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This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time. The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memet
by mordymoop 6y ago
This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time.
The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness."
People are instantly nerdsniped by the idea. The implications! Could it be true? The curious reader finds there is always a deep and sophisticated literature backing up the crazy-sounding claim. Only after investing a huge amount of energy can the scholar even hope to unpack the fact of the matter, which is: the Thinker never really meant that claim, not the way it's stated, not using those words the way most people mean them. It always, always, always turns out that the Thinker was either being intentionally provocative with the big-bold-claim, or else using language in an idiosyncratic jargon-ified way.
(Sometimes there is no single Thinker, and instead the big-bold-claim is a meme that bubbles up organically out of a whole school of thought, and is memetically selected for promulgation on the basis of its outrageousness.)
If Foucalt had just written: "The agreed-upon 'truth' of the social, subjective stuff that people tend to loudly disagree about is often decided by who is in power, and who is advantaged by the 'truth' coming out one way or another," well, that's not a body of thought, that's a low-performing tweet. He needs to make it seem big, important, sweeping, general, touching upon every facet of human endeavor. This is not necessarily to say that Foucalt is some kind of intellectual grifter; this is simply the pressure that the universe exerts on all thinkers. To be more general, more important. But, as the Thinker is forced to make their big idea more general and more important, it loses the simple and obviously true (and fundamentally anodyne) tweet-length core.
tl;dr: Memetics ruins everything.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoYou seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.
- mordymoop 6y agoI think you have misunderstood my point about the influence of the memetic apparatus on the promulgation of ideas. I'm not taking a particular stance on whether or not the Thinker himself would say X; I'm saying X is the version of the idea that is widely ascribed to the thinker because of memetic selection, and X is usually a version of what the thinker actually thinks. To say that X is a "strawman" implies some degree of disingenuousness, some intentionality, as if you could only possibly believe that Robin Hanson thinks people don't really care about their children if you are actively trying to misrepresent his real stance, which you secretly know deep down. In reality, Robin Hanson actually does think that people don't care about their children nearly as much as they say they do, add six more pages of caveats. This gets rhetorically rounded off to "Robin Hanson thinks people don't care about their children." The result is endless stupid conversations. This may or not be partly Robin Hanson's fault for making his blog post titles intentionally inflammatory and attention-grabby ("Healthcare is not about health", etc.). I am agnostic was to whether Foucalt has intentionally turned into the skid on this; but I do personally suspect that many big thinkers lean into obscurantism because they don't want to be nailed down. Another way of phrasing the above: What you just posted is actually my point. On reflection, I'm not actually sure whether you read beyond the second paragraph.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI might have misunderstood/skipped the part 'which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing' ? How much is the Thinker to blame ? What can Thinkers do to avoid this issue (besides 'obscurantism') ? I guess sometimes a specific critic wouldn't even be to blame, it's just that the critics are over time slowly going to shift the initial meaning until only the hollow strawman husk remains ? But yeah, I guess that we're talking about the same thing...
- QuesnayJr 6y ago"People in the Middle Ages don't care about their children" was a real view argued by Phillip Aries in Centuries of Childhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood