Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Rob-Goodier 5820 days ago
About #2: It's impossible that it's nonsense. To be nonsense, it would require a conspiracy among the field's thousands of practitioners and most of their students and admirers. The alternative is that the practitioners - the content creators - are the conspirators and the consumers are dupes, but the odds are against maintaining a long-running scam on such otherwise smart people (I hope).

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.
2 comments
Terretta 5820 days ago
> "It's impossible that it's nonsense. To be nonsense, it would require a conspiracy among the field's thousands of practitioners and most of their students and admirers."

This doesn't follow. There are many other ways it could be nonsense, as demonstrated by countless erudite groups from Nebuchadnezzar's astrologers to the Inquisition. None wants to be the one who "doesn't get it".

Moreover, the participants you list--practitioners, students, admirers--are hardly impartial.

Their interests in the emperor's clothes are well vested.

link
Rob-Goodier 5819 days ago
The Emperor was outed on day one, which sort of underlines my point. The new clothes story could also reflect the intelligence of crowds. Or the inability to dupe a crowd for very long. Life isn't beholden to the story, obviously, but I have some faith in the intelligence of groups of people. Too much faith to believe that we can be tricked outright for decades. There's no incentive to keep quiet about a conspiracy in the field of lit crit. There's little money in it, and little power. If there were a conspiracy, there would be plenty of whistle blowers within the fold of lit critics who would lose interest in the farce and call out their peers. Since that's not happening, it seems much more likely that there's less BS in the field than us outsiders would like to believe.
link
calcnerd256 5820 days ago
It doesn't have to be a conscious conspiracy.
link