5 ms·

You don't have to prove the study wrong, you just have to be cognizant of this: THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES. Sure, they found some studies on the subject of

You don't have to prove the study wrong, you just have to be cognizant of this: THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES. Sure, they found some studies on the subject of anger and creativity. Does this mean that "bad-tempered people earn more and live longer"? Fuck, no. First of all, this was never what was being studied. Second of all, what the hell is "bad-tempered"? It's all "just a guess". The act of going from observation (the behavior of a bunch of students in a study) to the abstraction (anger helps you live longer) is necessarily an act of intuition. You can accept it or not, as you like. If you decide the evidence is compelling, go for it - live your life by swearing at people. But you're just as free to say, "This evidence is bullshit, and it's a great stretch to say that it has general implications about the impacts of anger-management on health and success." There is no one to tell you otherwise. The unfortunate problem with this, and other articles in this vein, is the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation.

byebyetech 10y ago
These days I feel like all the astrologers went out of job and decided to get into social sciences.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  "Sciences" in this case deserves an extra-large pair of scare quotes. If science is the process of arriving at objective fact by testing hypotheses in a reproducible way, just about any field with the root word "social" can be excluded. That doesn't mean they provide nothing of use, merely that they aren't science and lack rigor. Careful not to confuse the two stances.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    I'd be curious as to how you find the boundary of science and decide what "rigor" is. The closer I look the more I find this border is cracked and broken, and the notion of a "science" that produces "objective fact" is a fiction, in the "hard sciences" as much as in the soft ones. Recently my favorite koan on this subject is from Deirdre McClosky's "If You're So Smart": >The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is "just like" a curve on a blackboard. No one has so far seen a literal demand curve floating in the sky above Manhattan. It's a metaphor. The same is true in physics (etc.), where we have models that describe the world - but these models are only responsible to our subjective demands on what they must do for us. If they lazily drop off in the area around a black hole or in the interstices between galaxies, well, so what? We can still tune our GPS satellites. The only "objectivity" here is what the priests who currently reign happen to tell us is the edge where we can stop worrying.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      This argument is dangerously close to a problem I'd like to call "semantic wankery". As in, by defining first terms fuzzily enough, anything can be equated to anything else. What is rigor? Everything is subjective. Well, great philosophical position and all, but when we're talking about evaluating whether what we know is actually reflective of reality, remarkably unhelpful. Reality being classified as that which exists despite individual opinion. Look up through a clear sky, stars can be seen. Get a telescope, and we can start describing properties of those stars. Better telescope? More properties. Anyone can reproduce this. Or perhaps the moon - we've sent people there. We know that it exists and is a place a person can walk the same way we're sure that Japan exists and is a place a person can walk. The whole of humanity deciding tomorrow that the silver disk in the sky no longer exists? That rock is still there and still influencing our tides.
      - astazangasta 10y ago
        The semantic wankery is a real problem. What's fuzzy is you saying things like 'the properties of stars' as if those exist in any way other than our description of them. Sure, there may be a material reality. But a star does not "have mass", mass is only our (current) description of some unknowable ineffable thing. And it is very important to appreciate that there is no such thing as "mass" out there, mass only exists in our heads. Mass may be straining towards a point informed by reality, but it is NOT that reality. The reason it is important to remember that our ideas and descriptions are not reality and can never be is because doing so is required if we are ever to replace our ideas and descriptions with ones that serve us better.
        nostrademons 10y ago
        All of this is true but not particularly useful. Mass may be an abstract construct, but it's one that's proven pretty handy for a few centuries. It lets us send planes up into the air. It lets us send satellites into orbit, which lets us predict where we are at any given moment, which lets me figure out how to avoid the terrible traffic on routes 101 and 85. It lets us figure out how big an engine we need to power our vehicles, and how much to charge for shipping, and whether that laptop we want will be a pain to carry around. Yes, it's ultimately a fiction, and it probably won't suffice to get us to alpha centauri. I am far more likely to ship a package or drive a car than go on an interstellar voyage, though.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES. > the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation Perhaps a bit tangential, or perhaps not, but anyway - that comment was very strongly postmodern.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  I've been reading Feyerband (Against Method), Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), and Foucault (The Order of Things) lately, I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny. Also, invaluable in being an excellent scientist. Understanding the epistemology is great for destroying your illusions about what you are producing and clearing the way for useful effort.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    > I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny. I can tell. :) I'm not being ironic, because I agree with: > invaluable in being an excellent scientist
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
I doubt it. For instance, I just read this post by astazangasta. There is very little subjective interpretation involved. I'm pretty sure that I know what astazangasta meant by those words. That is, this was a well-written, unambiguous post. But that post goes a long way to empirically disprove your point.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  An interesting thought a friend of mine had the other day is that the ONLY HOPE for objectivity is in exactly this, the moment of conversation. In the moment where a clear thought passes from one person to another, it exists in a space where we can recognize it as lacking subjectivity, as it must pass through that point of perfection to make the leap from one mind to another. But as soon as it gets to its endpoint it becomes muddied - I can't guarantee that you read what I write the way that I intended it.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    This is exactly why objectivity doesn't exist in human behavior. You can argue that there is a objective sense of something, but that is always filtered by a person's subjectivity, so the muddling you mention starts at the first step of meaning. Communicating this to other people is essentially starting a balancing act between subjectivities, between interpretations of the thing. Furthermore, saying that a clear thought has passed from you to another person is yet another layer of interpretation of their response and reaction. To say this transfer lacks subjectivity is to make a category error due to an apparent (i.e. interpreted) congruence in the subjectivities between e.g. the speaker and listener. tl;dr: Hope only comes into play because objectivity in this context is an article of faith.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      To be clear, I am not in the camp of trying to recover objectivity, and generally feel that the attempt is a sin: God is dead, etc. I thought it was an interesting attempt to find a space where it might exist, though, in the moment of the joining of two minds. Undeniably something happens in the act of conversation, since we know we can speak to each other in a useful way that is not entirely subjective. We must at least be responsible to each other in conversation, and we might call that act of (partially) successful transmission/reception "objectivity".

byebyetech 10y ago

These days I feel like all the astrologers went out of job and decided to get into social sciences.

