Earnestness

Thank you! Much appreciated.

> 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.

That's an excellent point and I agree with you. My statement about tech folks and certainty was a bit too broad, tbh, and maybe expresses some personal frustration as much as anything.

At the end of the day we're all human and vulnerable to the same tricks of psychology and human foibles.

[EDIT: I want to share in a quote another poster shared that's relevant to our discussion: 'Math is hard because it is easy. The humanities are easy because they are hard.'

It's not just about math being quantifiable, but that there's a much lower barrier of entry to discuss "the humanities" - justice, ethics, the meaning of life, etc. Maybe a good analogy would be we can all discuss the weather, but that means sometimes we think meteorologists are just quacks? : )].

[EDIT EDIT: If interested in learning more about the humanities I highly recommend the Socratic dialogues as starting point. They're still the foundation of all Western Philosophy, including the postmodern stuff people love to hate on. They're pretty approachable and interesting and readable and short and don't have any jargon, really. A course of some kind is ideal but you could read them on your own.]

> Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2]

I think he got the definition of "earnest" wrong. It is not about genuine interest. "Earnest" simply means something like "honestly revealing your motivations", no? What if you earnestly want to become rich and famous? What's wrong with that?

Also want to add to the parent post that "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness" is actually just a bunch of keywords and I doubt a competent academic would use that particular phrase.

It's easier for me to imagine, "The hermeneutics of hegemonic whiteness", "The dialectic of whiteness and hegemony", etc.

I have a hard time imagining "hermeneutic" and "dialectic" together because of what those words actually mean. I feel like you'd see one or the other in the kind of phrase / term / sentence we are discussing.

"Hermeneutics" is defined as: "the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts." Back in the day people did close reading/analysis of the Bible so they could understand what God meant and called it hermeneutics. Today it can encompass close reading and analysis of literature (since techniques of analyzing one book - the Bible - also work when analyzing other books) or be used in a more general way to talk about a sort of abstracted, looking-at-the-symbols-within approach to analyzing something.

"Dialectic" is literally a dialogue between two people, the term originating with Ancient Greece and Socrate's approach to philosophy. Hegel retconned it to also include a sort of evolution-through-competition where two things (for lack of a better word) logically opposite to each other butt heads and produce a "synthesis" - not unlike the "marketplace of ideas".

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

"This “textbook” Being-Nothing-Becoming example is closely connected to the traditional idea that Hegel’s dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, which, when applied to the logic, means that one concept is introduced as a “thesis” or positive concept, which then develops into a second concept that negates or is opposed to the first or is its “antithesis”, which in turn leads to a third concept, the “synthesis”, that unifies the first two "

I have no problem with funding CS research. It's at least somewhat productive to society. Not hugely, but that's academia for you. Even batting 50% is great compared to 0%.

These kinds of woke gender studies, socialist, racist, fields etc are a joke. I don't accept your implication that only someone inside the nut house are credentialed to evaluate it - if anything those seem like the people least likely to be able to make a clear judgment. These kinds of people are dangerous - they advocate for tearing down the system we have that works pretty well - with no coherent idea of what to replace it with. If they ever got into power we'd all be screwed.

It's my opinion that these fields are a net negative to society as a whole, having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not receive public funding. They are merely thinly disguised political ideologies. It's sad what academia has come to.

It's worth mentioning Paul Graham has a degree in philosophy. He should know what hermeneutic and dialectic mean.