The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#61

Post by platz » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #57

hirundo wrote: post #4

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…

The easiest way for an aspiring rationalist to talk himself into supporting a faulty conclusion is to start with a feeling of rightness or wrongness, examine those feelings and pluck out some rationalisations, then mistake them for principles and follow them to extremes.

Which is why highly educated folks have some of most flagrant biases.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#62

Post by username90 » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

Social sciences has yet to find their scientific method. Natural science was mostly bullshit before the scientific method and it set them straight. So in my opinion listening to social scientists today is kinda like reading Aristotle to learn about physics. A lot of thoughts for sure, and it sounds smart, but it totally lacks any connection to reality.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#63

Post by Zarath » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #34

The "furious exchange of proper nouns" made me lul. "Derrida and Badiou at Tanagra!" It's like this because like the Tamarians, everyone in the discussion is assumed to be familiar with all of the background material -- and if you are not, then what the hell are you doing here? I saw this kind of elitism unfold here on Hackernews once. Someone once asked for an explanation of what deconstruction was and was told basi…

I wrote a long response to this and deleted it, so I'll just say this. Politics and philosophy are one of the few things where everyone feels qualified no matter how pedestrian or unqualified they are. So you'll have to forgive people for not bothering to listen to someone who hasn't read a book on politics or philosophy maybe in their entire life yet feel like their regurgitated Fox News talking points should be taken seriously in a discussion. You wouldn't listen to someone who hasn't passed physics 1 about the whether the bridge you are building is stable. This isn't elitism.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#64

Post by faissaloo » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

wayoutthere wrote: post #49

api wrote: post #42

One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.

People don’t want philosophy; if they did then there are plenty of authors from Aristotle through the modern day. Existentialism is basically “how to survive in an arbitrary world that makes no sense”. It’s a fucking guidebook for the modern world built in the years before and after WW2. People en masse want pop-philosophy that confirms their existing beliefs. Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to…

>Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

I contest this, JP is among the many reasons why I've practically 'turbocharged' my life and transformed from a scrawny pretty toxic guy into an assertive, empathetic, can-do and intelligent dad-type guy.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#65

Post by aalleavitch » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

mrrrgn wrote: post #37

hirundo wrote: post #4

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…

Certain personality types are more likely to ignore social pressure and pursue logical conclusions of ideals. It's probably no accident that such personality profiles only account for a small percentage of our population as logical conclusions based off of faulty models can lead to huge disasters. The great mass of people who don't do much deep thinking act as a dampener and probably prevent our society from shaking…

I don't think that's so much an adaptive aspect of human societies as it is a result of the sort of memes that are effective at propagating themselves. If you are a meme that is facing selective pressures towards persisting for as long as possible, you'll fare best if you exploit human psychology such that you're very hard to get rid of and invoke behavior in the people that carry you that is oppressively dogmatic and ideally prevents the sort of exploratory behavior that might see you replaced by another meme.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#66

Post by brighter2morrow » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #20

hirundo wrote: post #4

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…

extremism /ɪkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m,ɛkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m/ noun the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism. Update: My point is that you are redefining what "extremism" means. e.g. The far-right is extremism. To think that you can create colonies in Mars in the next 10 years is "unorthodox". If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defini…

>If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extremist political groups live by isolating their membership from mainstream society. Mainstream society's way to reduce the reach of the far-right and far-left is to reach out to their low-level rank-and-file members to sooth their fears and invite them back to mainstream society.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#67

Post by sho » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

wayoutthere wrote: post #49

api wrote: post #42

One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.

People don’t want philosophy; if they did then there are plenty of authors from Aristotle through the modern day. Existentialism is basically “how to survive in an arbitrary world that makes no sense”. It’s a fucking guidebook for the modern world built in the years before and after WW2. People en masse want pop-philosophy that confirms their existing beliefs. Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to…

> Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

Without wishing to get into yet another discussion about Peterson, I think that's a pretty textbook example of an intellectually dishonest attempt to simply pigeonhole someone you probably don't know all that much about into the "enemies" basket.

I've read and listened to JP to some extent - believe it or not, yes, as part as some kind of greater effort to better myself, as is much of my reading. I agree with some of what he thinks, and disagree with others, but I don't regret the time spent. If that makes me a "shit person" then frankly I think it's your worldview that is the problematic one.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#68

Post by UncleMeat » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #4

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…

Second option bias is a real thing. People are often quick to criticize the mainstream but then fail to apply the same skepticism to the ideas that follow. There is tremendous risk in unexamined skepticism.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#69

Post by aalleavitch » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #4

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…

At pretty much every point in time prior to today, in essentially every field, a large portion of the broad academic consensus was either flat-out wrong or missing a large amount of vital nuance, and eventually a fringe idea developed prominence and replaced it to make academic consensus closer to the truth (we hope).

We'd be daft to think the same is not true today. It is very likely that there is some fringe position right now that is far more accurate than whatever passes as consensus, but we may not find that out for some time still.

Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still. Ideally, we should have fringe positions branching out from consensus in every direction, serving as the filopodia of academic thought.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#70

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #28

BeetleB wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People outside the mainstream on a topic who are not deeply experienced specialists in that field have almost certainly fallen prey to well-crafted arguments that advance a falsehood. First off, these are not mutually exclusive stances. Both you and GP can be right at the same time. Second, I'd leave it at "well-crafted" and omit the claim that they are falsehoods. Whether they are true or false is the source of end…

> They believe it because they bought into a prevailing narrative without much thought. And I'm arguing that this is the most rational thing to do in most cases. If you are outside your field, you should just accept the mainstream position unless you have devoted a great deal of (well-spent) time to the study of the topic. For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods, and many of the…

>For any given matter of fact there is only one truth and unlimited falsehoods

For simple things, yes. For most debated things in society, no. Or at least, not in any knowable fashion. Whether a single payer system is better than a private insurance system is not something you'll ever reduce to a fact, because of the sheer number of variables, and even more importantly, because the notion of "better" is nebulous.

And as someone else has already commented, mainstream opinions on the same topic can differ widely from society to society (healthcare, public vs private services, etc). As someone who has lived in fairly disparate societies, that alone is reason enough for me not to put too high a value on mainstream positions in any society, since I know that if I did, I will often be "wrong".

And then there is the reality that there have always been mainstream views that conflict with science.

Not to take away from your wider point. Yes, I agree that one needs to have fairly good analytical abilities, and the average person often goes wrong when straying from the mainstream because it's easy to fall into "local" logical traps. However, I do think that at times one recognizes the mainstream to be one of those logical traps. In my experience, both elegant and simple ideas have a way of gaining hold in society - particularly in philosophy (think Kant's Categorical Imperative, or the Golden Rule), but reality rarely yields to simplicity and elegance.