[FabHK]

> given a couple months, I could pose as just about any sort of expert.

Intriguing, and I wonder whether it's true. Probably in social settings for a while, but hopefully not eg through a job interview.

(related xkcd, "Impostor": https://www.xkcd.com/451/ )

[mirimir]

No, not job interviews. But I did ghostwrite parts of medical reviews, and of briefs and expert reports in litigation.

[wruza]

>xkcd

I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew the same crap for decades instead of just doing something better. Even politics is better than that.

“in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts; but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts”

“To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—"false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing it—without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing)”

I mean: words instead blanket a low-pitch synthesis and require most priorities in it to shift from a detailed to an increasingly informal scene which wraps by itself to form an atopological plane of understanding of the undecidables. Are you think so?

[smogcutter]

> I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis.

Read Popper for a hint at how misguided this is outside hard science.

[lowdose]

Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?

[smogcutter]

You’d hope.

[wruza]

Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote?

I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)

[smogcutter]

Sorry, just saw this. The Open Society and its Enemies is the big winner for Popper imo.

Short answer: it’s impossible.

Medium answer: the attempt itself is counterproductive and misunderstands how we use language.

Long answer: aside from being impossible, the impulse is related to Platonic essentialism, which is the philosophical spawning ground of authoritarianism and has stifled honest inquiry for circa 2k years.

[FabHK]

FWIW, I don't think very formal methods are the crux of the matter (at least for the incipient stages of a scientific field).

Having said that, postmodernism is (in my view) totally misguided. The obfuscated language is intentional, as among its epistemological assumptions is that reason is not only limited, but has only limited access to reality (well, or creates reality), and at any rate is insufficient.

Recommended readings:

* The Sokal Hoax [1]

* Intellectual Impostors by Bricmont and Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense in the US) [2] for an expansion on the Sokal Hoax, and many examples on pretentious and preposterous abuse of scientific terminology by postmodern philosophers

* Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault by Hicks [3] on the history of postmodernism, arising from counter-enlightenment philosophy all the way from Rousseau via the insufferable German idealists, including Hegel with his dialectical reasoning, which supported both fascism and Marxism.

Postmodernists often take specific reasonable criticism of or problems with science or realism, and then blow them up and generalise them unjustifiably. It is worth taking some of the criticism to heart, but the postmodernists aren't even the ones formulating those problems in the most cogent way. So, my advice would be to waste some, but not too much time on postmodernism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-098325...

[mirimir]

Well, there is the infamous Sokal paper:[0]

Alan D. Sokal (1996) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996).

And then SciGen, of course.[1]

0) https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre...

1) https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

[threwawasy1228]

It is actually kind of funny, I know what deconstruction is, and I would call the two quoted paragraphs pretty clear. They don't do a horrible job of describing what it is.

I think it just takes being steeped in the jargon of the field to read that. But, it is a pretty ok explanation. If you think this is somehow bad, I would argue you should try to read any of the wikipedia pages on homotopy type theory without background knowledge and tell me if those read like gibberish to you as well.

[wruza]

Yeah they do. I almost can read them now (not very confidently, but I was interested in similar topics), because there is always some strict clean concept below the terms. You just go to definitions of, say, surjection or impredicative, and down there is an explanation. You may bury in the details for first times, but with some logging or skipping “for later” it’s still possible.

The same you may find of course for “intelligible over sensible” etc, but then there are 53 schools, 734 works and billions of words to read, before you get that all of them just tossing meanings to claim their right. If something cannot be drawn as a diagram (whatever complex), it is not worth studying, because you cannot spend 50 years to understand something like “well, not sure what that means”. It almost feels like philosophers simply are bad at math/logic and have to use vague words and broad examples to prove their theorems or build axioms. After few iterations of “looking up” everyone is lost in trees forever, since there is no common sense of a forest, whose meaning could be fixed independently of given language or jargon differences. Thought turns into master and thinkers turn into its slaves? Who can prove that they understand this complexity and not simply trained their bio-NNs to claim it to themselves with no inner resistance? Can they reveal an impostor from that xkcd quickly? He-he.

Boring long-running sentences of form “bla bla ... (bla, bla, bla, bla) bla bla bla, bla bla (...) ...” only make it worse. I never seen it in good tech/math docs, but for subj it was a big red flag “never touch it”.

Ed: grammar