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If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons. First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia. -hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. -dialetics. Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points." Term dates back to Aristotle. -Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating power." Critical term in International relations. -Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick. So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery. I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say. PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness." His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's also done, if one can believe, in earnest. Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.

dvt 6y ago
I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you. PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
- adamsea 6y ago
  To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ). > PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus. True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk. Also I'll just throw out, in terms of impact, Baudrillard's work kinda hits the nail on the head when it comes to the internet. You can't quantify the impact of literature or more qualitative philosophy as easily, and, one can only know as time goes on. I'm not the first to say this, obviously. Baudrillard's quote seems scary-accurate of today: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.”
  - rewqpoijdlgh 6y ago
    Baudrillard was definitely onto something with his analysis of the Gulf War. For Americans it was advertised as a war, but it wasn't much more than a one-sided slaughter.
  - sameers 6y ago
    > True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk. I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc. To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world. Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.
crispyambulance 6y ago
> he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Yep. That rubs me the wrong way too. One characteristic of truly earnest people is that they're non-judgemental and open to new ideas and experiences. If one can get past the boilerplate, there's some really cool ideas in postmodernism. I think PG is being the opposite of earnest in that pithy, incurious takedown.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`? I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  Exactly! Whoever said humanities academics have a monopoly on obscurantism?
- adamsea 6y ago
  Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-understood meanings. Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes - they'd say the same thing. Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant of us to assume we can do the same in the humanities, because it means we assume the humanities are easy / trivial and so on, which they are not. It's like the "my kid could paint that" cliche of Modernist painting - maybe your kid could, but, you saying that just indicates that you aren't educated about what the artist is doing, why they choose to do it, and the previous works of art the artist is responding to or in dialogue with. Kind of like, "why can't everything be HTML/CSS, with maybe a little JQuery?" Sure, you have a point, but there are clearly more sophisticated use-cases where that approach is not the most effective, and, your saying that kinda indicates you may not have encountered or had to deal with those use-cases. Truth be told I think computer science, at least the parts of it where you get to create abstractions which then define the bounds of what is possible within that programming paradigm (see - word jumble!) is closer to the "soft" humanities than many are aware of or would care to see. Tech folks tend to love/desire "certainty" in one form another, and, the easiest way to achieve that is to rule out everything which is "uncertain", and, constrain your domain until "certainty" can be achieved. Which can be a great approach for certain technical problems, but also IMHO results in ignorant behavior towards anything which threatens said certainty.
keiferski 6y ago
There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot. As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS, JavaScript ("What do you mean it has nothing to do with Java?") and so on.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Good point. I should add "non-technical" to my comment.
- pbourke 6y ago
  > The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    > In the humanities it’s the point, No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.
throwawayback 6y ago
In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1335324372421238795 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1326556860418314242 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/132655686041831424... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1282344397393272840 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128234439739327284... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1312742522674917382 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/131274252267491738... (NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1282261189091905538 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128226118909190553... (NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1309790018219761664 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/130979001821976166... I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable dogma that I vehemently disagree with.
- __float 6y ago
  That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are very often tax advantaged. If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare there must not be any?
  - throwawayback 6y ago
    It is a politico-religious movement. Of course people that side with that movement find value in funding people to produce texts in its tradition and educate students in its ways of talking. I don't.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      > It is a politico-religious movement. Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to label and then defame something they don't like. They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to describe something, but too vague and imprecise to actually describe anything. Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they critique society for the oppressive elements which they believe they've found. I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques of systemic racism. Criticize something specific so we can talk about it. But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to make would rapidly fall apart. And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists, communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism, Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism, Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point of contention), and so on. Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives? The entire field of Gender Studies? Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it. But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you criticize makes it difficult to do so. And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles. Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you didn't actually say it.
woodruffw 6y ago
It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense. What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense. In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.
- rriepe 6y ago
  I've noticed that everyone who claims to hear dog whistles is, in fact, a dog.
  - woodruffw 6y ago
    This would imply that anybody who has studied a subject enough to recognize references to that subject is, in fact, the subject itself. It's obvious on face value that criminal prosecutors aren't (necessarily) criminals and that WWII historians aren't (necessarily) neo-Nazis. If you're going to accuse people who know about a subject of being that subject, be less oblique about it.
    - rriepe 6y ago
      There's no deeper reading to my post. I'm claiming that you're literally a dog.
      - woodruffw 6y ago
        Better than a featherless biped, I guess.
- dang 6y ago
  This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place. Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20postmodernis&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
tim333 6y ago
While it's not very Hacker News, 'humour' can have some value. Here's Calvin and Hobbes on much the same stuff https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849a7a06e2a78c7.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849...
- iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
  Ah man, humor! I like humor too. I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers. Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.
svat 6y ago
No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or interestingness, consider some examples: > Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √–1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (–1). This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes √-1. I got this reference from “Postmodernism and its problems with science” by Jean Bricmont (the original link has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publication/2731761_Postmodernism_and_Its_Problems_With_Science/links/0deec518162f19a016000000/Postmodernism-and-Its-Problems-With-Science.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...). Bricmont co-wrote the book Impostures intellectuelles (French) / Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book: * (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonsense&oldid=992481909#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonse...) Bruce Fink accused the authors of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings." * Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc² is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us […] privileged what goes the fastest”, and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has, in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/ https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled “Opaque Writing Style”, which, if I'm reading correctly, says that it is intentional. The London Review of Books carried a review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pauvre-sokal https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pau... , reference via https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also the many links on Sokal's page: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's book that defends her by saying: > Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont. My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse writers, you can find people “playing the game” or being unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand, to trust that the authors are in fact saying something meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal), and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the authors aren't failing to be clear; they aren't even trying! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems reasonable to suggest non-earnestness. (This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important—it may very well be—the point is only whether earnestness is considered a value.) -------- Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever have a section in their biographical entry justifying their “opaque writing style”, nor have it said that in their world it's better to be “wild” than correct. This IMO is a genuine value difference between the fields.
zemo 6y ago
one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny. hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".
- dang 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.
  - iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
    I'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here. You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses. However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.
eloff 6y ago
I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these humanities for the make believe they are. These people basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and that's damning. They even published a rewrite of mein kampf. Why should my tax dollars go towards that? These people should get a real job and contribute to society. Bogus is being too charitable. It made for one of my all time favorite episodes of Joe Rogan though. Worth a listen. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_academics_write_hoax_articles_for_peer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_acad...
- literallycancer 6y ago
  Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research? >These people should get a real job and contribute to society Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.
  - eloff 6y ago
    > Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research? Research is a process through which we unlock various technological orchards to harvest for the betterment of all mankind. The problem we have today is we're running low on new orchards. It's a crying shame how little we spend on research - compared to e.g. weapons. > Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps. Do I dignify that with a reply? That's got nothing to do with what I said.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  > Why should my tax dollars go towards that? Why should your tax dollars go towards CS research, when nearly half of all sampled papers (circa 2015) can't be reproduced [1]? As a society, we delegate funding based on perceptions of expertise: someone who knows more than you or I about these specific fields decided that they deserved some amount of funding (probably significantly less than you think). Sometimes that means that junk and fraud[2] gets through; that's the cost of doing business in every field. These kinds of embarrassing mistakes should be read as an indictment of academic culture and the failures of the peer review system as a whole, not a "gotcha" against a field that you or I aren't qualified to evaluate. Which, again, is why nobody asked for my opinion or yours about which things to fund. [1]: http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/ http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/ [2]: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-acm-ieee-computer-architecture-conferences-ccd61169370d https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...
tbrownaw 6y ago
> you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." < That represents philosophy in general about as well as say Theranos represents startups in general. And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.
roenxi 6y ago
In context though - 'earnestness' here is a quality looked for in academic founders and is being looked at as an ability to solve important problems that other people care about. The humanities studying hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness don't have that. In particular, the entire field has come up with no useful commentary on 'hegemonic whiteness', hermeneutic or otherwise, that leads to problem solving. It isn't a culture that is producing strong startup founders like STEM does. It's fair to say they are less earnest in the way PG is using the term; the humanities isn't where people go to solve real-world problems. Humanities is arguably at the base of some very successful companies (arguably Apple, for example). Hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness is the base of some profoundly ... albinophobe? I dunno, they're racist and don't like white people ... arguments and nothing admirable that I have yet encountered.
chmod600 6y ago
The "bogus" comment falls in a paragraph about ventures where the earnest don't generally win. So the first question to ask is: do the earnest generally win in that kind of academic field? I don't know much about that field, but I'm guessing probably not just because it is too closely tied to politics. If you earnestly persue research, you are likely to find something that contradicts the current political fashions, and end up buried. So in that sense, PG is probably right. The next question is: is he inappropriately dismissive (or even insulting) to the field over all? Does is have value that he unfairly dismisses? You seem to think so. But even if so, pretty much everyone needs to be dismissive about a lot of stuff. At least he's transparent about where his blind spots are.
- adamsea 6y ago
  None of what you are saying responds to what the parent poster actually said. You're constructing your own argument and then claiming the other person was arguing what you're arguing, but did a bad job of it.
geofft 6y ago
A note for people seeing the essay now: he's quietly changed the link to be "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic racialized phenomenology." (Which makes it even clearer that he doesn't have a reasoned argument at any specific target in mind, just "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Also that he forgot he needs to hide his power level.) EDIT: He's quietly changed the link again to remove "racialized."
flippinburgers 6y ago
Philosophy, the humanities, gender studies: really only for edgy college kids who are trying to get laid.

