ISO C++ 2D API - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Jan-04.html <comment><USER3> [A note from the peanut gallery]

Miguel loves C and that's perfectly fine - it's a great language, easy to read and write, powerful, but does suffer from some of the same _fundamental_ problems as C++... Both languages are tightly bound to today's base machine architecture - they are called "systems programming languages" for this very reason.

I find it odd that we have this continual debate about older (and widely used) systems programming languages (the ones that are _actually_ used and form the basis of modern computing....), but neglect the arguably more interesting - and obvious - problem: the lack of a viable, consumer class, non-Von Neumann machine architecture. What would it mean for the advent and design of new high level programming languages that are safe, performant, productive, portable, and that directly map to this new machine model?

The future will always be built on the past, but this doesn't mean we have to keep re-inventing the same problems to solve... Here's to a future of new machine models and the languages used to program them efficiently, effectively, safely, _and_ easily.

</comment><comment><USER4> This blogpost is so silly.

Agg is more like a meta library for constructing drawing APIs. Using it directly is quite painful. It even comes with Agg2D which is a simplified API.

Another easy to use C++ drawing API is Qt's QPainter.

It all comes down to how you design the API. C++ doesn't force you to come up with Agg if you really want something like QPainter. I expect the C++-translation of Cairo to be equally simple. We're talking about translating cairo_foo(ctx, params); to ctx.foo(params); and adding automatic memory management.

API design is hard. If you have it in you to design a good C API, you could probably do the same in C++.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is this? Python? Why "standardize" Cairo? I can already use Cairo if I want to.

I'd rather they provided some standard template interfaces to all of the common 2D graphics algorithms (simple line clipping, tessellation, polygon clipping, bezier subdivision, etc) and not couple it to a classical scanline rasterizer CPU graphics library. But I don't think that even this belongs in the language standard.

There are a bunch of other opensource libraries they'd need to "standardize" if they want to draw text...

<comment><USER6> > Why "standardize" Cairo?

Because it means you can start making assumptions about available resources on platforms you target. If all you need is the included 2d api in the standard (which would be terse at best) then as soon as you can throw a compiler flag for, say, c++14, you can _assume_ those primitives are there. You don't have to fight to either bundle a 3rd party library with your software, or pray to god the included version on the target system still has a version with the same abi, etc. You can just use it outright without hesitation because standard compliance means you have it at your disposal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do we really need a vector graphics library in standard C++? Why not just create a new ISO standard using Cairo as the base, and stop making the language even more bloated that it currently is. If the proposed graphics API does not require changes to the language it really doesn't need to be there.

<comment><USER8> Quality standard libraries are wonderful in that you can rely on their presence.

A thousand ad hoc separately licensed libraries with wildly varying build chains, supported compilers and operating systems, with similarly varying code quality, naming conventions, build configuration options, conflicting runtime selection, error handling styles, documentation quality, etc. may be the bread and butter of your standard C++ programmer -- I know it is of mine -- but it hardly seems like the ideal state of things, especially having also used languages with much, much larger standard libraries.

What practical problems have you, personally, run into as a result of standard library "bloat"?

Just yesterday, as a practical problem I've personally had with the "leanness" of non-standard libraries, I spend a good half the day trying to wrangle a set of third party libraries into submission. 4 library configs x 3 platforms varying just enough to spend a good half the day setting up library paths, library names, library dependencies, tracking down #defines for "optional" functionality that was forgotten (or off because it doesn't work yet -- I haven't figured out which) on one platform, all in yet another build system (adapting their projects to ours would take too long), harmonizing runtime library settings to match instead of crash...

A whole lot of busywork that simply doesn't happen for standard libraries, because "batteries included" means it's already been taken care of, without cutting off the rabbit hole of extra libraries when you need them.

<comment><USER7> I run into many of the same issues as you, but pushing some library to become standard does not _solve_ the problem at all - it just forces the problem on somebody else. Somebody still needs to configure and maintain the library for a particular distribution, but rather than it being a distribution's package maintainer (or yourself), the problem is pushed onto the compiler/standard library devs, and the distribution's maintainers will still need to configure the standard library for their own distributions anyway. This is the "bloat" \- it's increasing the workload for those developers. (I don't personally work on a C++ compiler, but I've worked on tooling for other languages, and I've maintained packages.)

The problem of package and configuration management is an OS problem and should not be the responsibility of compiler developers who would ideally be working on an OS-agnostic language compiler. For every non-language feature you push into the standard, you increase the amount of coupling the compiler has to an OS. (It's already the case with existing APIs, even down to basic IO - it actually forces the operating system to be designed to match the requirements of the language, and thus limits to scope for experimentation and other solutions.)

C++ has significant usage outside of our mainstream operating systems. It's used in embedded systems, and they have the exact opposite problems you describe - the trouble of taking things out of the language, rather than putting them in.

The way we maintain packages should be agnostic of any particular OS or language - we need a way to eliminate the "hidden knowledge" that goes into building and configuring the packages in the first place, so that any particular setup can be automatically reproduced. It's not a solved problem yet, but Nix is making great steps towards that capability, which don't require adding bloat to existing solutions. (We usually call it the Open/Closed principle)

The C++ Committee are attempting to solve the problem in a different way - <USER2> saying "we'll handle everything for you". What about adding libraries to ISO C++ for scraping websites, or accessing RDBMS, parsing text, or one of the dozens of common programming problems that exist? Why graphics in particular, and where do we stop attempting to push things into the standard? Screw it, why don't we just make ISO C++ a standard operating system?

<comment><USER9> I think Herb has said the answer to "why graphics in particular" is: beginners. If someone wants to start out programming in C++, it can be disheartening to learn that just drawing some simple shapes requires using external libraries, with all the complexity that brings.

<comment><USER10> Maybe some effort should be put into making it much easier to use external libraries in a C++ IDE then?

With Visual Studio or Eclipse I am still downloading the libs for my architecture, sometimes compiling them with an entire set of potential issues and dependencies, configuring paths, etc...

They have NuGet for .NET in Visual Studio, you'd think this could be done for native software.

It is actually far easier to do this on Linux with package managers, which is sad for Windows imho.

<comment><USER11> The main roadblock is the disgusting combinatoric explosion of compiler versions and debug/release single/multi versions.

The "answer" seems to be to download as source and plug vcxproj dependencies right into your solution. Which, coupled with Windows's problems with static libraries (I use nothing else on OS X - static library right out of Homebrew), is hilarious.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes that's the answer. But just yesterday this set of library vcxproj s ended up being generated by CMake... with one supported platform each and absolute paths in them. Not worth even checking into the depot, nevermind including in your .sln, not that the first person to take a crack at it didn't _try_ checking them in and adding them to the sln...

It's not even that great a library from what I can tell.

<comment><USER11> Yeah - CMake adds more problems than it solves, IMO. I keep an XCode project and a VS solution and just deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That blog post has 0 content.

In what way was Cairo the "clear winner"?

</comment><comment><USER13> News from Herb Sutter -- cool. Rather subjective attack on "hostile templates" \-- not cool.

<comment><USER5> AGG is pretty nasty to use and has worse performance than Cairo on basics like alpha blends and copies (bitblts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> He's not wrong about C versus C++. I'm probably just dumb, but I find the Mono source (C) way easier to follow than say the Sun JVM (C++).

<comment><USER11> I don't know many people who'd call the JVM good C++, though. It's got a _lot_ of baggage.

Life's way too short to not have things destruct on scope exit. I'm pretty confident that my own projects would be a lot more verbose and much, much more error prone (like, failure-to-get-off-the-ground error-prone) if I had to deal with C's limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> By the way, the author of Antigrain (Agg) has recently died:

[http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3154635/rip-maxim- sheman...](http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3154635/rip-maxim-shemanarev)

I was shocked to read this when I saw the blogpost from Miguel and wanted to find out why development of Antigrain stalled.

</comment><comment><USER16> its a matter of subjective taste.. particularly i think C# is nasty.. nothing to see here.

Edit: But i respect the man! :)

<comment><USER16> really, in the case he is pointing out (choosing cairo for moonlight) its just a matter of wrapping a C api in a C++ application.. so people can embed more easily...

