5 ms·

As the old saying goes "Fake it til you make it". Its always seemed like a dubious idiom to me but when reading stories like this one, there obviously has to be

As the old saying goes "Fake it til you make it". Its always seemed like a dubious idiom to me but when reading stories like this one, there obviously has to be some truth in the efficacy of the proposition.

mirimir 7y ago
I switched fields between BS and PhD, and a major component was learning the jargon. Perspective, conceptualizations, terminology, idioms, etc. Plus lots of facts, of course. I've changed fields a few more times, over the years. As my interests and circumstances changed. Most recently, I worked as a ghostwriter and consultant. I used to joke that, given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. And given the Internet, that's far easier than it was a couple decades ago. Anyway, it strikes me that learning how to learn is the main thing that you get out of doing a PhD. Plus the credentials and professional network, of course.
- FabHK 7y ago
  > given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview. (related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )
  - mirimir 7y ago
    No, not job interviews. But I did ghostwrite parts of medical reviews, and of briefs and expert reports in litigation.
  - wruza 7y ago
    >xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew the same crap for decades instead of just doing something better. Even politics is better than that. “in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts; but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts” “To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing it—without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing)” I mean: words instead blanket a low-pitch synthesis and require most priorities in it to shift from a detailed to an increasingly informal scene which wraps by itself to form an atopological plane of understanding of the undecidables. Are you think so?
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Well, there is the infamous Sokal paper:[0] Alan D. Sokal (1996) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). And then SciGen, of course.[1] 0) https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre... 1) https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
    - smogcutter 7y ago
      > I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.
      - lowdose 7y ago
        Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?
        smogcutter 7y ago
        You’d hope.
        wruza 7y ago
        Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote? I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)
        FabHK 7y ago
        FWIW, I don't think very formal methods are the crux of the matter (at least for the incipient stages of a scientific field). Having said that, postmodernism is (in my view) totally misguided. The obfuscated language is intentional, as among its epistemological assumptions is that reason is not only limited, but has only limited access to reality (well, or creates reality), and at any rate is insufficient. Recommended readings: * The Sokal Hoax [1] * Intellectual Impostors by Bricmont and Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense in the US) [2] for an expansion on the Sokal Hoax, and many examples on pretentious and preposterous abuse of scientific terminology by postmodern philosophers * Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault by Hicks [3] on the history of postmodernism, arising from counter-enlightenment philosophy all the way from Rousseau via the insufferable German idealists, including Hegel with his dialectical reasoning, which supported both fascism and Marxism. Postmodernists often take specific reasonable criticism of or problems with science or realism, and then blow them up and generalise them unjustifiably. It is worth taking some of the criticism to heart, but the postmodernists aren't even the ones formulating those problems in the most cogent way. So, my advice would be to waste some, but not too much time on postmodernism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0983258407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-098325...

mirimir 7y ago

I switched fields between BS and PhD, and a major component was learning the jargon. Perspective, conceptualizations, terminology, idioms, etc. Plus lots of facts, of course. I've changed fields a few more times, over the years. As my interests and circumstances changed. Most recently, I worked as a ghostwriter and consultant. I used to joke that, given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. And given the Internet, that's far easier than it was a couple decades ago. Anyway, it strikes me that learning how to learn is the main thing that you get out of doing a PhD. Plus the credentials and professional network, of course.

FabHK 7y ago
> given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert. Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview. (related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )
- mirimir 7y ago
  No, not job interviews. But I did ghostwrite parts of medical reviews, and of briefs and expert reports in litigation.
- wruza 7y ago
  >xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew the same crap for decades instead of just doing something better. Even politics is better than that. “in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts; but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts” “To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing it—without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing)” I mean: words instead blanket a low-pitch synthesis and require most priorities in it to shift from a detailed to an increasingly informal scene which wraps by itself to form an atopological plane of understanding of the undecidables. Are you think so?
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Well, there is the infamous Sokal paper:[0] Alan D. Sokal (1996) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). And then SciGen, of course.[1] 0) https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre... 1) https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
  - smogcutter 7y ago
    > I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.
    - lowdose 7y ago
      Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?
      - smogcutter 7y ago
        You’d hope.
        wruza 7y ago
        Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote? I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)
        FabHK 7y ago
        FWIW, I don't think very formal methods are the crux of the matter (at least for the incipient stages of a scientific field). Having said that, postmodernism is (in my view) totally misguided. The obfuscated language is intentional, as among its epistemological assumptions is that reason is not only limited, but has only limited access to reality (well, or creates reality), and at any rate is insufficient. Recommended readings: * The Sokal Hoax [1] * Intellectual Impostors by Bricmont and Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense in the US) [2] for an expansion on the Sokal Hoax, and many examples on pretentious and preposterous abuse of scientific terminology by postmodern philosophers * Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault by Hicks [3] on the history of postmodernism, arising from counter-enlightenment philosophy all the way from Rousseau via the insufferable German idealists, including Hegel with his dialectical reasoning, which supported both fascism and Marxism. Postmodernists often take specific reasonable criticism of or problems with science or realism, and then blow them up and generalise them unjustifiably. It is worth taking some of the criticism to heart, but the postmodernists aren't even the ones formulating those problems in the most cogent way. So, my advice would be to waste some, but not too much time on postmodernism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0983258407 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-098325...