dvt 6y ago

I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you. PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.

adamsea 6y ago
To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ). > PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus. True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk. Also I'll just throw out, in terms of impact, Baudrillard's work kinda hits the nail on the head when it comes to the internet. You can't quantify the impact of literature or more qualitative philosophy as easily, and, one can only know as time goes on. I'm not the first to say this, obviously. Baudrillard's quote seems scary-accurate of today: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.”
- rewqpoijdlgh 6y ago
  Baudrillard was definitely onto something with his analysis of the Gulf War. For Americans it was advertised as a war, but it wasn't much more than a one-sided slaughter.
- sameers 6y ago
  > True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk. I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc. To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world. Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.

crispyambulance 6y ago

> he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Yep. That rubs me the wrong way too. One characteristic of truly earnest people is that they're non-judgemental and open to new ideas and experiences. If one can get past the boilerplate, there's some really cool ideas in postmodernism. I think PG is being the opposite of earnest in that pithy, incurious takedown.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`? I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".

crispyambulance 6y ago
Exactly! Whoever said humanities academics have a monopoly on obscurantism?
adamsea 6y ago
Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-understood meanings. Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes - they'd say the same thing. Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant of us to assume we can do the same in the humanities, because it means we assume the humanities are easy / trivial and so on, which they are not. It's like the "my kid could paint that" cliche of Modernist painting - maybe your kid could, but, you saying that just indicates that you aren't educated about what the artist is doing, why they choose to do it, and the previous works of art the artist is responding to or in dialogue with. Kind of like, "why can't everything be HTML/CSS, with maybe a little JQuery?" Sure, you have a point, but there are clearly more sophisticated use-cases where that approach is not the most effective, and, your saying that kinda indicates you may not have encountered or had to deal with those use-cases. Truth be told I think computer science, at least the parts of it where you get to create abstractions which then define the bounds of what is possible within that programming paradigm (see - word jumble!) is closer to the "soft" humanities than many are aware of or would care to see. Tech folks tend to love/desire "certainty" in one form another, and, the easiest way to achieve that is to rule out everything which is "uncertain", and, constrain your domain until "certainty" can be achieved. Which can be a great approach for certain technical problems, but also IMHO results in ignorant behavior towards anything which threatens said certainty.

keiferski 6y ago

There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot. As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS, JavaScript ("What do you mean it has nothing to do with Java?") and so on.

randomsearch 6y ago
Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Good point. I should add "non-technical" to my comment.
pbourke 6y ago
> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.
- keiferski 6y ago
  > In the humanities it’s the point, No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.

throwawayback 6y ago

In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1335324372421238795 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1326556860418314242 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/132655686041831424... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1282344397393272840 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128234439739327284... https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1312742522674917382 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/131274252267491738... (NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1282261189091905538 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128226118909190553... (NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/1309790018219761664 https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/130979001821976166... I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable dogma that I vehemently disagree with.

__float 6y ago
That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are very often tax advantaged. If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare there must not be any?
- throwawayback 6y ago
  It is a politico-religious movement. Of course people that side with that movement find value in funding people to produce texts in its tradition and educate students in its ways of talking. I don't.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    > It is a politico-religious movement. Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to label and then defame something they don't like. They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to describe something, but too vague and imprecise to actually describe anything. Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they critique society for the oppressive elements which they believe they've found. I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques of systemic racism. Criticize something specific so we can talk about it. But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to make would rapidly fall apart. And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists, communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism, Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism, Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point of contention), and so on. Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives? The entire field of Gender Studies? Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it. But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you criticize makes it difficult to do so. And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles. Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you didn't actually say it.

woodruffw 6y ago

It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense. What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense. In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.

rriepe 6y ago
I've noticed that everyone who claims to hear dog whistles is, in fact, a dog.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  This would imply that anybody who has studied a subject enough to recognize references to that subject is, in fact, the subject itself. It's obvious on face value that criminal prosecutors aren't (necessarily) criminals and that WWII historians aren't (necessarily) neo-Nazis. If you're going to accuse people who know about a subject of being that subject, be less oblique about it.
  - rriepe 6y ago
    There's no deeper reading to my post. I'm claiming that you're literally a dog.
    - woodruffw 6y ago
      Better than a featherless biped, I guess.
dang 6y ago
This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place. Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20postmodernis&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

tim333 6y ago

While it's not very Hacker News, 'humour' can have some value. Here's Calvin and Hobbes on much the same stuff https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849a7a06e2a78c7.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849...

iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
Ah man, humor! I like humor too. I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers. Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.