See the case for the Dart VM for a good example.. its everything wrapped in the C api.. (and also if you want a example of beautiful C++ code for a complex application. hack the VM).. in every language you can write pretty code or nasty code.. i think the only exception here would be haskell (as a proof of the impossibility to write a code that do not look ugly)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What about Skia?</comment>


Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1343470/Have-scientists-discovered-create-downpours-desert.html

<comment><USER2> It's absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you most proud of? - <AUTHOR> This is a common interview questions. I'd love to see the varietyof answers people would give if not under the pressure of an interview. <comment><USER2> Hmm.. I'm don't feel _proud_ of anything--can't think of anything. On fb I see Proud to be Colombian, Proud to be Christian, Proud to be Me..they all sound a little strange to me. _What, I didn 't get the job?!_</comment>


Show HN: Web workflow automation deliverable anywhere [pre beta] - <AUTHOR> https://free.cloudbrowser.xyz/?v2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! I posted this just over two weeks ago. Since then I've made significant changes based on the feedback I received.

I patched some security holes, enabled WebP for Chrome clients, added support to view PDF and DOCX files, supported "zooming" the remote page (including on mobile), and added support for uploading files.

Some outstanding issues are still typing on mobile (there's a bunch of bugs with this).

I intend to pivot away from the "remote browser isolation" use case as it seems too hard to get customers (I contacted some existing suppliers of RBI, some VPNs, and a bunch of companies from "Clearance Jobs" and got no replies).

I'm pivoting (back toward my original goal) toward "Workflow Automation".

If you want to be on the "waitlist" for the private beta of this workflow automation tool, you're welcome to sign up on the Form[0] or just email me firstname.lastname@example.com

Technically, the basic idea is that the workflow automation can be delivered on any device, presenting a UX just like a regular browser, but you can record the events, and the edit that recorded sequence, to extract data, insert data, and repeat sequences of actions, in order to achieve workflow automation.

I see that I left off the actual link to try the demo (please note this demo has no "automation" capabilities now, it's just the "remote browser platform"):

[0]: [https://forms.gle/yE5cHY398Tu7a9rZ6](https://forms.gle/yE5cHY398Tu7a9rZ6)</comment>


To combat addiction and mental illness, people are talking to machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90299135/mental-health-crisis-robots-chatbots-listeners <comment><USER2> When my car won't start, I speak to it using words I learned in the U.S. Navy.</comment>


Granthika – semantic novel editor with auto timeline/character error checks - <AUTHOR> http://granthika.co <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a tool like this, that could be used to adjust books to movie script format. When scenes are taken off a book, sometimes the implications and ramifications of that scene aren't taken care of, leaving holes in the script. For example, the Half-Blood Prince movie has a couple of moments in which, unless you've read the book beforehand, you're like "wtf are you talking about?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Tool looks very cool and I really like idea behind it. I am not a writer, how is this useful to you who write longer prose?

<comment><AUTHOR> My novelist friend behind this writes 700-900pp books and complains he has to switch between Word, Project and Excel to keep everything straight. They're hoping it's useful for complex universes, fan fic and investigative journalism too.</comment></comment>


Proceedings Start Against 'Sokal Squared' Hoax Professor - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/article/Proceedings-Start-Against/245431 <comment><USER3> As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it.

I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics.

To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this.

However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.

I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.

<comment><USER4> As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected.

The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.

<comment><USER5> In my 10+ years in academia, i've seen only a few STEM people in university politics. From what I have read over the years, it's the same in 'real' politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who 'do not belive in truth'. This leads to different values and different politics.

<comment><USER6> > I know some who 'do not belive in truth'

This is such an important point that it needs to be emphasized. Large chunks of the humanities and social sciences operate under a _completely different epistemology_. This epistemology rejects reason. And I don't mean that as a jab, I mean it literally rejects the philosophical concept of Reason itself.

Everything is about ideology. It has at it's core the notion that there is no objective truth, and that any assertion of truth is merely the application of power of one group over another. Under this epistemology, lying, contradiction, hypocrisy, fallacy, and rhetoric are all acceptable and even encouraged.

Dig a little in to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction and so much of the Social Justice movement will make sense. You'll start to find very little about Social Justice is about social justice.

<comment><USER7> I'm not an expert but I think this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents, sort of like quoting "I think therefore I am" and going about telling people that Descartes was purely a solipsist. There's something to it, but it's not the whole truth, and in a sometimes-violent climate of name-calling (and worse) I think it can be damaging when misinformation is wielded as a club against political opponents like this.

<comment><USER8> Explain, then, the epistemology that leads someone with a degree in international relations and economics to say that being morally right is more important than being factually correct?

I agree that misinformation can be wielded like a club; I disagree that GP is the one doing so.

<comment><USER9> If you're going to throw quotes or references to news in to conversations out of nowhere at least source them.

For those playing at home: he's quoting stripped of context Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez. Watch the video here: [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio- cor...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio- cortez_people_being_more_concerned_about_me_being_factually_correct_than_morally_right.html?jwsource=cl)

<comment><USER10> What about that context contradicts torstenvl's interpretation?

It seems to me that saying that Washington Post fact-checkers are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" is one step away from saying they are morally wrong, an example of the "post-fact" attitude that holding the right position is more important than reality.

I suppose it was inevitable that when fact-checkers became inconvenient for politicians, politicians would attack them. How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?

People who still care about facts need to stand up to those who don't, lest facts cease to matter entirely.

Edit:

In response to the claim that the WaPo is being "pedantic" and "petty", I should include their response:

> The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her > falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post's > Fact Checker team give out for bungling the "semantics" of something. It's > when something is a blatant falsehood. It's the worst rating you can get for > a singular claim.

...

> What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez's defense, though, is the > idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being > "morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be > weighed against one another. She's practically saying, "Well, maybe I was > wrong, but at least my cause is just."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandria- ocasio-cortezs-very-bad-defense-her-falsehoods/?utm_term=.620d814d33d3)

<comment><USER9> The point she is making is that playing 'gotcha!' with relatively minor errors (in this case misinterpreting 21 trillion dollars worth of unaccounted for income AND expenditure as merely 21 trillion dollars of cash unaccounted for) misses the greater conversation about huge military spending vs civilian spending.

Sure you can spend your life being pedantic about things and us nerds commonly fall in to that trap, but it doesn't engage the conversation in a meaningful way and is very petty.

The reason I linked it is because the larger back-and-forth with Cooper where she admits facts are important and talks about when she makes mistakes provides colour that is missing from the misleading snipped quote "being morally right is more important than facts".

<comment><USER8> It is not a minor error. It's not pedantic. It's not petty. She claimed the DoD _lost_ more money than it has ever had, cumulatively, in its entire history, including when it was the Department of War.

If you want to have a conversation about military spending vs. civilian spending, fine. Let's have that conversation. But it's only worth having that conversation with people who will be honest and admit when they're wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently the university is accusing Boghossian of unethical research involving human subjects, and those human subjects are _the journal editors who published the nonsense articles he submitted_.

It's one of the most transparent excuses for a witch hunt and rigged trial I've ever seen.

<comment> Ar-Curunir IRB approval is a standard requirement for any research done when interacting with human test subjects. The researchers unquestionably didn't apply for IRB approval, and hence they're under scrutiny. No need to dream up conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER12> Yep. AFAIK you have to get IRB approval to do _literally anything_ with humans involved. Zero discretion is permitted because _any_ amount of discretion degrades trust in the system (and if you thought anti-intellectualism was bad these days, boy do I have a dystopia for you to imagine) and allows unacceptable failures to creep in purely due to human error.

How many times have you submitted a small PR that obviously can't break anything, complaining about the annoyance all the time, only to find out that your "obviously right" PR was in fact badly wrong? How many times have you seen some bit of code and thought "this is weird, but it had to have been approved to get merged, so I probably don't have to worry _too_ much about it"? Now multiply that by research with human subjects.

<comment><USER13> Incredibly good reasons for extensive review of human research can be found here, for the skeptical or curious: [https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timel...](https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/timeline/index.cfm)

Another more recent one: [https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&pag...](https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&page=1)

More examples aren't hard to find at all, including the case last year of the gene-edited girls: [https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr- bab...](https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr-babies-could- face-1831553751)

When you've got a burning question in mind and visions of tremendous benefits for all humanity (or saving some academic fields from themselves) it seems like a good idea to get your ideas reviewed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Such behavior, they wrote, hurts the reputations of the university as well as honest scholars who work there. "Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students' reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued."

I'm afraid this particular objection paints a rather damning picture - <USER2> critique of the field may be criticized under similar grounds. One who would make such a complaint has left the path of science.

(Interestingly, the concession that it is damaging to reputations actually lends support to the thesis)

<comment><USER15> >it jeopardizes the students' reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued."

Hahahaha

Could you imagine how different schools would be if they put that motivation over money? At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.

<comment><USER11> > At Eastern Washington, the CS professors admitted that they have to give, > without exaggeration, roughly half of their degrees to people that have no > idea what they're doing and have only demonstrated incompetence.

This is why we have such stringent interview processes in the software industry. Credentials don't mean anything when a large percentage of graduates aren't qualified to do the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope they fail to suppress Boghossian. As far as I'm concerned, he's done academia a great favor by shining a light on the inane horseshit people "review" and publish, especially outside the hard sciences where it can't be reliably verified. Instead of systematically addressing the problem, these people are choosing to claim that the emperor's clothes are just fine as they are. I very much hope this backfires, and I also hope this is made as public as possible.

</comment><comment><USER17> This took me a minute and a second read, for anyone else who was similarly confused:

> The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition > for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal > editors and reviewers

The university's basically saying that the project itself is the problem, not the individual articles themselves. As the author stated, the goal was to:

> "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is > corrupting academic research"

which is a behavioral research meta-study involving humans (in this case, journal reviewers and editors). Of course, behavioral research involving humans almost always requires IRB approval.

I realize on a third reading this is stated pretty clearly ("the hoax project met.."), but took me a minute nonetheless.

<comment><USER18> > which is corrupting academic research

Considering this paper was presumably hoping to bring about better standards in academia, how is this claim supported by the hoax AKA experiment?

<comment><USER19> They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass review in other fields, to see if any of the reviewers or editors would catch the obvious bullshit. They did not, across 7 published papers thus far IIRC.

In fact, the hoax authors even told the publishers they couldn't provide the raw data because it had been printed out on paper that had then been recycled. Publisher's response: sure, no problem, we'll publish anyway.

In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression. As such, they remain wilfully ignorant of these biases and proper statistical methods.

All told, would you consider this a corruption of academic research?

<comment><USER18> > They were trying to demonstrate that this field uses no rigourous empirical > methods, and that the reviewers and editors apparently have no knowledge or > understanding of how to check for bias or even validate empirical data > that's presented. The hoax authors checked this in multiple ways by > reporting data with very specific, obvious biases that would never pass > review in other fields,

Let me stop you right there. The replication crisis has shown repeatedly, across disciplines that have testable hypotheses, that bad articles are accepted in academic journals.

> In fact, many academics in this field argue that science, logic and math are > themselves corrupt enterprises of oppression.

I'm assuming you're talking about the conclusion many have drawn - which I think is pretty uncontroversial - that science, logic and math are not fields free from bias. We only have to got back to relatively recent history to encounter periods when women were excluded from universities and phrenology was considered science. Unfortunately I think what you might mean is that people in "this field" (what field?) think science should be entirely thrown out. You'll struggle to show that more than a tiny majority (please quantify in your response) of people in any field (even theology) saying that science is in itself a "corrupt enterprise".

<comment><USER19> > Let me stop you right there. The replication crisis has shown repeatedly, > across disciplines that have testable hypotheses, that bad articles are > accepted in academic journals.

The replication problem is worse the less rigourous the field. The hoax authors managed to publish their first 7 articles, with 20 more still in review IIRC, over the span of 10 months. They were quite confident that the rest would have gone through had some journalists not prematurely unearthed their subterfuge.

For instance, in the dog park paper, the authors claimed that they had inspected the genitals of 10,000 unique dogs in a single dog park over a short time span, and then questioned the dog owners on their sexual orientation. If you can even look past the absurdity and take it seriously, the sample being analyzed is clearly biased in various ways. What dog park would have 10,000 unique dogs and owners visiting in such a time frame? How is this a representative sample? What sort of owners would be open to strangers fondling their pet's genitals and then questioning their sexuality?

Each paper had distinct and meaningful bias or clear cherry picking injected into the data, and not a single one of them was caught in review. The hoax authors have emphatically claimed that this field is more akin to theology than any kind of meaningful science, where any paper that reinforces the orthodoxy gets published, no matter the methodological flaws, and that's what they attempted to demonstrate (and they did I think). This result is far, far worse than the replication crisis.

> I'm assuming you're talking about the conclusion many have drawn - which I > think is pretty uncontroversial - that science, logic and math are not > fields free from bias.

No, I mean quite literally that these "academics" think that the scientific method, and that logic and mathematics itself, are tools of white oppression. I won't vouch for the rest of the site, but the description presented here is a decent introduction to the "reasoning" they employ: [https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/the_scienti...](https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/the_scientific_method_is_racist_.html)

Edit: or just google "the scientific method is oppressive" if you want to find further evidence. There are thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts debating this claim. See: [https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/the-science-march- sparked-a-b...](https://www.thecut.com/2017/04/the-science-march-sparked-a- big-argument-about-objectivity.html)

<comment><USER18> > The hoax authors have emphatically claimed that this field is more akin to > theology than any kind of meaningful science, where any paper that > reinforces the orthodoxy gets published, no matter the methodological flaws, > and that's what they attempted to demonstrate (and they did I think). This > result is far, far worse than the replication crisis.

Interesting claim, considering [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is- th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-the-best- evidence-for-austerity-based-on-an-excel-spreadsheet- error/?utm_term=.6494a4515b12)

It is interesting to me that sometimes people seem to argue that the "grievance studies" subjects are useless practically, and then in the next sentence to argue they have a massive impact on other disciplines. In fields like economics we can, however, often see and measure the effects directly. And the effects of the orthodoxy that wants to justify, in this case austerity, using bad papers, with publically available data, that anyone could have checked, is far worse than the sokal squared hoax.

> No, I mean quite literally that these "academics" think that the scientific > method, and that logic and mathematics itself, are tools of white > oppression.

> There are thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts debating this > claim.

The first article you linked quotes an orientation video. The second rests on the "feminist glaciology" paper, which I've seen parroted by the right as an example of this claim you're making, many, many times, and another article posted on a website. I might be justified in asking you to provide evidence that "thousands" of papers defending the claim that "the scientific method is oppressive" but I don't expect you to, or be able to, defend that statement. Lets focus on a smaller scope, and try to prove that there exist papers _in the two articles you 've linked here_ that make that claim.

People who read these papers often make the mistake of reading an argument against all knowledge by conflating a few things:

1) That the institution of science represents pure infallible access to scientific knowledge

2) That objective truth is equivalent to, and accessed by scientific knowledge

We only have to go back a short period of time to see scientific justifications of awful things. But, the vast majority of academics aren't arguing that we should discard all of science. And, anyone can make a blog post. Objective truth is always necessarily filtered through humans.

It is also a good point that scientists should listen to indigenous people and their theories about natural phenomena. There are many examples of scientists correlating myths and stories with natural events and discovering that there was an eruption at a particular time. Understanding those perspectives advances science.

<comment><USER19> > Interesting claim, considering > [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is- > th...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/16/is-th..).

False equivalency. A single calculation error is not the same as a whole field that eschews scientific methodology. Which isn't to say that other fields don't suffer from biases and errors as well, but they have processes in place to rectify them, and your article points out exactly how this happens.

Notice how it took a _hoax_ to point out that there's a problem with grievances studies. That's a bad sign that the methodology and/or culture is fundamentally flawed.

> It is interesting to me that sometimes people seem to argue that the > "grievance studies" subjects are useless practically, and then in the next > sentence to argue they have a massive impact on other disciplines

That's not inconsistent. For the sake of argument, suppose grievance studies argues for affirmative action and hiring quotes to counter innate bias. Suppose that companies buy into this, and implement such policies. Now suppose that such measures are actually impossible to implement in practice, and are illegally discriminatory. All of these can be true simultaneously (and probably are true at this present time), which makes grievance studies a) practically useless, b) have a massive impact, and c) harmful. I think an even stronger case can be made in fact, but this thread is long enough as it is.

> And the effects of the orthodoxy that wants to justify, in this case > austerity, using bad papers, with publically available data, that anyone > could have checked, is far worse than the sokal squared hoax.

Maybe, but that doesn't somehow negate the harm from grievance studies, any more than the existence of genital mutilation of women abroad somehow negates any milder forms of sexism that might still exist in the west.

> I might be justified in asking you to provide evidence that "thousands" of > papers defending the claim that "the scientific method is oppressive" but I > don't expect you to, or be able to, defend that statement.

Interesting strawman. You've alleged that I said there are thousands of _papers_ that are _making_ this claim, rather than what I actually said, which is that there are thousands of _papers, articles, blogs and posts_ that have _debated_ this claim. The latter is easily verified by looking at google search results without even going into the academic literature. The former is a clear attempt at casting me as unreasonable making absurd and overreaching claims.

> We only have to go back a short period of time to see scientific > justifications of awful things.

There is no legitimate "scientific justification" for awful things. Certainly some people have _claimed_ scientific justification for awful things, but that does not entail that such justification actually exists.

> But, the vast majority of academics aren't arguing that we should discard > all of science.

I agree. And yet, that doesn't negate the evidence that a particular academic field does advance claims that are equally dangerous, nor does it negate the evidence that such a field has influence that isn't congruent with the empirical evidence.

> It is also a good point that scientists should listen to indigenous people > and their theories about natural phenomena. There are many examples of > scientists correlating myths and stories with natural events and discovering > that there was an eruption at a particular time. Understanding those > perspectives advances science.

Except few people argue otherwise. Historians and geologists have connected mythical events to possible historical events countless times (see for instance, geomythology which was coined in _1968_ ).

That's a very different claim to saying that such myths should be given _equal weight_ as demonstrable facts, and that science has no particularly unique or meaningful claim to truth about the natural world over other views. That's patently false.

In fact, I'll make an even stronger claim and say that it's _logically and mathematically_ false. Solomonoff Induction grounded scientific inquiry with a _proof_ that it converges on the truth. No other process aside from math can demonstrably produce real truth. Of course, people deep in grievance-type fields disavow logic and math as well, and so they would find such proofs unconvincing.

<comment><USER18> I think its time to pin down what fields you believe are in "grievance studies" which is just name calling since...

> A single calculation error is not the same as a whole field that eschews > scientific methodology. Which isn't to say that other fields don't suffer > from biases and errors as well, but they have processes in place to rectify > them, and your article points out exactly how this happens.

...it seems you believe Art and Creative Writing are "grievance studies".

And your claim was this was "far worse than the replication crisis"... how? Vast economic policy changes versus what, exactly?

> That's not inconsistent.

Yes it is - to claim that these academics (who are accused of being postmodern neomarxists) can recruit corporate, capitalist HR departments, but not recruit more students, is inconsistent.

> Maybe, but that doesn't somehow negate the harm from grievance studies,

What harm? What harm do you think is specifically proven by this hoax or any other paper?

> You've alleged that I said there are thousands of papers that are making > this claim, rather than what I actually said, which is that there are > thousands of papers, articles, blogs and posts that have debated this claim. > The latter is easily verified by looking at google search results without > even going into the academic literature. The former is a clear attempt at > casting me as unreasonable making absurd and overreaching claims.

Sorry for misreading you. I thought you were making a non-trivial claim that people in academia were debating the scientific method. If you're making the claim that non-academics are debating a subject, that's a pretty trivial thing to say. Flat earth, anyone?

> I agree. And yet, that doesn't negate the evidence that a particular > academic field does advance claims that are equally dangerous, nor does it > negate the evidence that such a field has influence that isn't congruent > with the empirical evidence.

Awesome, lets discuss all the "dangerous claims" that this academic field is making. This hoax has nothing to do with the field's "claims", but I'm happy to talk about specific claims in specific papers, and compare their acceptance and their magnitude. I would much prefer that discussion to one where we allude to a vast academic conspiracy that doesn't exist.

> There is no legitimate "scientific justification" for awful things. > Certainly some people have claimed scientific justification for awful > things, but that does not entail that such justification actually exists.

See, here's the core of the point. If scientists and presumably, people like yourself, were so sure they'd found scientific knowledge previously, and it "didn't exist", couldn't the same doubt exist for the claims you make today? Who gets anointed to decide what scientific knowledge does, or does not, exist? Perhaps all these academics saying that we must be suspect of anyone who proclaims such a thing have a point.

> That's a very different claim to saying that such myths should be given > equal weight as demonstrable facts, and that science has no particularly > unique or meaningful claim to truth about the natural world over other > views. That's patently false.

I'm happy to discuss papers that you think make those claims.

<comment><USER19> By the way, I believe the hoax authors actually cited many examples of papers that they found problematic, so if you're interested in actually examining some objectionable work, that's your way forward.

<comment><USER18> Sure, and if you'd like to point out what claims in those papers indicate that the authors believe "myths should be given equal weight as demonstrable facts", I'd love to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When there are lots of people who have a vested interest in the Emperor's wardrobe, not surprising (but a bit sad) that the hammer is coming down on those that point out that the Emperor is naked.

</comment><comment><USER21> The guy _fabricated_ data to fool the editors. Academia relies on researchers being honest and not doing so -- there simply aren't any resources for journals to do independent replication of all received papers before accepting them for publication. That's precisely why data fabrication is taken so seriously and the consequences of doing so are basically career ending -- it's the deterrent to incentivize people to be honest.

Edit: Also can we not lump all of academia into the same basket? The standards in computer science/math/physics are very different from that in biology/medicine which in turn are very different from those in humanities

<comment><USER22> So if he had actually collected data on rape culture among Portland-area dogs, it would have been legitimate research ("One of their papers, about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore., was initially recognized for excellence by the journal 'Gender, Place, and Culture', the authors reported")?

<comment><USER23> If it is relevant data, why shouldn't it be legitimate research? Because you personally think the topic is ridiculous, absurd or not worth consideration? Many ideas seem that way (including very important ones, such as the study of language) so that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss them outright.

<comment><USER22> I thought people were overstating the case that humanities departments across the country are converged. But if investigating whether dogs actually get consent before mating in dog parks (or is there another definition for "rape culture among dogs"?) is considered possibly legitimate research, I may need to revisit my judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems like some people are actually pleased the hoax worked. If this is you, try to honestly imagine how you would feel if it had failed -- if the journals immediately called BS and refused to publish.

Would you be happy or unhappy about that? If unhappy, are you really so sure you're on the side of truth, or are you just a member of one tribe pleased that the other tribe has been embarrassed? The world where the hoax failed would surely be a better one for knowledge and academic integrity.

<comment><USER25> As far as I can tell the hoax _did_ fail. As I recall from the authors' writeup, the initial round of hoax papers they sent out _all got rejected_. By any reasonable standard they could/should have stopped right there and published a paper called "social science journals aren't as gullible as we thought".

Instead they iterated on the papers, and kept iterating until they got something published. What's bizarre is that the authors don't seem to realize that this changed the whole nature of their study, and they were now testing a completely different thesis than the one they set out to test.

<comment><USER26> I'm sorry, but if the barrier to entry for publishing is a few weeks of revising made-up papers, that's still a gigantic problem. The hoax succeeded.

<comment><USER25> Look past the false dichotomy - there can still be a gigantic problem even though this particular hoax didn't do a good job of exposing it.

I mean, the social science journals targeted by this hoax could be awful, I have no idea. But the hoax started with the thesis "if we submit an awful paper it will get accepted" and that thesis turned out to be false. This implies that the journals are not as bad as the hoax authors originally expected, right? They could still be bad, but the hoax doesn't establish that.

The fact that the authors later got other papers accepted, I don't think we can say much about. If an experimenter's methodology is "keep iterating until X happens", then obviously the fact that X eventually happened can't prove anything about their thesis.

<comment><USER26> There is a LOT of motivated reasoning in here. What method of experimentation are you proposing where if the first attempt at validating a hypothesis fails, you simply quit instead of tweaking the hypothesis and trying again?

The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to become a published author in these journals. I do not expect that these authors could, without any training or expertise, revise-and-submit a half dozen papers to be published in physics or chemistry. That's significant, whether you like it or not.

<comment><USER25> > motivated reasoning

You have things backwards. I _agree_ with the hoaxers' motivation, and I assume that what they were trying to prove is presumably true. But their experiment didn't actually support those conclusions.

> What method of experimentation are you proposing ..

Lots of methodologies are valid, but if the whole thing is presented as science then the conclusions need to be consistent with the methodology used!

In the hoaxers' writeup, they said they submitted a bunch of absurd papers, but they all got rejected, so they gradually toned things down bit by bit until some of them got accepted. That's fine, insofar as it goes, but you cannot then turn around and claim to have proved that the journals will will publish absurd papers, which is what the authors did. You can't call a result significant if your methodology is to gradually lower the bar for "significant" until you get the result you wanted!

What the hoax actually proved was that the authors could publish a paper that they considered absurd, but which the journal considered fine. Which is neat - but isn't that already true of the regular papers these journals normally publish? Then what in the world did the hoax accomplish?

> The hoax proved that you do not need more than a couple weeks of training to > become a published author in these journals

I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not the times or credentials involved.

<comment><USER26> > You can't call a result significant if your methodology is to gradually > lower the bar for "significant" until you get the result you wanted!

This didn't happen. You're the one who has post hoc decided that there is some abstract bar of "significance" that they're moving up or down. The point is to publish absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals. There is not some absurdity equivalent to p < 0.05 that they manipulated. They just published absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals. It's not like the absurdity of Dog Rape Culture would be lessened if the first papers they submitted had been the output of /dev/random.

> I don't think the authors claimed anything like that, where are you getting > that? Their thesis was just that the content of the papers was absurd, not > the times or credentials involved.

I'm getting it from the literal facts of what happened. They are not trained in these fields, and papers they wrote were published in these journals. Therefore, the hoax shows that you do not need to be trained in these fields to publish in these journals.

<comment><USER25> > They just published absurd papers in ostensibly serious journals.

You and I can say the papers were absurd, but an argument is only meaningful to the extent that it has persuasive power to someone who doesn't already agree with it. For anyone who disagrees that the papers were absurd, the hoax has no argument to make - that's where it falls down compared to Sokal, or SciGen-style hoaxes, etc.

I mean honestly, did you read the authors' writeup? I remember it had a bit in the summary like: "so what has this experiment proved exactly? Well, we'll leave that for you to decide". If that's a study that's proved its thesis, I'm a banana.

> Therefore, the hoax shows that you do not need to be trained in these fields > to publish in these journals.

I don't know what special training an academic from one branch of the social sciences would need to publish in another, but again you're claiming the study proves something the study authors didn't even discuss. That's not a tenable position to hold, and you might reconsider why you hold it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The grievance studies community very quickly pivoted to the 'but it was unethical!' line in the wake of the hoax - it's a shame but not at all surprising that they aren't interested in attacking the root cause.

</comment><comment><USER28> While I don't think Boghossian is a fraudster, his hoaxes are certainly poor science. He should have conducted a rigorous empirical study instead. Of course, he must have known that fabricating data can cost him his career. But punishing him sends the wrong sign to academic whistle-blowers. IMHO, the best thing Portland State can do is to establish rules for ethical and scientifically valuable hoaxes as a lesson learned from this.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sure, the criticism this hoax is trying to demonstrate may be legitimate, but the methodology is one designed to highlight the cleverness of its executors and diminish the credibility of a discipline, rather than point out constructive areas for improvement. Basically, it is a methodology that does not treat its targets as intellectual equals and is quite indecorous—you get the sense that a major point of this operation is to discredit the field and make its practitioners feel some kind of public humiliation or shame. A childish tactic.

In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic practices. Sokal's big hoax did a good lot for Sokal (whom everyone is now familiar with—but it's funny: is the public acquainted with Sokal because of the contributions he made to _his_ field? Arguably, no. Who's supposed to be the sham academic again?) and caused a lot of drama—but was it an effective means of enacting the sort of change in academic practice it claimed to be striving for? Well, we simply need to ask ourselves why there's even a need for such a thing as "Sokal squared" to answer that question.

This is a conniving way to go about improving academic practice—doesn't the very practice sort of eschew the principles of open collaboration, transparency, collective growth, and honest dissemination of thought/knowledge academia should, in the ideal world, foster?

This is largely just an attempt to incite drama and gain notoriety on the part of the authors, and it further drives wedges between already highly disparate, specialized fields that may as well talk past each other.

Of course there are things to criticize about grievance studies, just as there were things to criticize about the lingo and methods popular in the humanities when Sokal devised his original hoax—but stooping to underhanded publicity stunts instead of open intellectual conversation likely won't solve the problem. Please don't give in to this sort of nonsense and stroke the pleading egos of the 'academics' that pull these sorts of stunts. Boghossian is not a hero.

<comment><USER30> > In my opinion, this is not the right way to effect change in academic > practices

So what is? Specifically, what is, given that the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not?

<comment><USER29> I think a mechanism that, first of all, promotes some kind of interaction between fields and helps counterbalance the hyper-specialization our academies currently promote.

It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have no interest in whether things are true or not". More likely is that people from hyper-specialized fields use different criterion for the validity and veridicality of statements and that their incredibly hermetic jargon and deep reliance on interlocking field-specific concepts prevents them from communicating with other academics from other disciplines in meaningful ways—thus resulting in a great sense of misunderstanding and misjudgment between members of the fields. In some sense, our pursuits are so hyper- specialized at this point that they are incommensurable—there's an incredible lack of 'generalists' able to act as liaisons and to produce the appropriate meta-criticisms for each field of study.

That, I think, is a much more reasonable assumption than one that assumes a cohort of people who "don't have interest in the truth" have somehow slipped their way into academia and are using it as nothing more than a vehicle for their political motives—that's a rather conspiratorial hypothesis and would need much more evidence to support it than the publication of a couple of papers in a couple of journals.

If we were to solve the hyper-specialization problem to a degree, I think it would promote greater academic health and collaboration overall.

<comment><USER31> > It is very unlikely that "the academic fields in question demonstrably have > no interest in whether things are true or not".

Er, they are actually quite open about this.

For example:

 _Founded in 1974, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University has put research into action by inspiring innovative solutions that advance gender equality._

The goal/purpose is "advancing gender equality", not "truth finding".

Most of these fields don't just not believe in truth as a concept, they actually actively oppose and dismiss the search for truth or requirements for evidence as being expressions of and mechanisms for maintaining illegitimate power hierarchies.

Now hyper-specialisation is also a problem, but it's not _this_ problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am really torn on this.

On one hand, there is an immense amount of vacuity in the social sciences, which is a tragedy; not only is it a waste of money and effort but it obscures and even crowds out actual, valuable work (yes, there is very good, useful, meaningful work in deconstructionism, not to mention often-impugned fields like women's studies...but it could be 1%). Pointing at the emperor is quite important. I liked Sokal's paper at the time too.

Yet at the same time I do agree that setups like this are exploitative.

<comment><USER33> The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it. We can say a proposal looks stupid (and it might actually be) but huge swathes of current scientific consensus would look ridiculous at any point directly prior to its establishment, which might be considered the whole basis behind the Max Planck quote: "Science advances one funeral at a time." It's not really that many people are ever bowled over by something, so much as the next generation just grows up with a general idea in the atmosphere, so it's a little less alien.

At it's heart, isn't the basic conflict between the two views of science as expressed by Drumlin and Arroway in Contact?

<comment><USER32> > The problem is value can only really be ascribed afterward, and sometimes > not even immediately afterward; something might have to sit in a drawer for > fifty years before somebody has another 2 to put together with it.

I think we appropriately assign the probability of this to nil. All work has a model and context; we can look at ancient Indian writings on zero or some of the interesting mathematical conjectures on non-real solutions to Greek math problems, but without a "fertile field" for them to fall upon, they ultimately had no impact. It's fun to find them in the historical literature, but they are significant to us only because they foreshadow, or partially foreshadow, modern fleshed-out work.

Compare that to, say, Maxwell: his theory was hard to understand and _did_ take decades to be accepted, but it was part of an active discussion of theories of light and electromagnetism and it's not like it sat in a dusty cupboard for 50 years before being found in a eureka moment.

So when I defend some of the crazy deconstructionists, they do rest upon centuries of hermeneutics and linguistics and do have something useful to say...but like I mentioned it's perhaps 1% of what is published. And even some of the smart ones like Derrida and Barzun are self-admittedly also, (my paraphrase), performance artists. But their early work was part of an intellectual tradition.

The problem is the language is so vague and high-faluting that it's easy to simply generate what I honestly consider bullshit. I think you can tell that if it really exists without attracting even critical commentary (TBF some percentage of the recent publication in machine learning, and some much that appears in the "predatory journals" of pharmacology, fall into the same boat) it's worthless.

So that's part of where my concern lies: it's really important to point at the emperor, but I think if you consider the whole idea of a "stance" to be absurd, you throw out something very important.

My other concern is that indeed, the pompous journal editors _were_ unwitting human subjects...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> He obviously did fabricate the data but that's also the point. I find the whole thing amusing and don't have a problem with it, even if it's coming from a position I don't necessarily agree with.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a good Joe Rogan episode interviewing the hoax paper authors in question:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg)

<comment><USER36> I watched the first half of it. Hilarious. Definitely recommend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The process described is not an inquiry, it's a show trial. If the article is accurate and complete, by what standard is this institution not considered irrevocably compromised?

If the powers of an institution can be wielded in such a petty political way, they are courting popular revolt. The broader risk is that in a stack of applicants, if the only thing someone knows about Portland State University is its hyperpoliticized environment, one could see how a CV might not make the first cut of phone screens. These show trial people are disadvantaging their students.

</comment><comment><USER30> > lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous articles > if the topic is politically fashionable

Did they send any papers to string theory journals?

</comment><comment><USER38> It's coming to a head, finally. These academic dogmatists are being dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected.

As usual, Steven Pinker sums it up best:

> "Criticism and open debate are the lifeblood of academia; they are what > differentiate universities from organs of dogma and propaganda," Pinker > wrote. "If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they > should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them > to try to punish and silence him."

<comment><USER39> There's a _lot_ of people who need to be dragged out into the sunlight to be disinfected.

The people that I imagine belong in that category almost certainly don't intersect much with the people who you imagine belong in that category.

This sword cuts both ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's true that there's a fair amount of bullshit in humanities. However, thinking in terms of fuzzy categories like "grievance studies" is lossy and imprecise. It's not really a term which carves reality at the joints, so much as a general purpose tribal rallying cry for STEM people against a hated and feared outgroup. This kind of interdisciplinary tribal politics isn't constructive. Rounding off everyone in "grievance studies" to the same stereotype is the fastest way to irrational hatred and unnecessary conflict.

Also, this article is pretty good: [https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs- th...](https://everythingstudies.com/2018/06/21/postmodernism-vs-the-pomoid- cluster/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Original article and comments discussing the work: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127811)

</comment><comment><USER42> _" The three authors, who describe themselves as leftists..."_

Is that relevant to the case or just an aside from the story?

<comment><USER43> Because one line of attack on the authors is that their exposure of flaws in the often left-leaning humanities is politically motivated. Stating their politics helps shut that down and support the idea that they are just champions of integrity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sometimes, you gotta take one for the team. This prosecution will help the case far more than it will hurt.

</comment><comment><USER45> Replication crisis + reputation crisis = lawyers

</comment><comment><USER27> The irony of this whole thing is that had the researchers reached a different conclusion, there would be no investigation in the first place.

The entire Sokal Squared hoax was designed to prove motivated reasoning within the social sciences, and the backlash and subsequent investigation is just further evidence of that.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a good critical overview of the various papers here[0].

[0] [https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal- squa...](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/on-sokal-squared/)

</comment><comment><USER46> How can we provide support?

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't think HN's take on this story is especially sophisticated or well informed. Some things I think people could stand to know about this:

The "Hoax" writeup in Aero is deceptive:

Most of the papers these "researchers" came up with were rejected; almost all the papers submitted to high-status journals in the field were rejected; on the occasion (I think just once?) a high-status journal accepted one of their papers, their writeup gave the impression that it was a luridly insane paper about "white males not being allowed to speak in class", when in fact that paper was rejected and what had been accepted was a different, more banal paper about the nature of hoaxes. Here's the quote from their writeup:

 _We used other methods too, like, "I wonder if that 'progressive stack' in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn't be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can 'experience reparations.'" That was our "Progressive Stack" paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, "I wonder if they'd publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf." The answer to that question also turns out to be "yes," given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it._

Does this sound like "Progressive Stack" was rejected? Of course not: "the answer was 'yes'" is used _in the same paragraph_ to indicate an acceptance, and, by "surprisingly warm to it", the authors simply meant they received suggestions for improvement from the journal review board. Whatever you think about the politics of this "experiment", you shouldn't be OK with being lied to. Also, how skeezy is it to attack reviewers for trying to help improve a paper?

Meanwhile, look at the impact factors for the journals they actually got stuff accepted at.

The researchers fabricated data for some of their submissions:

This blurs (I think deliberately) the line between article review and _replication_ , which is not the job of a review board, but rather constitutes an entire research project of its own. Nobody claimed to have replicated any of these papers, but the authors of the report are counting on laypersons not to understand how academic journal review works, and the extent to which it absolutely relies on good faith.

Or, as Stefan Savage (can't help it, hero of mine) put it on Twitter last night:

 _" This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result matters then the error is eventually detected."_

 _" But the I think the bigger issue is that Boghossian et al's work doesn't seem motivated by anything productive. So they ridicule niche area X for not being sufficiently scientific. Given that they don't even work in the area, this accomplishes what exactly?"_

 _" I think people get in trouble when they think academic publication has value in itself. Ideas become valuable when people care about them. Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn't make your ideas matter."_

They didn't generate any real results:

All the researchers have discovered is that social science fields --- _just like STEM fields_ \--- include a mix of low- and high-quality journals, and if they can't get something accepted in a high quality venue, a paper author can shop until they find a journal that will accept. And, that journal review is an eminently fallible process. Neither of these conclusions should surprise anybody.

I have no idea what I think of the IRB process at play here; I don't know any of what the IRB involved knows. But these people wasted a lot of reviewer time, wrote a deceptive report, and and did it in the service of pointless, banal conclusions. They're not heroes.

<comment><USER48> _" This stuff is overblown on multiple levels. First, to paraphrase Churchill, peer review is the worst form of paper evaluation, except for all the others. We routinely accept papers whose conclusions are wrong, but if the result matters then the error is eventually detected."_

The journals didn't just accept papers whose conclusions were wrong. It's not like there was a math mistake hidden on page 5. The entire paper was abject nonsense.

Imagine you're designing a process to select rigorous papers out of a stack. Surely you'd want the top of your funnel, the first round of filtering, to weed out manufactured nonsense. The accusation isn't that these journals didn't check the math carefully enough, or whether the paper replicated. It's that they straight up couldn't tell they were being trolled.

I don't mean you or Savage specifically, but when I read the defenses against this hoax, I feel like I'm watching mental gymnastics of epic proportions. The most prestigious journals didn't fall for it; the paper didn't technically get published; peer review isn't supposed to be perfect. This shouldn't have been remotely possible! All of these papers should've been tossed straight into the bin. If you sent the physics equivalent of a feminist rewrite of Mein Kampf to a low-tier physics journal, what are the odds they'd respond with "suggestions for improvement"?

 _" Publication is one particular path to reach a community of readers but it doesn't make your ideas matter."_

Finally, it's also weird to hear people now claim that publications don't matter all that much. Why even have peer review then? Would these publications themselves accept a description of themselves as "not having value"?

<comment><USER47> I'm sure all the papers are, at bottom, terrible; they're made-up social science papers. But Boghossian and his team are working hard to manipulate you into believing they're "entirely abject nonsense" of the type any reviewer should have been able to detect. Again: they're doing that by:

1\. Playing switcheroo with the papers they talk about and the papers they actually got accepted, as they did with their dishonest description of the Hypatia paper.

2\. Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia --- and forcing you to rely on _their description_ of the ludicrous meaning of the paper, despite the fact that they deliberately wrote abstruse papers from which you could take many different meanings.

For instance, in a separate "Project Fact Sheet" the authors wrote, they describe "HoH2" as a paper that says "social justice activists can make fun of others, but no one is allowed to make fun of social justice." But that's not really what the paper says at all; in fact, if I didn't have the background on Boghossian's dumb project, I'd have called that an _uncharitable_ reading of the paper, which is really just a dense survey of gender studies work on the relation between humor and privilege (yes: I actually _read this stupid paper_ ).

3\. Hyping up papers they managed to get accepted in bottom-tier journals, as if the existence of those journals was a revelation. Once again: all scientific fields have those journals! They're a consequence of the "publish or perish" management of academia. Boghossian won't tell you how little impact his team's papers have, because that would subvert the narrative they're trying to deliver.

Here's a pretty interesting writeup from someone who actually worked out the impact of this whole project. He used R! HN should love this!

[http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/](http://www.favstats.eu/post/hoax_papers/)

Read this and see if you still feel the same about how important this project was.

<comment><USER35> > Making it hard to find the papers --- for instance, there's no link to the > paper they actually got accepted in Hypatia

I thought they released a google drive containing all the papers in question:

[https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWP...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJLr_o04R-zpHcMNaIWPGs7Ue_i- tkCw)

<comment><USER47> They did, which is the only place you can find the HoH2 paper, but they don't link to that paper from the writeup --- you have to dig into the Drive folder to get it. That's because the HoH2 paper isn't an overtly absurd paper, unlike the "Progressive Stack" paper, which they deceptively suggest got into Hypatia and which they _do_ link to, despite it being rejected.

Their writeup is disingenuous, bordering on overtly dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow, submitting a paper to an editor/reviewer is considered human research thus ethical board approval is required:

> _McLellan asked Boghossian to reveal any evidence that he had received > approval from the university's institutional review board for research > involving both human and animal behavior._

> _The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition > for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal > editors and reviewers. Any research involving human subjects (even duped > journal editors, apparently) needs IRB approval first, according to > university policy._

So from now on, writing a CS paper on a new sorting algorithm will require ethical board approval.

<comment><USER50> If I write a paper on a fake sorting algorithm and submit it to a real journal to see if it gets approved, it's not really a stretch to call that human subjects research.

<comment><USER51> But if you call it "bogosort" and make the algorithm blatantly terrible, then any journal that takes it seriously is showing its lack of expertise.

<comment><USER52> Maybe it could work by sorting things based on political ideology and strength of coalition support plus willingness to shout down the opposition.

I'm sure you can imagine how that applies to a list of integers. They probably sort themselves into intersectional groups recursively. So the algorithm starts off and the first pass sorts loosely into odd vs even. Then a next pass sorts the partitions further into positive and negative. Then the next pass sorts by prime factorization and so on until they are maximally sorted by all the ways in which they can be grouped intersectionally.

Of course the result of the sorting is useless, but that's the moral of the story.

<comment><USER51> Quick, write it up and get it published!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> when you bite the hand that feeds you it will choke you

</comment><comment><USER15> Hope he enjoys his struggle session.

</comment><comment><USER54> > The hoax was dubbed "Sokal Squared," after a similar stunt pulled in 1996 by > Alan Sokal, then a physicist at New York University.

This has as much to do with Sokal's hoax as those battery fire-hazards with wheels have to do with "hoverboards".

A 'Sokal Squared' hoax should mean something like multiple journal articles getting published-- _none of which contain any data to back up their claims_ \-- all claiming to replicate an original journal article _which also contains no data_ to substantiate its claim.

The twist that makes Sokal's original hoax clever is there isn't any research being put forward. There is simply an assertion, non-sequiturs, and a repetition of the assertion as the conclusion. He completely left out the "research" part of his journal article.

The reason his hoax was so embarrassing for that journal is that no university ever imagined they'd need to make a basic rule that researchers must actually include research in their research papers. That means that Sokal didn't _directly_ break any rules with his hoax, and much of the spotlight remained on the journal for failing to do the trivial job of rejecting submissions that fail to contain content.

I'd be willing to bet there was a dean or two and some administrators who met to figure out if Sokal actually broke any of the school's guidelines. I'd also bet they came up with some way they could apply a vaguely worded research guideline to discipline him but decided against it for fear of pushback within the wider research community. Still, it's a reasonable concern when a professor publicly states that they submitted an article to a journal _in bad faith_ , even as a hoax.

tldr; it's a nuanced situation that IMO requires lots of reflection.

On a completely different topic-- some knuckleheads apparently falsified some data for reasons, and a university is going to discipline them for falsifying data. I don't understand what ethical conundrum I'm supposed to care about here.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is the person that wrote "A Manual for Creating Atheists" which contains a questioning technique that has been called "Street Epistemology".

Could the hoax investigation be a punishment for the Manual?

</comment><comment><USER56> _> 2) No, he should not be fired. In fact, the punishment should be very mild (e.g. a warning, attending a tutorial on research ethics)._

Is attending a tutorial a form of punishment? What about an exam? If yes then what does this imply about the nature of the university education?

</comment><comment><USER57> _" Your efforts to conduct human-subjects research at PSU without a submitted nor approved protocol is _[sic] _a clear violation of the policies of your employer, " McLellan wrote _[ungrammatically] _in an email to Boghossian._

Maybe his efforts is a violation, maybe they isn't, but hey at least get the grammar right, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at a University.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Their goal, they wrote, was to "to study, understand, and expose the reality > of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research." They contend > that scholarship that tends to social grievances now dominates some fields, > where students and others are bullied into adhering to scholars' worldviews, > while lax publishing standards allow the publication of clearly ludicrous > articles if the topic is politically fashionable.

This hoax didn't demonstrate anything non-trivial about these fields. As we know from the replication crisis, it is relatively easy to get a paper accepted in academic journals. This hoax and the hoaxers were as guilty of the political bias and ethical malafice they were trying to accuse "grievance studies" of. The fields they target have all been shrinking since 2008, a clear sign they lack a vice-like grip on universities.</comment>


Optimizely (YC W10): Ditching Politics for Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704141104575588200540514156.html

<comment><USER2> wow. that's a lot of white people. :)</comment>


Sketches of an interactive arithmetic for programming (2014) - happy-go-lucky http://glench.com/LegibleMathematics/ <comment><AUTHOR> This line is a straw man. I'm sure code like that exists, but it's hardly the best we can do. The proposed system is good enough that you don't have to compare it against a straw man for it to look good and useful.

        force = 6.67*10^-11*mass_1*mass_2/radius^2

Firstly, we can write it like this

        force = 6.67*10^-11 * m1 * m2 / radius^2

And what language doesn't support this?

        force = 6.67e-11 * m1 * m2 / radius^2

Andalso what about an abstraction, and the ability to write multiplication naturally?

        -- a.k.a. G
        -- nobody really knows why this is so different from what relativity predicts
        const GRAVITATIONAL_CONSTANT = 6.67e-11

        fun gravitationalAttraction(m1, m2, radius) =
          GRAVITATIONAL_CONSTANT m1 m2 / radius^2

        val force = gravitationalAttraction(mass1, mass2, radius)

Now we actually know what it's calculating and why, and what that tiny number is. Would it be better if rendered as a large fraction? Absolutely. But I think it is less necessary if you write code like this well.

The suggested system is good but not novel. Rendering maths as you type it has been there in Mathematica, etc. forever.

<comment><USER2> > the ability to write multiplication naturally

That syntax doesn't work along with using parentheses for function application unless you do something like making the parser context-sensitive (so function followed by '(' means application but value followed by '(' means multiplication) or treat whitespace as significant (so "f(x+1)" is application but "f (x+1)" is multiplication). This is why Mathematica does Sin[22] instead of Sin(22).

(It used to be that (a,b) in Mathematica was shorthand for Sequence[a,b], which led to silly bugs like accidentally writing f(a,b) instead of f[a,b], giving you Times[f,a,b] instead. This is just to illustrate why it is not obvious to make it so that juxtaposition is multiplication.)

> Rendering maths as you type it has been there in Mathematica, etc. forever.

I know you can type superscripts, subscripts, fractions, etc. using shortcuts. If you meant "as you type it" as in Mathematica will reformat what you type in more traditional notation as you type it, then I am wondering where you can enable that.

<comment><AUTHOR> >That syntax doesn't work along with using parentheses for function application unless you do something like making the parser context-sensitive (so function followed by '(' means application but value followed by '(' means multiplication) or treat whitespace as significant (so "f(x+1)" is application but "f (x+1)" is multiplication). This is why Mathematica does Sin[22] instead of Sin(22).

I'm not so sure that's true? You can just parse 'a b c d e' as

        Apply (Apply (Apply (Apply a b) c) d) e)

and then you can just say that Apply is overloaded to mean multiplication for numbers, just like + is overloaded to mean concatenation for strings in most languages, but addition for numbers. It doesn't actually change the parsing, your parsing doesn't become context-sensitive. 'Apply x y' would mean multiplication if the arguments are numbers and application if the left argument is a function.

Even if you allow multiplication of functions by scalars (which you probably shouldn't, IMO) you can easily say that 'x f' means 'x times f' while 'f x' means 'f applied to x'.

>I know you can type superscripts, subscripts, fractions, etc. using shortcuts. If you meant "as you type it" as in Mathematica will reformat what you type in more traditional notation as you type it, then I am wondering where you can enable that.

Well you can write :alpha: and it will make it an actual alpha character, you can write superscripts and it will superscript them, it will make fractions readable, etc. It will turn -> into a unicode right arrow, that sort of thing.

<comment><USER2> That's altering the syntax for function application by allowing f x to mean f(x), which is fine but changing the rules. If we do go with that, then "a b c" should be "Apply a (Apply b c)" because of the associativity of application --- traditional math tends not to have functions which return functions.

There is an ambiguity which comes up when you allow both f x and f(x) syntax, which is you cannot tell the difference between f(x,y) and f((x,y)) if your language has tuples. (One solution: make tuples be like Mathematica's Sequence, thus establishing the associativity of Cartesian products once and for all.)

A gotcha is that you can't write f(x)(y) if your function _does_ return a function, since this will parse as f(x y). You would need to write (f(x))(y) instead. (If you insist the associativity rule should be the other way, then 3f(x) would be (3f)x, which is possibly ok, and sin cos x would be (sin(cos))(x).)

<comment><USER3> I don't think you can have all of traditional mathematical notation (which is often highly overloaded) in a programming language while only using syntax for disambiguation.

Mathematicians mostly depend on the semantics of an expression to disambiguate it. You could get something close by making use of a type system to filter all possible parses.

For example, _sin cos x_ would parse as _sin(cos(x))_ , _(sin(cos))(x)_ , _(sin_ * _cos)(x)_ , ... and most of these would be discarded by the type checker. If you do it naively, the complexity will be exponential, but I think you could use dynamic programming to handle that. In my example, it would be more problematic that _(sin_ * _cos)_ might be interpreted as multiplication of functions, but this could be solved by having separate operators for numbers and other types, and only allowing some to be represented by juxtaposition.

Overall, I'm not convinced that such a highly ambiguous system would be beneficial in a general purpose programming language, but when you just want to type in a specific mathematical formula, disambiguate it once, and then work with the unambiguous representation (maybe using a pretty-printer), I think it would be useful.

<comment><USER2> > I don't think you can have all of traditional mathematical notation (which > is often highly overloaded) in a programming language while only using > syntax for disambiguation.

I think it is reasonable to be able to handle certain subsets of mathematical notation, but yeah, in total it seems to be context dependent. (I've tried designing languages to deal with this before, and my previous comments were about actual issues I had encountered making it all consistent.)

> For example, sin cos x would parse as sin(cos(x)), (sin(cos))(x), (sin * > cos)(x), ... and most of these would be discarded by the type checker

Unfortunately, all of those make some sense! The first is what anyone who took precalculus would read, but the second could be substituting cos into the power series of sin, and the third could be the pointwise product (sin * cos)(x) := sin(x) * cos(x), which is particularly important for the ring of functions on the real line.

> Overall, I'm not convinced that such a highly ambiguous system would be > beneficial in a general purpose programming language, but when you just want > to type in a specific mathematical formula, disambiguate it once, and then > work with the unambiguous representation (maybe using a pretty-printer), I > think it would be useful.

One thing I've been enjoying about Mathematica is the ability to have the source code be written in 2D graphical notation.

I'm not convinced that it would be useful to have a special way to input and disambiguate mathematical formulae for a general purpose programming language because 1) actual formulae are infrequent and 2) it tends not to be too challenging to translate a formula into the syntax of the programming language. I think the main use case for trying to interpret traditional math notation is for exploratory calculating/graphing/programming where you would only ever use the equation at most a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know of any implementation (in some form, maybe unfinished) of this for the web? I'm having a hard time searching for it. NaSC looks awesome but is pretty hard to get running for a one-off lesson in schools (and for use by students at home).

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in an environment like this you should check out NaSC for Elementary OS.

</comment><comment><USER6> smath studio (www.smath.info)</comment>


Dyad creator live streaming development of his new game Battle Arena Morituri - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/sssmcgrath <comment><USER2> potentially NSFW, highlight from todays stream :-) [http://i.imgur.com/YTlTJU6.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YTlTJU6.jpg)</comment>


Planetary Resources shows off Arkyd-100  - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/21/planetary-resources/ including their class 10K clean room. <comment><USER2> Planetary's approach to microsatellites is VERY daring. Instead of flying bulletproof, radiation-hardened single vehicles (like NASA or JPL), they plan to put up scads of cheap, disposable spacecraft using off-the-shelf hardware.

This is an uncommon approach, and IMO it perfectly meshes with their exclusive use of unmanned vehicles. Who cares about reliability, it's just a robot and there are many more where it came from...

As an example of the "off-the-shelf hardware" thing, they are even looking at using WiFi (and high-gain antennas) to communicate with orbiting satellites until they can get laser communications (or enough money to buy time on the Deep Space Network).

EDIT: Another example is that instead of a purpose-built real-time OS (like VxWorks, which JPL used on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers), they are using Linux with a real-time patch. Maybe it's not quite as reliable, but it's much more powerful.

Source: Planetary recently gave a talk at my university. I'm sure most of this is up on their website as well.

<comment><USER3> >Planetary's approach to microsatellites is VERY daring. Instead of flying bulletproof, radiation-hardened single vehicles (like NASA or JPL), they plan to put up scads of cheap, disposable spacecraft using off-the-shelf hardware.

>Who cares about reliability, it's just a robot and there are many more where it came from...

I'd expect anyone whose orbital hardware isn't cheap and disposable might care about scads of unreliable, soon to be junk being tossed up there.

<comment><USER2> True, space junk is an issue, and I don't know what Planetary is doing to mitigate that.

But, bear in mind that only the Arkyd 100 is supposed to stay in Earth orbit. The planned 200, 300, etc. all boost off in various directions (investigating and later, exploring asteroids) so their eventual fate doesn't matter as much.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps we need a startup that produces craft to deorbit all the junk...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original press release: [http://www.planetaryresources.com/2013/01/asteroid- mining-up...](http://www.planetaryresources.com/2013/01/asteroid-mining- update-from-the-factory-floor/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like they're going to have competition: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5095706>

</comment><comment><USER7> Related: Check out MOST, "the world's smallest space telescope", developed in Canada and launched about ten years ago.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOST_%28satellite%29>

<comment><USER8> They use single string commercial components but have tested them in a particle acceleration for radiation tolerance. Also the software must take into account that upsets or breakage can happen.

NASA and other space organizations and companies do much more expensive and comprehensive radiation testing, something like 100,000 dollars per integrated circuit, while MOST probably did all the components in total for that kind of sum.

And MOST is in a 800 km orbit, worse radiation than ISS.

It's space technology, all kinds of myths are spread around. If there would be more openness, diversity and launch opportunities, progress would really take off as new solutions could be simply tested.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like the approach of a compact satellite. if phones can fit into your hand its about time a satellite should fit into the trunk of a car.</comment>


The 31-Year-Old Strategist Behind the Shutdown - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303382004579129360000422966.html?dsk=y

<comment><USER2> The source of the political crisis in American government is that the Tea Party captured a lot of state governments in 2010 and then proceeded to gerymander congressional districts to their favor. That means that no matter how insanely destructive House republicans get they can't be voted out, at least until the next census. So there is no accountibility. And since they're ideology borders on a religous war we're in for a bad ride.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article _' I really believe we are in a great position right now," says Michael Needham, the 31-year-old president of Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the nation's largest conservative think tank. By "we" he means the Republican Party and the conservative movement; their "great position" refers to the potential to win the political battle over the government shutdown._

Is the guy a total cynic, clinically insane, or just pathetically intoxicated by his own rhetoric?

The slight possiblity that he might actually be correct in his assessment of the situation gives me indigestion.

</comment><comment><USER4> _" Mr. Needham is not apologetic at all for the shutdown that he sees as regrettable but necessary collateral damage if it focuses the public on the horrors of the health-care law."_

In other words the ends justifies the means. This is not how laws are to be repealed. If they're successful then a very dangerous precedent will be set. I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of Obamacare in its current form, but these tactics to effectively repeal it without due process unnerves me.

</comment><comment><USER5> What a pathetic waste of talent.</comment>


Your first 50 (paying) customers are always the hardest (A story) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zakimahomed.com/blog/?p=7

<comment><USER2> Not in the Apple App Store. The first 50 are very, very easy. Its just getting more after the initial sales burst which is tricky.</comment>


Best performing Cryptocurrencies 2017 +1M% return - <AUTHOR> https://coincall.io/content/best-hodl-2017/ <comment><USER2> I mean.. those growth rates are insane. It feels surreal. But on the other hand, I can't personally complain, having profited from it. What a time to be alive.</comment>


The Greenland ice sheet is experiencing one of its greatest melting events - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/31/greenland-ice-sheet-is-throes-one-its-greatest-melting-events-ever-recorded/ <comment><USER2> So, the upshot of the article is that @ .8 mm/year (if it keeps going at this rate), we'll see a 80 mm ocean level rise in 100 years. What does this mean in terms of the tidal variations that we currently see around the world? Considering that these variations are essentially cyclic with the moon's rotation around the earth. So in some places the avriations are essentially 0, whereas the extremes are around 16 metres and most places that I have seen, appear be in the range of 1 to 5 metres.

I would expect that the major effect, if it is actually observable, will occur in the equatorial regions of the planet. How much will be seen in the temperate regions? Is it possible that the further north or south you go from the equator that we might see a fall in ocean levels due to the movement of water towards the equator?

Should be interesting to create a world model based on what we do see in the tidal variations and orbital effects.</comment>