Dear Quadrant,
I think I’ll attempt a pseudoscience article: kind of the Sokal hoax in reverse. Don’t get me wrong: I liked the Sokal prank as much as Windschuttle did. Showing up hogwash from any ideological stand is a valuable exercise. But I think Australia needs the opposite experiment.
I don’t think I can be arsed being as masterful as Professor Sokal, but still, I’ll devise an experiment to see if you will publish (to quote Sokal himself)
“an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
Just to be a bit pomo about it, I think I’ll put the word ‘hoax’ in the opening sentence: one of many clues, including bogus references. I think I’ll employ some of Quadrant‘s sleight-of-hand reasoning devices to argue something ludicrous — something like the importance of putting human genes into food crops to save civilisation from its own ills, and how this sort of science shouldn’t be scrutinised by the media, because, you know, it’s empirical.
The trick would be to argue something both ludicrous and perfectly plausible (at least to the uninquiring mind); using dodgy logic, unsupported arguments and untruthful assertions.
I was planning to submit it under my own name, but —— thought not. Better to write it, he advised, under another name; one that’s pretty common. A name that, when Googled, provides some plausible possibilities.
So you’ll be pleased to learn I’m going to submit pseudonymously. It’s the Quadrant tradition, after all. Your first editor published under a host of silly names. Aside from ‘Ern Malley’, there was ‘Dulcie Renshaw’, ‘Glaucon’ and ‘Proteus’. Eew.
What’s something as good and Aussie as Ern Malley? Bruce? Sharon? (I once travelled the Bruce Highway to a town called Sharon! True.)
I’ve settled on ‘Sharon Gould’. As good a name as Proteus, don’t you reckon? Think of it as Sharon Burrows’ and Bob Gould‘s love child. When you Google it, lots of plausible folk come up.
I’m not going to claim to be any one of these Sharon Goulds: you can draw your own assumptions. We can all draw assumptions from thin evidence, can’t we Quadrant? I know there are times I’ve done so. Let’s see how you go.
Sincerely,
Sharon
