7 ms·
Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
- absconditus 17y agoThe Postmodernism Generator link in the article seems to be broken. Here is a working URL: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ Information about the generator can be found at the bottom of the generated page.
- ewiethoff 17y agoObligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/451/ http://xkcd.com/451/
- nimbix 17y agoThis reminds me of a textbook from college where the author tried to explain the concept of hegemony by writing 20 pages of unintelligible language, and failed to explain anything at all. Wikipedia, on the other hand, manages to explain the concept in about 3 paragraphs. The professor wasn't much help either because he was too busy telling stories about what it was like when he fought Mussolini's fascists in WW2. It's no surprise I dropped out...
- abstractbill 17y agoThe privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... I'm having a hard time believing this can be anything other than satire.
- pg 17y agoThere's an endless supply of this stuff. Or more precisely, a supply limited only by the publication needs of thousands of professors. Just search for the relevant buzzwords on Google Scholar. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructuralist http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructural... It's funny at first, but after a while just kind of draining.
- sp332 17y agoNo, this is satire: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgres... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair )
- krakensden 17y agoRead your link and the article- the quote about the sexism of E=MC^2 is the real thing.
- ojbyrne 17y agoI sort of dread the idea of defending post-modernism, but here's my opinion. There are some interesting ideas, but unfortunately it's become buried under reams and reams of mediocrity. But that's science, and that's how science has worked for a very, very long time. In the long run the mediocrity gets stripped away, and we're left with the interesting ideas. Phlogiston dominated scientific discourse for far longer than it needed to.
- anatoly 17y agoPostmodernism isn't science. You're right in that the mediocre stuff will fade and the interesting ideas will remain. Yet I have two counterpoints to offer. First, will postmodernism leave lasting ideas at all? Has its skepticism towards language, for example, led to anything new over what was given to us by Wittgenstein? Second, even if all the dross fades and disappears, isn't it a shame about all those years when it dominated humanities and much of philosophy? What kind of genuinely interesting ideas were never explored because of that domination?
- davidmathers 17y agoHas its skepticism towards language, for example, led to anything new over what was given to us by Wittgenstein? This is my question exactly. I would like to see a short intro to postmodernism that starts with Wittgenstein and explains in relatively clear language what new insights it produced. I don't know if it's safe or unsafe to assume that the postmodernists read Wittgenstein.
- Dilpil 17y agoBelieve it.
- xtho 17y agoAt a certain point in history, those sentences were capable of initiating a new way of thinking that was impossible before. 30 years later, Mr. Dawkins enjoys himself beating a dead horse.
- tybris 17y agoWhat point in history do you refer to?
- xtho 17y ago30 to 40 years ago? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray
- anatoly 17y agoPrecisely. You could say that those sentences filled a much-needed gap.
- randallsquared 17y agoI do not often literally laugh out loud while reading HN. Today, I did. :)
- silentbicycle 17y agoUsing magical thinking to reason about scientific phenomena sounds just as out of place as using the scientific method to judge art.
- crux_ 17y agoIt's not satire: it is metaphor. Post-modernism (in the sense of this type of thing, anyway) arose and mostly deals with literature, where imagery, symbolism, and metaphor are the main carriers of meaning rather than spelling things out literally. Also, its purpose isn't so much to interpret the work itself as it is to look through it and see what it says about the writer and the reader. In this case, it's the same thing applied to science rather than a novel, and while it might not be very relevant to fluid mechanics, it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context. That said, 90% of everything is crap and I've no doubt that this is too; it does certainly seem to be on the surface. Edit: I'm different than that other 'crux' who is also standing up for postmodernism here. Odd coincidence!
- jibiki 17y ago> it is metaphor. For what? > it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context. Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?
- crux_ 17y ago> For what? Are you saying the language in the quote above isn't loaded down with symbolic and metaphorical imagery? Or, more specifically, that it isn't drawing metaphorical parallels, rather than literal ones, between physical concepts and cultural ones? > Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be? Please, spare me your sarcasm and scare quotes. Should I interpret your scepticism as a belief that there is nothing at all worthwhile to say about gender and culture in science?
- jibiki 17y ago> Are you saying the language in the quote above isn't loaded down with symbolic and metaphorical imagery? Or, more specifically, that it isn't drawing metaphorical parallels, rather than literal ones, between physical concepts and cultural ones? No, I'm asking what her statement is a metaphor for. A conversation along these lines should look like the following: Crux: "I wouldn't take that vacation if I were you. A rolling stone gathers no moss." Jib: "What do rolling stones have to do with anything?" Crux: "I was speaking metaphorically. What I mean is that as long as you keep going (like the stone,) you'll keep your momentum (won't gather moss.)" > Should I interpret your scepticism as a belief that there is nothing at all worthwhile to say about gender and culture in science? No, just that her quote isn't saying anything worthwhile about gender and culture in science. The fact that you can't identify anything it even "might" be saying is evidence for this. In general, our conversation seems to fit the following pattern: A: "There are many zorks in this world." B: "Really? Name one." A: "Are you saying there's no such thing as a zork? Prove it!" B: "..."
- Estragon 17y agoThere's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]? Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-picking the worst instances of postmodernist discourse and setting up postmodernism as a monolithic entity universally opposed to the values of scientific inquiry. I Love To You[3] is an example of a book written by a post-modernist (one of the ones Sokal et al. made fun of, incidentally) without any obvious obfuscation. I also enjoyed the interview with her, "Thinking life as relation,"[4] although it's a bit less accessible. [1]http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ [2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature04789.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature0... [3]http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=f... [4]http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff597af0724e40ae7f70240cb903f5&pi=0 http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...
- Estragon 17y agoHmm, can someone point me to the documentation for Hacker News's markup system, please?
- johnnybgoode 17y agoThere isn't much: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- Estragon 17y agoThanks, I'll edit out the markdown markups, then.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- aheilbut 17y ago
- shalmanese 17y agoI don't know why everyone constantly brings up Sokal without also mentioning the Bogdonav Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair . Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
- crux 17y agoI am generally aware and wary of the hackerish tendency to deride mightily any intellectual undertaking or material that doesn't triumph, confirm, or conform to their strictly rationalist view of the world and its every corner. I find it boorish and stifling. More to the point, I have some incredibly intelligent friends who have spent a good amount of time with Deconstruction (not identical with Pomo, of course) and have found things of great value to them. Which is why I am desperate, really, for someone to step in and demonstrate the worth of someone like Jacques Derrida, or more dangerously, Lacan or Boudrillard. B-d, for instance, had a bunch of cool ideas, about simulacra and maps and territory and the Gulf War. I've witnessed them, if only in aphoristic form. So how is it that a community that's at least capable of putting out a good handful of really modern, interesting notions can apparently be so firmly up to its knees in bullshit? I think it's unworth us to dismiss this entire wing of 20th-C thought altogether. But when you start trudging through the ludicrous, depressing gibberish that is on display here, it's hard not to. Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds? How am I to reconcile the two attestations of Baudrillard: obvious falsehood and farce on the one hand, and demonstrable cleverness and insight on the other?
- akamaka 17y agoI'm embarrassed every time an article like this gets posted to Hacker News. I don't think anyone here would take Ray Kurzweil's books seriously, but quite a few people would upvote an article by Dawkins or Chomsky, whose books have contributed to their respective fields in the same way that Kurzweil has to ours -- which is to say, not at all. P.S. The last time someone submitted an article about the Sokal affair, I posted a short comment about the importance of postmodernism here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856
- Adlai 17y agoDawkins... , whose books have contributed to [his field]... not at all. Ever heard of a "meme"? Dawkins has contributed plenty to his field, and he writes very accessible books. That essay by him obviously doesn't criticize the entire field. He's just telling his readers to put up some nonsense filters before they start reading padded fluff.
