciate of these cross-disciplinary opportunities. With due consideration after  years of penal servitude on promotion and tenure committees, Onymous Guy thinks that, regardless of the academic merits of this publication, mastery of bullshit will advance one's career in academia a great deal.

No comments: