Turkey vs Eagle, McCauley Is My Beagle

Dorothy Parker once said that the problem with practical jokes is that they sometimes get elected.


Or, perhaps worse, they become public policy.


Such is Turkey vs. Eagle, McCauley Is My Beagle,  a whimsical essay Benjamin Franklin wrote and later expanded into an essay called An Economic Project.  In it, he jokingly suggested moving clocks forward and backward in order to save whale oil, which was used for lamps, and candle wax.


If a policy like Daylight Savings Time can be based on a joke, I have to wonder how many theories, principles and laws considered sacrosanct in the academic world are actually based on things that were written tongue-in-cheek or said in jest.


For that matter, how do we know that when some tribal elder isn't spoofing the anthropologist, folklorist or other researcher who's interviewing her?  Or whether someone buried some junk in a field, led archaeologists to it and claimed that it was a treasure of some kind?


None of this is as far-fetched as you might think.  Have you ever heard of a paper called "Transgressing The Boundaries: Toward A Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"?   It was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text. The editors of that august journal would have been none the wiser had the paper's author, NYU physicist Alan Sokal, not revealed (after the paper's publication) that it was a hoax, nothing more than "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations and outright nonsense" structured around the silliest quotations he could find from postmodernist academics about mathematics and physics.


Maybe Sokal will come up with a Gravity Savings Program.