“If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”
A good primer on chaos theory for youth?
“Rendezvous with Rama”
Why have a plot when gradual discovery with expository dialogue will do.
“Contact” -Sagan
More scientific method
“The Diamond Age” -Stephenson
This book even has long discussions of computing
“Sideways Stories from Wayside School”
Anything with jokes is going to be about logic at some point.
“Of Human Bondage” -Maugham
This book has a famous scene where the Phillip goes to Paris to study art; you get the impression that he isn’t very good at painting and as time goes on he starts to recognize that his fellow students are not great painters either. After two years, he gradually builds up the courage to have one of his instructors look at all of his work and let him know whether or not he can achieve his goal of becoming great painter. After he receives a negative verdict he commits to a new life plan.
Setting up this sort of experiment, especially in regard to poetry or other humanities topics, seems to be the overwhelming barrier.
We can take at face value that “Malley’s” poems were created from phrases of a limited length selected at random (whatever that really means in this case) and then arranged in a random manner.
This setup would allow us to say that some modernist critics cannot distinguish a modernist poem written by a single person (although with possible allusions and cribbings) from one constructed with phrases less than a specified length from a specific pool of literature.
From what I have found on the affair, it is hard to see if there was much experimental design at all (a criticism that Sokal can share in):
In this specific case, we are stuck with two people who seemed to intentionally create a spoof of modernist poetry which is not a terrible representation of the genre. For a progressive journal to publishing something that was designed to make a strong attempt at passing as modernist poetry using the new technique of collage seems completely appropriate.
Does this seem like an adequate control poem for an experiment of this sort:
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I suspect that a randomly generated poem from a large amount of source material would look significantly different. I tried out some google poem generators (which are probably not acceptable for this sort of experiment either), and the results weren’t as nice http://shawnrider.com/google/index.php?query=modernism&Submit=generate+poem
In the end, problems with authorship and creation by collage are two of the widely recognized features of modernist poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English. The hoax seems to prove that some of modernist poetry’s techniques are indeed effective.
I think your point about intentionally created spoofs like Nathicana coming out as good poetry drives home the point that these sorts of parodies aren’t necessarily a good example of control poem construction.
Making these sorts of critiques brings in the distinction between being rational vs rationalizing http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/rationalization.html. If you already have a point you want to prove and proceed to construct a method whereby you’ll prove it, it isn’t truly rational. If you spend a long time working on experimental design and becoming curious about how these methods (structural analysis of myths or modernist poetry) succeed/fail vs a random smattering of words and ideas, then you can build some rational knowledge on the matter.
While I like the idea of the spot the fakes test, I think it would be difficult to come up with good examples where the experimental design really leads to interesting conclusions with the scope of the project.