Karunamon 10y ago
"Sciences" in this case deserves an extra-large pair of scare quotes. If science is the process of arriving at objective fact by testing hypotheses in a reproducible way, just about any field with the root word "social" can be excluded. That doesn't mean they provide nothing of use, merely that they aren't science and lack rigor. Careful not to confuse the two stances.
- astazangasta 10y ago
  I'd be curious as to how you find the boundary of science and decide what "rigor" is. The closer I look the more I find this border is cracked and broken, and the notion of a "science" that produces "objective fact" is a fiction, in the "hard sciences" as much as in the soft ones. Recently my favorite koan on this subject is from Deirdre McClosky's "If You're So Smart": >The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is "just like" a curve on a blackboard. No one has so far seen a literal demand curve floating in the sky above Manhattan. It's a metaphor. The same is true in physics (etc.), where we have models that describe the world - but these models are only responsible to our subjective demands on what they must do for us. If they lazily drop off in the area around a black hole or in the interstices between galaxies, well, so what? We can still tune our GPS satellites. The only "objectivity" here is what the priests who currently reign happen to tell us is the edge where we can stop worrying.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    This argument is dangerously close to a problem I'd like to call "semantic wankery". As in, by defining first terms fuzzily enough, anything can be equated to anything else. What is rigor? Everything is subjective. Well, great philosophical position and all, but when we're talking about evaluating whether what we know is actually reflective of reality, remarkably unhelpful. Reality being classified as that which exists despite individual opinion. Look up through a clear sky, stars can be seen. Get a telescope, and we can start describing properties of those stars. Better telescope? More properties. Anyone can reproduce this. Or perhaps the moon - we've sent people there. We know that it exists and is a place a person can walk the same way we're sure that Japan exists and is a place a person can walk. The whole of humanity deciding tomorrow that the silver disk in the sky no longer exists? That rock is still there and still influencing our tides.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      The semantic wankery is a real problem. What's fuzzy is you saying things like 'the properties of stars' as if those exist in any way other than our description of them. Sure, there may be a material reality. But a star does not "have mass", mass is only our (current) description of some unknowable ineffable thing. And it is very important to appreciate that there is no such thing as "mass" out there, mass only exists in our heads. Mass may be straining towards a point informed by reality, but it is NOT that reality. The reason it is important to remember that our ideas and descriptions are not reality and can never be is because doing so is required if we are ever to replace our ideas and descriptions with ones that serve us better.
      - nostrademons 10y ago
        All of this is true but not particularly useful. Mass may be an abstract construct, but it's one that's proven pretty handy for a few centuries. It lets us send planes up into the air. It lets us send satellites into orbit, which lets us predict where we are at any given moment, which lets me figure out how to avoid the terrible traffic on routes 101 and 85. It lets us figure out how big an engine we need to power our vehicles, and how much to charge for shipping, and whether that laptop we want will be a pain to carry around. Yes, it's ultimately a fiction, and it probably won't suffice to get us to alpha centauri. I am far more likely to ship a package or drive a car than go on an interstellar voyage, though.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

> THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES. > the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation Perhaps a bit tangential, or perhaps not, but anyway - that comment was very strongly postmodern.

astazangasta 10y ago
I've been reading Feyerband (Against Method), Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), and Foucault (The Order of Things) lately, I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny. Also, invaluable in being an excellent scientist. Understanding the epistemology is great for destroying your illusions about what you are producing and clearing the way for useful effort.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny. I can tell. :) I'm not being ironic, because I agree with: > invaluable in being an excellent scientist

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

I doubt it. For instance, I just read this post by astazangasta. There is very little subjective interpretation involved. I'm pretty sure that I know what astazangasta meant by those words. That is, this was a well-written, unambiguous post. But that post goes a long way to empirically disprove your point.

astazangasta 10y ago
An interesting thought a friend of mine had the other day is that the ONLY HOPE for objectivity is in exactly this, the moment of conversation. In the moment where a clear thought passes from one person to another, it exists in a space where we can recognize it as lacking subjectivity, as it must pass through that point of perfection to make the leap from one mind to another. But as soon as it gets to its endpoint it becomes muddied - I can't guarantee that you read what I write the way that I intended it.
- rhizome 10y ago
  This is exactly why objectivity doesn't exist in human behavior. You can argue that there is a objective sense of something, but that is always filtered by a person's subjectivity, so the muddling you mention starts at the first step of meaning. Communicating this to other people is essentially starting a balancing act between subjectivities, between interpretations of the thing. Furthermore, saying that a clear thought has passed from you to another person is yet another layer of interpretation of their response and reaction. To say this transfer lacks subjectivity is to make a category error due to an apparent (i.e. interpreted) congruence in the subjectivities between e.g. the speaker and listener. tl;dr: Hope only comes into play because objectivity in this context is an article of faith.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    To be clear, I am not in the camp of trying to recover objectivity, and generally feel that the attempt is a sin: God is dead, etc. I thought it was an interesting attempt to find a space where it might exist, though, in the moment of the joining of two minds. Undeniably something happens in the act of conversation, since we know we can speak to each other in a useful way that is not entirely subjective. We must at least be responsible to each other in conversation, and we might call that act of (partially) successful transmission/reception "objectivity".