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Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

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Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#101

Post by viccis »

seydor wrote: post #18

In the past it was the postmodernists attacking physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism) It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science

The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other than a party trick of philosophical philistinism. He showed that a journal that "covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture" doesn't perform adequate peer review of theoretical physics papers.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#102

Post by seydor »

viccis wrote: post #101
seydor wrote: post #18

In the past it was the postmodernists attacking physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism) It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science

The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other tha…

The fact that sokal was wrong doesn't mean that science criticism has offered anything more useful throughout all these years

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#103

Post by f137 »

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Something seems to be wrong...

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#104

Post by jacobgkau »

srean wrote: post #69
titzer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.

Do they have special rights ? Perhaps an expectation or a duty. From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.

As an example, courts ordered the Associated Press allowed back into the White House press pool after the Trump administration attempted to remove them. You or I would not be allowed to just show up at the president's events to watch/listen in person. That is a special right.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#105

Post by javier123454321 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #68
javier123454321 wrote: post #19

[flagged]

The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is. When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and scien…

I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#106

Post by yepitwas »

ch4s3 wrote: post #94
davidw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature. This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in... The press has a lot of problems right now: * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance. * Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The pa…

> * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs This has more or less always been the case.

The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners.

Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#107

Post by ianburrell »

bawolff wrote: post #78

I've never heard of Eric Weinstein, but he sounds like a crank. I don't think he should be grouped together with Sabine, whose primary message is that she believes science funding priorities are out of whack, and are currently funding things she believes won't be fruitful or are over explored at the expense of things she believes are more promising. There is a huge gap between - we should change funding priorities vs…

Sabine has been recently supporting Eric Weinstein. She started off criticizing research, but has been following the path to grift. Now she appears on podcasts with fellow Weinstein and other cranks.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#108

Post by viccis »

seydor wrote: post #102
viccis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other tha…

The fact that sokal was wrong doesn't mean that science criticism has offered anything more useful throughout all these years

The problem is that his motivation was to critique "science criticism", but nothing about what he did did anything of the sort. He went about it with the same scientific rigor that one would expect from Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.

Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#109

Post by jeffbee »

intalentive wrote: post #95
jeffbee wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think writing Helldivers memes on shell casings means anything?

"Hey, fascist! Catch!", "Bella ciao" and three arrows are all antifascist. I would assume that the shooter is motivated by antifascist political ideology at odds with Kirk's political ideology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.

If you have Spotify you can look for the years-old (so not invented today) playlist called Groyper Wars.

Actually you don't even need an account. TIL. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ais7KJXx8Gyd0hsrbakKW

ETA: And you have the wrong "three arrows" iconography.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#110

Post by ejstronge »

tracker1 wrote: post #93
ejstronge wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations betw…

My understanding is that the workers are actually contractors and not direct employees of Samsung and were left to make their own Visa arrangements and instead of getting the correct Visas to be able to actually work in the US, they used business travel (B-1) Visas which are supposed to be for temporary travel in order to enter the US for a maximum of 6 months. This was reported in other articles on the situation...…

I likely have read at least one of the articles you were citing (or similar work) and my sense was that information was obtained later that was unclear at the time of the event. I see your point - especially when a journalist writes about an area where I have personal experience - but I guess I don't equate this to a decline in journalist quality given the confusion around an event like this.
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