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I really dislike the academic language used in the article > A pervasive ontology of sameness, rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity

I really dislike the academic language used in the article > A pervasive ontology of sameness, rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity to cultural relativism soon developed. The Ottoman enemy and its Christian opponents became, over time, integrated parts of a discernible, albeit internally contentious unity, revealed by that great equaliser, war. Why do people have to write like this?

gerdesj 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that "pervasive ontology of sameness" should elicit a response of "bingo"! Your quotes are from one individual - Kiril Petkov. He starts off fine in my opinion but his final paragraph looks like he might have hit the sherry too early. I think he is saying: "It's six of one and half a dozen of the other".
mistrial9 5y ago
academics in soft-sciences sometimes use opaque wording to create a shield from low-brow or emotional opposition to the statements.. I think that after watching a trained academic give a talk on the theory behind a particular museum installation.. Since it is highly subjective what to focus on in something like a museum show that is publicized, it seemed to me that the academic was signalling to an "in crowd" of other trained academics, while giving the straight-arm to those who were not > A pervasive ontology of sameness, rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity to cultural relativism soon developed what I read in that is, the destruction was so obvious, that the participants on both sides had to retreat to some feelings of humanity, and found similarity that way
- bryananderson 5y ago
  All of us in computing and natural sciences love to say this about the social sciences, but wouldn’t an outsider to our fields say the same after reading a paper? I don’t think it’s fair to expect academic work to use layperson’s terms. We wouldn’t expect, say, biologists to do this when writing for other biologists—we’d expect a biologist-communicator like Richard Dawkins to write a book summarizing the original work in a way that a smart layperson can understand without needing to learn the field’s jargon. Similarly there are great books by historian-communicators for a general audience, but that’s not the way they talk when writing for other academic historians.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    Yeah, skimming the start of the Spanner paper (to take a random example from CS), can you really claim with a straight face that any of these would be intelligible to the average layperson? > At the highest level of abstraction, it is a database that shards data across many sets of Paxos state machines in data centers spread all over the world. Replication is used for global availability and geographic locality; clients automatically failover between replicas. > provides externally consistent reads and writes, and globally-consistent reads across the database at a timestamp. > Spanner assigns globally-meaningful commit timestamps to transactions, even though transactions may be distributed. The timestamps reflect serialization order.
fsckboy 5y ago
> Why do people have to write like this? they don't have to, but it's a beautifully written sentence, a pleasure to read; it's like you're asking "why do experts in an artform actually display their expertise?" here's how to read it. "A pervasive ontology of sameness soon developed." ok, what does that mean? well, it's "rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity to cultural relativism." You probably believe in the essential humanity of all people, and you have sensitivity to relative differences between cultures: he's saying it started at this time, it's a hinge point between what was before and the modern era. We are all the same, our sameness is pervasive, and it's all of us because ontology is comprehensive. Now that we've decoded the first sentence, the rest restates it: The Ottoman enemy and its Christian opponents became, over time, integrated parts of a discernible, albeit internally contentious unity, revealed by that great equaliser, war. now, it doesn't mean he's right, but that's what he's trying to say.
- haihaibye 5y ago
  Yes, the reason people write like that is because they are showing off to other experts. This article was written for laymen to learn about a battle, and I believe you could state that simply as "developed a shared sense of humanity" The trouble with stating it clearly is that it's now easy to point out it wasn't a pervasive shift - 1/2 a century later there were millions of deaths in the 30 years war - showing a lack of common humanity across Protestant/Catholic lines, let alone Islam/Christianity.

gerdesj 5y ago

I'm pretty sure that "pervasive ontology of sameness" should elicit a response of "bingo"! Your quotes are from one individual - Kiril Petkov. He starts off fine in my opinion but his final paragraph looks like he might have hit the sherry too early. I think he is saying: "It's six of one and half a dozen of the other".

mistrial9 5y ago

academics in soft-sciences sometimes use opaque wording to create a shield from low-brow or emotional opposition to the statements.. I think that after watching a trained academic give a talk on the theory behind a particular museum installation.. Since it is highly subjective what to focus on in something like a museum show that is publicized, it seemed to me that the academic was signalling to an "in crowd" of other trained academics, while giving the straight-arm to those who were not > A pervasive ontology of sameness, rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity to cultural relativism soon developed what I read in that is, the destruction was so obvious, that the participants on both sides had to retreat to some feelings of humanity, and found similarity that way

bryananderson 5y ago
All of us in computing and natural sciences love to say this about the social sciences, but wouldn’t an outsider to our fields say the same after reading a paper? I don’t think it’s fair to expect academic work to use layperson’s terms. We wouldn’t expect, say, biologists to do this when writing for other biologists—we’d expect a biologist-communicator like Richard Dawkins to write a book summarizing the original work in a way that a smart layperson can understand without needing to learn the field’s jargon. Similarly there are great books by historian-communicators for a general audience, but that’s not the way they talk when writing for other academic historians.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Yeah, skimming the start of the Spanner paper (to take a random example from CS), can you really claim with a straight face that any of these would be intelligible to the average layperson? > At the highest level of abstraction, it is a database that shards data across many sets of Paxos state machines in data centers spread all over the world. Replication is used for global availability and geographic locality; clients automatically failover between replicas. > provides externally consistent reads and writes, and globally-consistent reads across the database at a timestamp. > Spanner assigns globally-meaningful commit timestamps to transactions, even though transactions may be distributed. The timestamps reflect serialization order.

fsckboy 5y ago

> Why do people have to write like this? they don't have to, but it's a beautifully written sentence, a pleasure to read; it's like you're asking "why do experts in an artform actually display their expertise?" here's how to read it. "A pervasive ontology of sameness soon developed." ok, what does that mean? well, it's "rooted in notions of essential humanity and nascent sensitivity to cultural relativism." You probably believe in the essential humanity of all people, and you have sensitivity to relative differences between cultures: he's saying it started at this time, it's a hinge point between what was before and the modern era. We are all the same, our sameness is pervasive, and it's all of us because ontology is comprehensive. Now that we've decoded the first sentence, the rest restates it: The Ottoman enemy and its Christian opponents became, over time, integrated parts of a discernible, albeit internally contentious unity, revealed by that great equaliser, war. now, it doesn't mean he's right, but that's what he's trying to say.

haihaibye 5y ago
Yes, the reason people write like that is because they are showing off to other experts. This article was written for laymen to learn about a battle, and I believe you could state that simply as "developed a shared sense of humanity" The trouble with stating it clearly is that it's now easy to point out it wasn't a pervasive shift - 1/2 a century later there were millions of deaths in the 30 years war - showing a lack of common humanity across Protestant/Catholic lines, let alone Islam/Christianity.