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by GeneralMayhem 1332 days ago
The venomous, dangerous, overgeneralized part is - I assume intentionally - snuck in under the radar. Did you follow the link on the word "bogus", and notice what keywords PG thinks are indicative of bogosity? A warning against overwrought language is one thing, but it's carried through to an attack on any complexity in written language (with no acknowledgement that sometimes that complexity is necessary or preferable except for nefarious reasons), and from there to an attack on the caricature of the liberal arts that STEM-lords love to mock without understanding. You start out nodding along to the idea that "mercurial Spaniard" is a bit much, and by the end you're nodding along to the idea that liberal-arts academia is a conspiracy.
2 comments

Graham didn't say that liberal-arts academia is a conspiracy. He said that the part of the humanities that makes heavy use of words like transgression/narrative/postmodern/gender constitutes "the more bogus end of the humanities".

I won't 100% support that, since I don't have a deep understanding of these areas. But I think it's in a valid range of opinion, given things like the Sokal affair [1]. All sorts of people are reasonably suspicious of the hard-to-understand output of the "Theory" and "Studies" fields, not just "STEM-lords".

The suspicion isn't restricted to the humanities either. We all know that business schools and social science departments are having their own problems right now with trendy findings that don't hold up. There's legitimate controversy over whether work in string theory represents meaningful scientific progress. Etc.

Some areas of academia have more problems with bogosity than others. It seems hard to dispute.

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

That "bogus" link is also cheating. I can't hyperlink with my voice, so hyperlinks aren't spoken language.