Comments on: Sokal, in reverse

By: Joseph Hyde

Joseph Hyde — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 16:16:06 +0000

I would respectfully disagree…

Examples of this, that is someone who is an expert in a field that they don’t have formal training in, that is a formal degree are all around us… The common name for such people are ‘Renaissance Men’. I am sure you can name a few, some even have Phd’s in other disiplines.

Thanks.

By: Harry Collins

Harry Collins — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:45:35 +0000

Thanks for posting my reply. I have had a few responses which entirely ignore what the original article was about and I am getting a bit `shirty’ about it. Crucially, a test where the judges know that one of the persons is not what they are pretending to be is entirely different to one where they judges do not know. In the later cases — which include hoaxes and confidence tricks — it has long been documented that `the mark’ does most of the work of `repairing’ the deficiencies in the performance and only a minimal performance is required. That is why ELIZA-like programs can work so well: they have no bearing on properly conducted Turing-Test like experiments. It is also peeving to be accused of such a conflation because I have written extensively on these differences — eg `Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines’ (MIT Press 1990) or `Dr Golem: How to think about medicine’ (University of Chicago Press, 2005 — the chapter on bogus doctors). Cheers, Harry

By: small and gray

small and gray — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 14:08:15 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Dr. Collins. I’m certainly not interested in “scoring cheap points”; I could have sworn the link to the preprint wasn’t on the Nature site when I wrote the post (I read the article twice!), but I guess I wasn’t careful enough. I apologize for that, and I’ve changed the post to link to your preprint.

With respect to your second point, I appreciate that you didn’t intend the work as a Sokal hoax, but that’s a link many people are likely to draw–the Nature writer included. So it’s worth considering the similarities, if only to reject the parallel (which I do). Similarly, I wasn’t suggesting acquiring linguistic skill is exactly like writing an ELIZA-like program; the question is whether there’s a qualitative rather than quantitative difference. At any rate, I think think the latter points are open to debate. I’ve pointed to your comment at the top of the article, and I’d encourage people to read the preprint and draw their own conclusions. I appreciate your comments.

By: Harry Collins

Harry Collins — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:35:37 +0000

The account given on this website of my experiment: `Sokal in Reverse.’ is incorrect in at least three ways.

First it is stated that the journal in which the original is to be published was not supplied by Nature. It was! As stated there, the journal is Studies in History and Philosophy of Science — the paper will be out in December.

Second, the experiment was not intended as a Sokal hoax in reverse, it was intended to demonstrate how linguistic skill in a technical area could be genuinely acquired. The whole point of a hoax is that the skill is _not_ acquired.

Third the level of skill bears not resemblance to that encoded in an ELIZA-like program.

Anyone who has any interest in what the experiment was really about rather than scoring cheap points can read the preprint, the website of which was also given in the Nature article. It is http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/expertise — click on `Experiments on Interactional Expertise.’

Harry Collins