misreadings. He advised readers to slowly and skeptically examine the arguments of each party, bearing in mind that "the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true." Influence Sociological follow-up study In 2009, Cornell sociologist Robb Willer performed an experiment in which undergraduate students read Sokal's paper and were told either that it was written by another student or that it was by a famous academic. He found that students who believed the paper's author was a high-status intellectual rated it better in quality and intelligibility. The "Sokal Squared" scandal In 2017, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose initiated "The Grievance Studies affair", a project to create bogus academic papers on cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies and submit them to academic journals. Their intent was to expose problems in "grievance studies", a term they apply to a subcategory of these academic topics in which "poor science is undermining the real and important work being done elsewhere". The hoax began in 2017 and continued into 2019, when it was halted after one of the papers caught the attention of journalists, who quickly found its purported author, Helen Wilson, to be nonexistent. By that time, four of the 20 papers had been published, three had been accepted but not yet published, six had been rejected, and seven were still under review. Sokal III In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III". The initials stand for "Sokal III". The Quarterly'' retracted the article. See also Academese , a software developer known for his early hoax involving postmodern deconstruction at the 2nd International Conference on Cyberspace in 1991 , an actor gave a lecture to a group of experts with almost no content but was praised The Ern Malley affair, Australia's most infamous literary hoax , a program that produces imitations of postmodernist writing References Footnotes Citations Bibliography – English translation. Further reading External links Alan Sokal Articles on the Social Text Affair Alan Sokal's own page with very extensive links; includes the original article Original hoax article (HTML) 1996 hoaxes 1996 in science Academic journal articles Academic scandals Criticism of postmodernism Duke University Hoaxes in science Hoaxes in the United States Literary forgeries Science and technology studies Scientific misconduct incidents Sociology of scientific knowledge