- donniefitz2 17y agoThat article was awesome. Those excerpts sound more like something from The Onion.
- jk4930 17y agoCustomers Who Liked This Item Also Liked http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/dictionary.php http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/dictionary.php
- ovi256 17y agoWhy have comedy when you have postmodernist 'academia' ? So much funnier.
- RK 17y agoA few years ago there was the so-called Bogdanov Affair in physics, which some people claimed was a "reverse Sokal hoax" (i.e. publishing bogus physics that was so esoteric that no one could tell whether it was legitimate). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
- eru 17y agoYes. But fortunately (for the phyisicists) the Bogdanov brothers were not postmodernist pranksters.
- xtho 17y agoCS can be pretty postmodern too: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ (An Automatic CS Paper Generator)
- tybris 17y agoIt probably has more to do with the ability of computer scientists to create a paper generator than with CS in particular. There are people who can neither think nor write in every branch of science. The remarkable thing about postmodernism is that there are no other people in it.
- scott_s 17y agoAnd if you submit a paper generated from that to a top CS conference or journal, it will get rejected.
- xtho 17y agoMaybe, but it was sufficient to get the developers to a conference.
- scott_s 17y agoRead the motivation behind it more carefully. It got accepted to a scam conference. These are conferences that accept all papers, and exist to generate a profit for the conference organizers. Nobody takes the scholarship of those conferences seriously. The entire point of the exercise was similar to the stunt Sokal pulled: to demonstrate the quality of the venue by submitting a paper that anyone competent in the field would recognize as garbage.
- tybris 17y agoPostmodernism is the most embarassing thing we have to show to the archeologists of the future.
- Adlai 17y agoBut because it's "fluid and leaky", it's not going to fossilize... I think that every culture has had their fair share of overly-respected sophomores. How many do you think trolled around Athens, and were forgotten by history because nobody cared to record what they said? With a bit of common sense, that's what will happen here too.
- fluffster 17y agoThis essay by Stove is a very interesting read too: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
- knowtheory 17y agoI think the most frustrating thing about this particular article and the way it's presented is the fact that this is, in essence, a literature overview/summary by Dawkins. Very little of the content involved in the piece is original thinking by St. Dawkins. He's not disrobing anyone (perish the thought), he's reporting on Skoal & Bricmont disrobing people.
- rcorsaro 17y agoIn the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Derrida uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the paradigm, and subsequent futility, of postcultural truth. In a sense, subdialectic textual theory holds that the task of the writer is significant form. “Society is part of the paradigm of narrativity,” says Debord; however, according to Dietrich[9] , it is not so much society that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the genre, and some would say the dialectic, of society. Foucault uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the role of the poet as artist. However, Parry[10] states that we have to choose between dialectic objectivism and precapitalist deappropriation. Any number of situationisms concerning capitalist discourse may be discovered. But the example of subdialectic textual theory intrinsic to Joyce’s Dubliners is also evident in Ulysses, although in a more mythopoetical sense. Lacan uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the common ground between reality and sexual identity. Thus, Lyotard’s essay on subdialectic textual theory implies that the law is capable of truth. Baudrillard promotes the use of textual narrative to deconstruct hierarchy. In a sense, several materialisms concerning the futility, and eventually the paradigm, of subdialectic culture exist. The characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the reader as observer. However, in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce deconstructs realism; in Ulysses, although, he analyses capitalist discourse.
- ThomPete 17y agoWay to often people confuse what would be nice to have with what is possible to have. Postmodernism unfortunately must often take the heat from those people. Postmodernism is an observation is a critique of the absolute frames of references. It's not an atempt to claim how the world is but rather a tool to hack reality. In that sense no people on HN should be against postmodernism but rather understand it instead of just showing their ignorance.
- grantmoney 17y agoI posted this in the other thread, but intended to post it here, so it's posted twice unfortunately. Apologies in advance! I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending. The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity. From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there was no more philosophy. You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it. The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology. The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.