nothing about this feels particularly surprising to me, though that doesn't make it anything less than infuriating. like, why discount the collective knowledge of autistic people, of trans people (often more skilled and avid employers of the scientific method than any "skeptic"!), or of plural people, when psychology is almost certainly largely just made the fuck up? what exactly are we supposed to be so scandalized about with Sokal when the great rational bastion of STEM has lately produced nothing but Theranos and fake hydroponics projects at ivy league universities funded by Jeffrey Epstein?
but the thing that really gets me is: why the fuck did the liberal arts get taken in by this bullshit? were we trying to produce more #Truth about The Grapes of Wrath? having just read through a bunch of old articles on that book, I can tell you, we HAD a way of doing that, it was called "publishing your own god damn paper." the earliest and most cited paper I found was like TWO PAGES LONG and didn't cite any sources or even reference page numbers in the text, it just TALKED ABOUT THE BOOK.
modern writing on art is I Guess more "rigorous" in some sense but it's absolutely undeniable that for all the people who have written books responding to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, I don't think a single one of them has been read by actual comic creators and critics outside of weird freaks like me. maybe they, too, should've just said what they had to say in the form of an actual comic! anyway despite being a weird pervert who reads academic texts for fun, I couldn't hack it in the field. I decided, foolishly, to learn how to draw and how to read Javascript and CSS, instead of learning how to read Academic French--a career ending move.
as far as I can tell, the paper publishing system's effect on the liberal arts has been to render a entire field, dedicated to studying and elevating humanity from the fucking muck, into a withering basal limb of an organism whose entire purpose now has reoriented towards spitting out tie wearing business boys dedicated heart and soul to making the line go up. but by god they got dangerous career criminal Aaron Swartz off the street!
They have played us for absolute fools.
