Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Earnestness

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 478 posts

Re: Earnestness

#291

Post by literallycancer »

eloff wrote: post #286
iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #192

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think…

I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these humanities for the make believe they are. These people basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and that's da…

Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?

>These people should get a real job and contribute to society

Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.

Re: Earnestness

#292

Post by dan-robertson »

pbourke wrote: post #252
keiferski wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot. As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing…

> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying…

If you want to try to read something from the humanities that doesn’t use any specialised words, you could try Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack of suitable language to express his ideas.

It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the fields you don’t really know about are trying to obscure some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted. Maybe these people are actually trying to express something complex and nuanced?

I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing being obscure but I don’t think these are unique to the humanities. Indeed I think you’ll probably find many people in humanities fields are better writers than those in the academic areas you may be more familiar with.

Re: Earnestness

#293

Post by pgwhalen »

adamsea wrote: post #217
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`? I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".

Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-understood meanings. Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes - they'd say the same thing. Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant of us to…

I enjoyed this comment - as someone that is occasionally skeptical of these lofty ideas in the humanities, the analogy to abstractions/concepts in programming never occurred to me.

On the certainty thing, though - I see what you're saying about tech folks desiring certainty, but I've also found that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is, and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that. For example, proving the efficacy of a vaccine: we really can be extremely certain that a vaccine is effective. Other areas of study (that I believe are still entirely valid and important), just can't achieve that level of rigor.

I should note my views may be skewed as the entirety of my career has been as a software engineer at an options trading firm, where we are buying and selling uncertainty in a sense, so we have to be comfortable with it.

After writing that all out.. maybe I'm just confirming you example of constraining uncertainty until there can be certainty, or at least a well-quantified form of uncertainty.

Re: Earnestness

#294

Post by rriepe »

woodruffw wrote: post #270
rriepe wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that everyone who claims to hear dog whistles is, in fact, a dog.

This would imply that anybody who has studied a subject enough to recognize references to that subject is, in fact, the subject itself. It's obvious on face value that criminal prosecutors aren't (necessarily) criminals and that WWII historians aren't (necessarily) neo-Nazis. If you're going to accuse people who know about a subject of being that subject, be less oblique about it.

There's no deeper reading to my post. I'm claiming that you're literally a dog.

Re: Earnestness

#295

Post by sidlls »

Yet another PG essay in which he defines as positive characteristics those which he thinks he has, and in broad strokes completely dismisses the value of anything else.

Re: Earnestness

#296

Post by tbrownaw »

iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #192

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think…

> you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."

First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." That represents philosophy in general about as well as say Theranos represents startups in general.

And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.

Re: Earnestness

#297

Post by dang »

cambalache wrote: post #224
dang wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Under that premise nothing can be criticized. Even Mein Kampf must have a "charitable" interpretation.

Note that word plausible.

Re: Earnestness

#298

Post by philosopher1234 »

pbourke wrote: post #263
keiferski wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the humanities it’s the point, No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.

> virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that. I “earnestly engaged” with it by doing a humanities degree 20 years ago when this stuff was taking root. The only field that seems resistant to being overwhelmed by it is history, possibly because the scholarship must be grounded in original sources.

What have you read in the humanities recently?

Re: Earnestness

#299

Post by dang »

bluntfang wrote: post #69
warent wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentence you opened this up with comes across kind of concerning and gross. For reasons?

I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have company.

That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Earnestness

#300

Post by philosopher1234 »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #264
anubidiocane wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness"? And why a researcher should use it? Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"

> But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness"? "A deep dialogue on the overwhelming power wielded by white people". > And why a researcher should use it? I get that fields have their different choices of jargon, my point is it's hard to misrepresent bad content when it's written like the above example. > Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point co…

Your paraphrase loses some of the reference of the original. The terms chosen there have legacies and specific meanings within their disciplines
Post reply on HN