In defense of vandalism

Remember Conservapedia? I don't know how they are doing right now, but shortly after the site was created, they were being inundated with fake entries written by the site's critics (and some of those entries were published). Not all Conservapedia's critics liked that fact; in an old post, Ed Brayton wrote

Putting up the fake entries only gives them an excuse for all of the legitimately bad entries on the site that I was criticizing. It was nothing but the cyber-equivalent of teenagers TPing someone's yard, it was juvenile and stupid and shouldn't have been done. Criticism is a good thing; vandalism is not.

I couldn't disagree more. Vandalism of this sort is a good thing. Technically speaking, the famous and brilliant Sokal Hoax was an act of vandalism; and yet it's hard to deny that it has generated genuine social good. Demonstrating that a group of people is unable to tell the difference between their own beliefs and a mockery of those beliefs provides a lot of useful information.