The Problem With Academics

CNN’s running an article about two guys from MIT who wrote a program that assembles random bits of academic-speak into a pseudo-paper. In other words, they randomly generate trash that so closely resembles the trash actually put out by academics that they stand a good chance of being accepted by said community. We’ve all seen these papers — they’re full of lofty, obfuscated language designed to do but one thing — convince the reader that the author is smart. It’s my personal view that these people are little more than highly educated oxygen thieves.

Anyway, here are a few choice quotes from the CNN piece:

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida. To their surprise, one of the papers — “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” — was accepted for presentation. The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press. Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text affair after submitting their paper. “Rooter” features such mind-bending gems as: “the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning” and “We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions.”

Wow, that’s rich.