svat 6y ago

No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or interestingness, consider some examples: > Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √–1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (–1). This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes √-1. I got this reference from “Postmodernism and its problems with science” by Jean Bricmont (the original link has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publication/2731761_Postmodernism_and_Its_Problems_With_Science/links/0deec518162f19a016000000/Postmodernism-and-Its-Problems-With-Science.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...). Bricmont co-wrote the book Impostures intellectuelles (French) / Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book: * (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonsense&oldid=992481909#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonse...) Bruce Fink accused the authors of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings." * Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc² is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us […] privileged what goes the fastest”, and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has, in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/ https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled “Opaque Writing Style”, which, if I'm reading correctly, says that it is intentional. The London Review of Books carried a review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pauvre-sokal https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pau... , reference via https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also the many links on Sokal's page: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's book that defends her by saying: > Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont. My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse writers, you can find people “playing the game” or being unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand, to trust that the authors are in fact saying something meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal), and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the authors aren't failing to be clear; they aren't even trying! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems reasonable to suggest non-earnestness. (This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important—it may very well be—the point is only whether earnestness is considered a value.) -------- Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever have a section in their biographical entry justifying their “opaque writing style”, nor have it said that in their world it's better to be “wild” than correct. This IMO is a genuine value difference between the fields.

zemo 6y ago

one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny. hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".

dang 6y ago
I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.
- iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
  I'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here. You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses. However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.

eloff 6y ago

I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these humanities for the make believe they are. These people basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and that's damning. They even published a rewrite of mein kampf. Why should my tax dollars go towards that? These people should get a real job and contribute to society. Bogus is being too charitable. It made for one of my all time favorite episodes of Joe Rogan though. Worth a listen. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_academics_write_hoax_articles_for_peer/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_acad...

literallycancer 6y ago
Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research? >These people should get a real job and contribute to society Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.
- eloff 6y ago
  > Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research? Research is a process through which we unlock various technological orchards to harvest for the betterment of all mankind. The problem we have today is we're running low on new orchards. It's a crying shame how little we spend on research - compared to e.g. weapons. > Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps. Do I dignify that with a reply? That's got nothing to do with what I said.
woodruffw 6y ago
> Why should my tax dollars go towards that? Why should your tax dollars go towards CS research, when nearly half of all sampled papers (circa 2015) can't be reproduced [1]? As a society, we delegate funding based on perceptions of expertise: someone who knows more than you or I about these specific fields decided that they deserved some amount of funding (probably significantly less than you think). Sometimes that means that junk and fraud[2] gets through; that's the cost of doing business in every field. These kinds of embarrassing mistakes should be read as an indictment of academic culture and the failures of the peer review system as a whole, not a "gotcha" against a field that you or I aren't qualified to evaluate. Which, again, is why nobody asked for my opinion or yours about which things to fund. [1]: http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/ http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/ [2]: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-acm-ieee-computer-architecture-conferences-ccd61169370d https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...

tbrownaw 6y ago

> you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." < That represents philosophy in general about as well as say Theranos represents startups in general. And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.

roenxi 6y ago

In context though - 'earnestness' here is a quality looked for in academic founders and is being looked at as an ability to solve important problems that other people care about. The humanities studying hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness don't have that. In particular, the entire field has come up with no useful commentary on 'hegemonic whiteness', hermeneutic or otherwise, that leads to problem solving. It isn't a culture that is producing strong startup founders like STEM does. It's fair to say they are less earnest in the way PG is using the term; the humanities isn't where people go to solve real-world problems. Humanities is arguably at the base of some very successful companies (arguably Apple, for example). Hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness is the base of some profoundly ... albinophobe? I dunno, they're racist and don't like white people ... arguments and nothing admirable that I have yet encountered.

chmod600 6y ago

The "bogus" comment falls in a paragraph about ventures where the earnest don't generally win. So the first question to ask is: do the earnest generally win in that kind of academic field? I don't know much about that field, but I'm guessing probably not just because it is too closely tied to politics. If you earnestly persue research, you are likely to find something that contradicts the current political fashions, and end up buried. So in that sense, PG is probably right. The next question is: is he inappropriately dismissive (or even insulting) to the field over all? Does is have value that he unfairly dismisses? You seem to think so. But even if so, pretty much everyone needs to be dismissive about a lot of stuff. At least he's transparent about where his blind spots are.

adamsea 6y ago
None of what you are saying responds to what the parent poster actually said. You're constructing your own argument and then claiming the other person was arguing what you're arguing, but did a bad job of it.

geofft 6y ago

A note for people seeing the essay now: he's quietly changed the link to be "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic racialized phenomenology." (Which makes it even clearer that he doesn't have a reasoned argument at any specific target in mind, just "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Also that he forgot he needs to hide his power level.) EDIT: He's quietly changed the link again to remove "racialized."

flippinburgers 6y ago

Philosophy, the humanities, gender studies: really only for edgy college kids who are trying to get laid.