Comment by whatshisface
4 years ago
I'd bet that it was inspired by the Sokal affair. The difference in reaction is probably because people think the purity of Linux is important but the purity of obscure academic journals isn't. (They're probably right, because one fault in Linux will make the whole system insecure, whereas one dumb paper would go in next to the other dumb papers and leave the good papers unharmed.)
The similarities are that reviewers can get sleepy no matter what they're reviewing. Troll doll QC staff get sleepy. Nuclear reactor operators get sleepy too.
> The similarities are that reviewers can
Most people in the outgroup who know about the Sokal Affair but who know nothing about the journal they submitted to aren't aware of this, but Social Text was known to be not peer reviewed at the time. It's not that reviewers failed some test; there explicitly and publicly wasn't a review process. Everyone reading Social Text at the time would have known that and interpreted contents accordingly, so Sokal didn't demonstrate anything of value and was just being a jackass.