MIT students randomly generate papers; get accepted to a conference

[Jacob Orlove]

The story

The paper generator.

Generating random papers is so much fun!

[Bram]

Awesome.

Just plain awesome. Best joke ever.

[Machinus]

I heard about this a while ago. I think the students might have gotten the idea from someone else.

Apparently a professor at an ive league school wrote an essay about how a lot of social science is actually meaningless gibberish, and wrote several papers of bullshit that got published in separate journals. Then after the papers were published he revealed that they were just garbage.

[Jacob Orlove]

Yeah, similar papers have been written in the past, but this is the first time that the process has been opened up to the public.

[Klep]

Also those humanities papers were written by hand.  This was completely computer generated.

[Matt]

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

[Jacob Orlove]

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Yeah, but those are humanities/social science papers, which are about ten thousand times easier to fake.

[jpmeyer]

I heard about this a while ago. I think the students might have gotten the idea from someone else.

Apparently a professor at an ive league school wrote an essay about how a lot of social science is actually meaningless gibberish, and wrote several papers of bullshit that got published in separate journals. Then after the papers were published he revealed that they were just garbage.

The reason that Sokal was able to pull this off is from what I read, he interspersed his paper, which was meaningless gibberish in a lot of parts and blatantly false (but suitably fancy-sounding) in others with juuuuuust enough sections that would flatter the people publishing the journal.  He was writing stuff like "Gravity is at its core, merely a social and linguistic construct."  They saw the "X is a YZ construct" form and popped a million boners.