6 ms·

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 s

by 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.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Agreed! :)
- nullsense 6y ago
  >To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. MongoDB is webscale.
  - jkestner 6y ago
    For the uninitiated: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping over something they could explain in detail. In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic programming. To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed said something along the lines of math is hard because it's easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.
iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points. 1. I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur. I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-). I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about. 2. I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains. But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1]. [1]. http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
enriquto 6y ago
> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even western percussion instruments are painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to understand western harmony as a concrete particular case among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g. https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-music.html https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus... this is a serious textbook about ethnomusicology and linear PDE on Riemannian manifolds. What were your ethnomusicology classes about? They might be really bad, if you ended up thinking that it is a "soft" subject.
- telesilla 6y ago
  I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include: Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.0405?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04... Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnational_Encounters_Music_and_Performance_at_the_US-Mexico_Border_ed_by_Alejandro_L_Madrid_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati... Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?hl=es&id=JiK9DgAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?...
  - adamsea 6y ago
    I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic. FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool. Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper: “This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.” For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.

by dvt 6y ago

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.
- adamsea 6y ago
  Agreed! :)
nullsense 6y ago
>To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. MongoDB is webscale.
- jkestner 6y ago
  For the uninitiated: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping over something they could explain in detail. In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic programming. To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed said something along the lines of math is hard because it's easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.

iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago

Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points. 1. I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur. I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-). I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about. 2. I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains. But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1]. [1]. http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

enriquto 6y ago

> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even western percussion instruments are painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to understand western harmony as a concrete particular case among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g. https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-music.html https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus... this is a serious textbook about ethnomusicology and linear PDE on Riemannian manifolds. What were your ethnomusicology classes about? They might be really bad, if you ended up thinking that it is a "soft" subject.

telesilla 6y ago
I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include: Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.0405?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04... Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnational_Encounters_Music_and_Performance_at_the_US-Mexico_Border_ed_by_Alejandro_L_Madrid_review https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati... Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?hl=es&id=JiK9DgAAQBAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?...
- adamsea 6y ago
  I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic. FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool. Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper: “This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.” For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.