10 ms·
Postmodernism Generator
- setra 10y agoGenerated: If one examines textual theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject Marxism or conclude that the raison d’etre of the reader is deconstruction. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a postsemantic nationalism that includes language as a paradox. Lyotard uses the term ‘Marxism’ to denote the failure of neoconceptualist class.
- Erik816 10y agoPretty sure you could get at least a passing grade from an average humanities course by just copying and pasting sentences like this, depending on the school. I say that as a philosophy/political science grad.
- andrepd 10y agoPeople often say that sort of thing, but I wonder if those claims were ever rigorously tested. Did someone ever try to test what kind of grades they got at humanities courses with made up gibberish answers like this?
- mcphilip 10y agoDepends on the skill level of the grader, I suppose, but phrases like "postsemantic nationalism" are a red flag to me as an armchair philosopher with some knowledge of the history of postmodernist thought.
- oceante 10y agoA trivial google search will weed out these papers. They wouldn't make it past even the least skilled graders at any institution I'm familiar with... and if they did I think it would be the student who was really harmed, not the field.
- CalChris 10y agoI just love that phrase postsemantic nationalism. So I Googled it and found one legit hit and I can't really tell if it's legit. http://blacky2poe.w.interiowo.pl/realismandneost/theabsurdityofn.html http://blacky2poe.w.interiowo.pl/realismandneost/theabsurdit... But it reminds me of what in chess is called a computer move, something which is contrary to the way even super-gm's think but nevertheless a good move.
- rokosbasilisk 10y agoI can confirm somewhat. I used a markov chain generator for a couple of 101 level english classes, with filters to adapt for my personal style like word choice restriction. I also gave a few passes manually to correct and cleanup things that were too ridiculous.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y agoWell, the Sokal Affair [1] is famous for getting just such a paper accepted at a peer-reviewed postmodernist academic journal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- FabHK 10y agoYou're familiar with the Sokal hoax [1]? Physicist Alan Sokal got a non-sensical paper [2] with the wonderful title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity accepted and published in the journal Social Text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/trans...
- andrepd 10y agoI'm familiar with one instance of such a hoax being successful, yes. I'm not quite convinced it is feasible on a large scale, and that the world of humanities/liberal arts research is so ridiculous as this kinds of anecdotes paint it. I'd be curious to see this is the case.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoPossibly. One of the pretexts of postmodernism is that no privileged reading of a text exists, not even the author's. Thus the reader of a text can interpret it in any way that is internally consistent with the rest of postmodernism's rules and norms. So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it.
- jnicholasp 10y ago> So it doesn't really matter what you intend it to say, as long as the grader can and does interpret something consistent from it. Which, for any sufficiently complex and ambiguous sentence, any motivated reader will always be able to do. I won't speculate on how large a percentage it is, but some percentage of these papers are straight up Rorschach ink blots, even if the authors themselves believed they were writing something coherent and intelligible.
- oceante 10y agoExcept it's not generated. A simple google search [1] reveals there's at least one paper out there that contains a structurally identical phrase [2]. The "Dada Engine" just takes real papers and substitutes nouns and pronouns. A similar strategy could probably be used on most any academic paper. But it does appeal to those who would never attempt to read these papers in the first place. [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=If+one+examines+textual+theory%2C+one+is+faced+with+a+choice%3A+either+reject+Marxism+or+conclude+that+the+raison+d%E2%80%99etre+of+the+reader+is+deconstruction.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=If+one+examines+textual+theo... [2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj4mYLPrv7QAhUE8CYKHcNsAHgQFggtMAM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpapers.ssrn.com%2Fsol3%2FDelivery.cfm%3Fabstractid%3D2501450&usg=AFQjCNEPKHoP7xiAM-5QwPmywteUB4WCQg https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- jsnathan 10y agoPretty sure those are all generated. Seems to be a trend of people reposting these throughout the Internet without explanation.
- guitarbill 10y ago> The "Dada Engine" just takes real papers and substitutes nouns and pronouns. A similar strategy could probably be used on most any academic paper. I dare you to do this on e.g. a Physics paper. This doesn't mean badly written Physics papers don't exist, but unless it's an awful paper or you aren't familiar with that field, the statistics and data analysis should stand on it's own. So you always have this fallback. Of course they aren't infallible either, but it's one extra BS detection layer. For social science, extra BS detection could be had via reference checking. Unfortunately, this is effort and tedious, in part because almost all papers are long-winded and hard to read. So instead, form/style/reputation of cited authors/buzz-words is used. All of these are easy to fake. I don't know what the solution is. I've seen in Philosophy, students would mark text with logic symbols. Then, you can see a bit more easily if "therefore" really means something follows. Maybe that kind of rigorousness is needed, in an explicit form? But you're right in that it's mostly laziness, and the random generators don't hold up to too much scrutiny. It's more that it's a mirror, a way of pointing out the shortcomings of the field. Which is why it's funny.
- CalChris 10y agoIt got a B+! https://www.gradeflex.com/graded/5856d8d3de6a2008572d2baf https://www.gradeflex.com/graded/5856d8d3de6a2008572d2baf
- EdiX 10y agoThis makes more sense to me than all I have read of Lacan.
- eugeneionesco 10y agoThis is hilarious!
- ClayFerguson 10y agoThis is the doctorate thesis by Cornel West. The levity and import of this text can only be fully realized when read aloud by him, in front of a liberal audience composed of similarly afflicted progressive uppity-types.
- everyone 10y agoI love this. Someone please try and get one published!! also... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- sprobertson 10y agoTangential, but can anyone eli5 this field of philosophy (the non generated form)? I recognize names like Lacan and Zizek but can't get far enough through the verbal cruft to interpret anything.
- dcre 10y agoIt's such a wide set of authors that any ELI5 is going to fall very short (kind of like saying "can anyone explain 20th century European literature to me?") but the Wikipedia for continental philosophy is a tolerable intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy Of course, actually reading Nietzsche or something would be better but that's not really an ELI5.
- JonnieCache 10y agoAs I understand it, you could sum it up as: categorizations and abstractions are primarily instruments of power and control, rather than tools to further understanding. The true purpose of categories or classifications is to place people or concepts outside of them, and thus to denigrate and dominate them. Categories or labels have no "real" meaning except to serve this malign purpose. Part of the reason why these people originally wrote in such a strange way was because they wanted to try and write without applying the traditional categories and modes of thought we've all been raised with. Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to tell you this and you shouldn't listen to me. I'd welcome correction from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
- sprobertson 10y agoI listened anyway... if that's in any way accurate it's the best explanation I've heard yet!
- qz_ 10y agoI'm not the best at English, tried understanding this for a good 5 minutes before I remembered what "generator" means. Oh, well.
- freditup 10y agoYour comment mirrors an observation of mine (although I am a native English speaker): Trying to read the generated article gave me a very similar feeling compared to the feeling I get when trying to read an article that's much too difficult for me. I read a sentence or two and try to grasp at the meaning of the sentences and how they relate to each other. I reread these words a few times, and eventually draw out a little bit of understanding and move on to the next sentences. In this case with the generated text though, eventually my mind concludes that it's all nonsense and gives up on finding any meaning. With a real text, hopefully, I'd derive more meaning little by little as I struggled on. What's interesting to me here is that a nonsensical text can produce the same "in over my head" feeling as a highly intellectual and difficult text. It seems to imply that we could be fooling ourselves when reading difficult texts - perhaps a text is all nonsense, or perhaps it's brilliant, but we have little way to tell.
- adpoe 10y agoYes. I studied literature in school, and I was very guilty of writing papers like these, once upon a time. If someone gave me this and told me it was real, I would believe. Hits the mark.
- FabHK 10y agoPertinent Twitter account: @RealPeerReview posts papers published in peer-reviewed journals of questionable scientific merit. https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview
- mistersquid 10y agoPostmodernism and postmodernity describe very complex intellectual and artistic practices. The periodic belittling of these cultural formations by people who do not well understand them is unbecoming and tiresome. The Sokal affair gets mentioned in threads such as this. But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that _Social Text_'s editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence. It puzzles and saddens me that so many intelligent scientists and empiricists repeatedly point to such instances of "postmodernity" as proof that the postmodern emperor has no clothes because such a broad statement is simply untrue. The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation. Their work is not easy to understand and, yes, they can be interpreted in many different ways. They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths. Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation and we would all--humanists, scientists, and intellectuals of all kinds--be better off and richer if they stopped serving as propaganda that postmodernity has no cultural or intellectual value. EDIT: grammar, readability, spelling. Added penultimate, single-sentence paragraph.
- danharaj 10y agoReally the best "criticism" of postmodern thought is that once you've gone through and deconstructed everything and reduced the world to power relations, it doesn't give you much indication what you can do about it. Of course, that's not what most postmodern thinkers set out to do. Dismantling the present is necessary for imagining the future.
- elliotec 10y agoGotta say, this comment itself reads like it was written by the postmodern generator
- foldr 10y agoNo it doesn't. Come on, that's not a constructive response to a perfectly articulate comment.
- JonnieCache 10y agoI wonder what people with literary theory degrees make of RFCs. Much the same I imagine.
- kazagistar 10y agoRFCs are templates for tangible products. They don't exist for their own sake, and can be judged by their artifacts. What does postmodernism accomplish?
- JonnieCache 10y agoIt attempts to describe certain aspects of human cultural interaction, broadly defined. I'm not defending it, I share the opinions of many of it's detractors, my point is only that to describe a technical subject you don't understand as incomprehensible nonsense is silly.
- twelvechairs 10y agoFrom 1996 For details https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator
- lacampbell 10y agoAutomation putting more people out of jobs.
- andrenth 10y agoRelated reading: "Fools, frauds and firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left".