Neverwhere Posted January 17, 2014 Share Posted January 17, 2014 Not sure I should admit to this here but I studied English lit at uni so post modernism came up quite a lot. It essentially came out of semiotics so was initially focused on language and by extension literature and to some extent thought (as quite a lot of thought is comprised of language) and inside this context some of the better post modernists are quite interesting. However idiots (including some of the intellectuals that originated the field) mistake theories of language for theories of reality. The worst cases are so deluded that they think semiotics can be used to assess the veracity of evidenced based hard sciences (I'm thinking of such twaddle as Irigaray's assertion that E=mc2 is an anti-feminist "sexed equation"). It's totally deluded and utter lunacy. One of the worst people I met for this during uni ended up as a professor at Cornell. She excelled at post modernist doublethink to such an extent I don't think even she knew what she was on about, but apparently this was exactly what they were looking for. Personally I think there's a certain amount of ego bound up in how out of hand this has gotten: these people didn't study science or maths and they don't understand those fields at all so in order to feel that their academic choices and interests - and by extension themselves and their lives - are equally meaningful they try to belittle the hard sciences and subsume them into their own field in order to justify their own grandiose self importance. Nicely parodied by Avenue Q: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Knimbies who say No Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 Not sure I should admit to this here but I studied English lit at uni so post modernism came up quite a lot. It essentially came out of semiotics so was initially focused on language and by extension literature and to some extent thought (as quite a lot of thought is comprised of language) and inside this context some of the better post modernists are quite interesting. However idiots (including some of the intellectuals that originated the field) mistake theories of language for theories of reality. The worst cases are so deluded that they think semiotics can be used to assess the veracity of evidenced based hard sciences (I'm thinking of such twaddle as Irigaray's assertion that E=mc2 is an anti-feminist "sexed equation"). It's totally deluded and utter lunacy. One of the worst people I met for this during uni ended up as a professor at Cornell. She excelled at post modernist doublethink to such an extent I don't think even she knew what she was on about, but apparently this was exactly what they were looking for. Personally I think there's a certain amount of ego bound up in how out of hand this has gotten: these people didn't study science or maths and they don't understand those fields at all so in order to feel that their academic choices and interests - and by extension themselves and their lives - are equally meaningful they try to belittle the hard sciences and subsume them into their own field in order to justify their own grandiose self importance. Nicely parodied by Avenue Q: Irigaray is well into the 'mad old bat' category. Unlike most similar potty geriatrics, she has a publisher. Nod, smile, and let her pinch your cheeks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neverwhere Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 Irigaray is well into the 'mad old bat' category. Unlike most similar potty geriatrics, she has a publisher. Nod, smile, and let her pinch your cheeks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Knimbies who say No Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 [quote name=Lo-fi' timestamp='1390005279' post='1102451126] What can you do? Bakewell says old people's views are not to be sneezed at, but early onset dementia seems the kindest appraisal in this case. Worth a thread of it's own, the HPCer's guide to safe and poisonous species of feminism. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neverwhere Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 What can you do? Bakewell says old people's views are not to be sneezed at, but early onset dementia seems the kindest appraisal in this case. Worth a thread of it's own, the HPCer's guide to safe and poisonous species of feminism. Just ask them if they believe in egalitarianism. Anything other than a straight up "yes" should be considered worrying. Beyond dementia I think there is a genuine problem with the contemporary belief in "personal truth" that seems to permeate western culture. This is contributes to annoyances such as the reification of post modernism but more dangerously to widespread science-denialism and the general devaluation of evidence. If more people believed in actual reality and evidence being important I don't believe the mainstream political parties would be able to continue touting their bankrupt ideologies. But then again maybe that's just my personal truth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oliver Sutton Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 Just ask them if they believe in egalitarianism. Anything other than a straight up "yes" should be considered worrying. Beyond dementia I think there is a genuine problem with the contemporary belief in "personal truth" that seems to permeate western culture. This is contributes to annoyances such as the reification of post modernism but more dangerously to widespread science-denialism and the general devaluation of evidence. If more people believed in actual reality and evidence being important I don't believe the mainstream political parties would be able to continue touting their bankrupt ideologies. But then again maybe that's just my personal truth However, if one examines egalitarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept postcultural capitalist theory or conclude that language is intrinsically meaningless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted January 18, 2014 Author Share Posted January 18, 2014 However, if one examines egalitarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept postcultural capitalist theory or conclude that language is intrinsically meaningless. And if language is intrinsically meaningless then... I dunno Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thecrashingisles Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 (I'm thinking of such twaddle as Irigaray's assertion that E=mc2 is an anti-feminist "sexed equation"). Can this seriously be denied? Why did Einstein not formulate his theory as "P=wc squatted"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neverwhere Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 However, if one examines egalitarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept postcultural capitalist theory or conclude that language is intrinsically meaningless. Can this seriously be denied? Why did Einstein not formulate his theory as "P=wc squatted"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
okaycuckoo Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 Doesn't the US constitution say much the same thing but in clearer English? I think it commits the state to not interfering with the pursuit of happiness, not to defining happiness. Here's another hoax - “Evaluation of transformative hermeneutic heuristics for processing random data”: What do porn star Ron Jeremy, Max Weber and Michael Jackson have in common? Very little — except the three names appear in the list of references for a recent hoax paper by a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by publishing a completely fabricated article. The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the publication been paying attention — including a reference to the scholarship of Jackson, Weber, Jeremy and citations to new studies by Bernoulli and Laplace, both dead more than 180 years (Weber died in 1920). They also throw in references to the “Journal of Modern Illogical Studies,” which to the best of our knowledge does not and never has existed (although perhaps it should), and to a researcher named, dubiously, “A.S. Hole.” And, we hasten to add, the noted Kazakh polymath B. Sagdiyev, otherwise known as Borat. http://retractionwatch.com/2013/09/23/a-serbian-sokal-authors-spoof-pub-with-ron-jeremy-and-michael-jackson-references/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenzdawg Posted January 18, 2014 Share Posted January 18, 2014 I double dog dare you to post some of this stuff on The Guardian CIF and see how many recommends it gets. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mrs Bear Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 However, if one examines egalitarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept postcultural capitalist theory or conclude that language is intrinsically meaningless. I am not understanding please? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ntb Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 I was blissfully unaware of what seems to me to be an entire field of nonsense generation. Now I'm even more depressed at the depths we have fallen to. Do any of them actually make a legitimate living without taxpayer handouts? I'm doubting it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted January 19, 2014 Author Share Posted January 19, 2014 I was blissfully unaware of what seems to me to be an entire field of nonsense generation. Now I'm even more depressed at the depths we have fallen to. Do any of them actually make a legitimate living without taxpayer handouts? I'm doubting it. They seem to staunchly criticise the pursuit of wealth and economic growth whilst simultaneously ruthlessly defending their own position to do precisely that on personal terms, by dividing off am area of academia all to themselves and taking the paychecks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sexton Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 However, this assumption is not correct, since the earlier discussion of deviance is, apparently, determined by the traditional practice of grammarians. It must be emphasized, once again, that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is rather different from the strong generative capacity of the theory. Conversely, the natural general principle that will subsume this case delimits the traditional practice of grammarians. Presumably, this selectionally introduced contextual feature cannot be arbitrary in a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. For one thing, the natural general principle that will subsume this case can be defined in such a way as to impose a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mrs Bear Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 However, this assumption is not correct, since the earlier discussion of deviance is, apparently, determined by the traditional practice of grammarians. It must be emphasized, once again, that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is rather different from the strong generative capacity of the theory. Conversely, the natural general principle that will subsume this case delimits the traditional practice of grammarians. Presumably, this selectionally introduced contextual feature cannot be arbitrary in a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. For one thing, the natural general principle that will subsume this case can be defined in such a way as to impose a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Was this all your own work? If so I am lost in admiration. If I studied bolaxology for a year I don't think I could produce a piece like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
okaycuckoo Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 By coincidence Noahopinion has a post today - relevant to this thread and maybe to the way we discuss things on this forum: If you don't believe me, try it out yourself! Go into some political chat room that subscribes to some ideology you disagree with. Try to convince the room that one of the other chatters is a poser and not a true believer. I bet you can do it. Now ask yourself how well you really understand the ideology you just enforced.To put it bluntly, ideologies are large parts ******** to begin with, and so it's possible to ******** your way through ideological tests. http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/against-ideological-turing-test.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erat_forte Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 I was blissfully unaware of what seems to me to be an entire field of nonsense generation. Now I'm even more depressed at the depths we have fallen to. Do any of them actually make a legitimate living without taxpayer handouts? I'm doubting it. The Observer today has a very interesting piece about a Psychology study that Sokal has been involved with debunking. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown Aarently the paper and the pseudo-mathematical bo11ox behind it are pretty lucrative: This theory is not just big in academia, there's a whole industry of coaching and it intersects with business and business schools. There's a lot of money in it. One website lists Seligman's booking fee at between $30,000 and $50,000 an engagement Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neverwhere Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 Aarently the paper and the pseudo-mathematical bo11ox behind it are pretty lucrative: The "personal truth" industry is booming http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/28/self-help-books-literature-publishers-growth http://www.economist.com/node/18712290 http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2013/11/20/lets-not-forget-alternative-medicine-is-a-huge-industry/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted January 19, 2014 Author Share Posted January 19, 2014 The Observer today has a very interesting piece about a Psychology study that Sokal has been involved with debunking. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown Aarently the paper and the pseudo-mathematical bo11ox behind it are pretty lucrative: Sokal has been branded a 'literalist' apparently Wtf! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erat_forte Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 Sokal has been branded a 'literalist' apparently Wtf! Well I suppose the actual real world is rather late-90s isn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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