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Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

psyche.co

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Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#191

Post by mordymoop »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #140
mordymoop wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time. The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness." People are instantly nerdsniped by…

You seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.

I think you have misunderstood my point about the influence of the memetic apparatus on the promulgation of ideas. I'm not taking a particular stance on whether or not the Thinker himself would say X; I'm saying X is the version of the idea that is widely ascribed to the thinker because of memetic selection, and X is usually a version of what the thinker actually thinks.

To say that X is a "strawman" implies some degree of disingenuousness, some intentionality, as if you could only possibly believe that Robin Hanson thinks people don't really care about their children if you are actively trying to misrepresent his real stance, which you secretly know deep down. In reality, Robin Hanson actually does think that people don't care about their children nearly as much as they say they do, add six more pages of caveats. This gets rhetorically rounded off to "Robin Hanson thinks people don't care about their children." The result is endless stupid conversations. This may or not be partly Robin Hanson's fault for making his blog post titles intentionally inflammatory and attention-grabby ("Healthcare is not about health", etc.). I am agnostic was to whether Foucalt has intentionally turned into the skid on this; but I do personally suspect that many big thinkers lean into obscurantism because they don't want to be nailed down.

Another way of phrasing the above: What you just posted is actually my point. On reflection, I'm not actually sure whether you read beyond the second paragraph.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#192

Post by BlueTemplar »

nescioquid wrote: post #186
BlueTemplar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, Plato didn't consider that sophistry might be easier through oration than through writing ?

Sure, there's the dialog where Socrates encounters the two brothers who teach people how to "fight with words" (Euthydemus). The dialog is really pretty funny to read, and the arguments the brothers throw around I've seen referenced as examples of eristics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic ).

Does he really say something in the vein that it wouldn't be as bad if they did this in writing ?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#193

Post by BlueTemplar »

mordymoop wrote: post #191
BlueTemplar wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.

I think you have misunderstood my point about the influence of the memetic apparatus on the promulgation of ideas. I'm not taking a particular stance on whether or not the Thinker himself would say X; I'm saying X is the version of the idea that is widely ascribed to the thinker because of memetic selection, and X is usually a version of what the thinker actually thinks. To say that X is a "strawman" implies some deg…

I might have misunderstood/skipped the part 'which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing' ?

How much is the Thinker to blame ? What can Thinkers do to avoid this issue (besides 'obscurantism') ?

I guess sometimes a specific critic wouldn't even be to blame, it's just that the critics are over time slowly going to shift the initial meaning until only the hollow strawman husk remains ?

But yeah, I guess that we're talking about the same thing...

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#194

Post by nescioquid »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #192
nescioquid wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's the dialog where Socrates encounters the two brothers who teach people how to "fight with words" (Euthydemus). The dialog is really pretty funny to read, and the arguments the brothers throw around I've seen referenced as examples of eristics ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic ).

Does he really say something in the vein that it wouldn't be as bad if they did this in writing ?

I am unaware of any such passage in Plato where the verbal expression of an idea is compared with the written expression of that idea; he criticizes eristics and he criticizes writing.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#195

Post by TimTheTinker »

olooney wrote: post #171
TimTheTinker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying a potentially true idea could commit known fallacies? If so, what you’re really saying is that analytical philosophy is in question... in that case, I don’t think it’s worth arguing with you.

That is correct. As my argument was not a proposition expressed in or reducible to a formal language, nor was it an empirically verifiable statement of fact, it is neither true nor false but is in fact meaningless. There was no point in my expressing it, and there is certainly no point in you arguing with it. As Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

An argument or proposition doesn't have to be formal or empirically verifiable (or or even falsifiable) to be subject to the kibosh of basic analysis.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#196

Post by boo_boo »

SummerlyMars wrote: post #183
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transfo…

It's still difficult to parse. If I replace the parts that I don't understand with variables, I get > The move from a in which is understood to structure brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of that takes as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the . Consider all the differen…

If you don't understand "capital", you're probably punching above your weight anyway.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#197

Post by baron_harkonnen »

whimsicalism wrote: post #144
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transfo…

> the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, they are all quite clear. Many modern marxists, like G.A. Cohen, write similarly clearly. > Attention is All You Need That paper actually defines quite a bit of what it is talking about. Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this. I've actually read quite a bit of the "psychoanalysis"-inspired ph…

> That paper actually defines quite a bit

What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as'

a structuralist account: capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to

etc.

> intentionally obscurant

Academic technical papers are also very frequently intentionally obscurant. That's part of academic writing, and certainty is itself worthy of critique.

> Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this

"In this section we compare various aspects of self-attention layers to the recurrent and convolutional layers commonly used for mapping one variable-length sequence of symbol representations(x1,...,xn)to another sequence of equal length(z1,...,zn), with xi,zi∈Rd, such as a hidden layer in a typical sequence transduction encoder or decoder."

Attention is All You Need is no different than the equivalent postmodernist text (this line of Butler's is certainly not the "Attention.." of the postmodernist theory world). Both are impossible to understand with one read, require lots of thought and study to understand and it typically helps to have someone else guide you through the text.

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#199

Post by tgv »

denton-scratch wrote: post #126
tgv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you disagree without agreeing what "truth" means?

Ha! Well, "obviously" everything that I know must be truth; otherwise it would be mere belief. But for everything I think I know, there's someone that believes different. In that light, it seems unreasonable for anyone to think they have access to truth. So truth seems to be reduced (or elevated?) to something we can never reach, and only aspire to. It makes it into some kind of metaphysical object, whose nature can'…

But what are these conclusions worth, then? How do you accept that the premises and reasoning are solid? Where does it go from "this table is wooden" (an example used in this discussion somewhere; let's ignore the linguistic problems) to "but that truth is manufactured"?

Re: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

#200

Post by yboris »

coldtea wrote: post #22

> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…

To me it seems like this is the trouble: for you, reading Foucault, it is clear what is meant by truth and that the word is constrained to a narrow scope. But to others, including me, it is not at all clear how far the scope goes.

So if the defense of this ambiguity is to require everyone to read several books by the author first, I find it unacceptable.

Without clarity, people can think they agree, while they disagree. Similarly, they might think they disagree, when in fact they agree. I have a hard time comprehending why so many people defend vague language.

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