. The last point is the reason I have bothered to write all this and post it, where I expect to get a lot of responses and flames for being too liberal. My point is that the joke is indeed funny, but unfortunately it is on us (Baez). Damn right it's funny! But, it's not necessarily on "us". I see it as being only on those who believe they are more knowledgeable in their field than they really are. I do referee papers once in a while and I do not pass things based on authors name, or their institutional address. I check the science, including going over equations, checking consistence in data and verifying that there is some relationship between what the author does and his conclusions. While I do not start with an assumption that the authors try to pull a fast one, I'm also not assuming that they have any idea what they are talking about (Weiner). Now, this excerpt from Weiner makes no sense. Does he check the articles or not? How can you check some articles and not others? He is an intelligent person for checking all incoming articles, if he checked all of them. To block a publication from being trashed by a hoax, you have to be thorough in your research that you perform on them before they get published. No matter how many people complain and disagree with Sokal's hoax, there is no reason to say he was wrong in getting it published. I, for one, am glad he did. He must be very intelligent to slide a hoax like his by a so-called group of educated scientists. Sokal goes out of his way to leave telltale clues as to his true intent - the conclusion is inescapable that the editors of Social Text didn't know what many of the sentences in Sokal's essay actually meant; and that they just didn't care (Boghossian). So overall, Sokal's hoax seems to be a brilliant piece of work. Hopefully the editors of many publications have learned something from his "performance." ...
