reply to post by Ectoterrestrial
This feedback loop tends to help journals, magazines, conferences from decaying too far into social cliques. But on occasion, when they do...
Such decay speaks to the true meaning of the Sokal affair to which the OP makes erroneous reference.
The purpose of Alan Sokal's little jape was not to expose the deficiencies of the peer-review system in science, but to reveal the ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy of postmodernist critics of science who treat it as only one explanatory 'narrative' among others, no more true or trustworthy than Norse myths, Marxist dialectics, Freud's theories of the unconscious or the belief that aliens control our brains. In fact, rather than 'privileging' science above these other 'narratives', postmodernists decry it as sexist, elitist, patriarchal and controlling. They prefer Marx and Derrida to Darwin and Einstein.
Alan Sokal submitted his paper, a piece of learned-sounding nonsense with an equally nonsenical title, to the journal Social Text. This is not a scientific journal but a publication for scholars of 'cultural studies'. You can tell by that suffix 'studies' that Social Text is a bastion of postmodernism. Its editors fell on Sokal's submission like the Children of Israel on the morning manna -- they thought a 'real' scientist was actually coming over to their side! They rushed the paper into print, and ended up with pie on their faces.
The history of the Sokal Affair is both entertaining and instructive; you can read about it from the horse's mouth here. But what is most important from the point of view of this thread is that, as Alan Sokal was well aware, Social Text had no peer review process at the time he submitted his paper.
If it had, the paper would never been published; the first fellow-physicist who looked at it would have rejected it. The fact that it did get published is an argument for peer review, not against it.
