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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#251

Post by enriquto »

dvt wrote: post #208
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 upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.…

> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology

I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even western percussion instruments are painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to understand western harmony as a concrete particular case among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g.

https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus...

this is a serious textbook about ethnomusicology and linear PDE on Riemannian manifolds.

What were your ethnomusicology classes about? They might be really bad, if you ended up thinking that it is a "soft" subject.

Re: Earnestness

#252

Post by pbourke »

keiferski wrote: post #236
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…

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 degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.

Re: Earnestness

#253

Post by zemo »

he poses the idea of being earnest about something in a way that is disingenuous.

> Why can't there be people interested in self-driving cars or social networks for their own sake?

If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be interested in your own mastery. I am not saying that it is bad to be motivated by mastery: I am personally very motivated by mastery. It's what has kept my interest after a decade of programming professionally. I relate to being interested in a problem because it's an interesting puzzle.

But we should not pretend that being interested in the aspect of solving a problem is the most genuine manner of interacting with that problem (or the opposite: that caring about the side-effects of your work more than you care about the work itself is somehow lacking in earnesty). It is not. What you are building does not stop at the problem-solving phase. How the things you build affect the world is what you have done. If we set our ethical standard at "so long as I am interested in doing the building, I am being earnest", our efforts will forever be deployed by others, perhaps with effects that do not align with our values.

Re: Earnestness

#254

Post by keiferski »

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…

> 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.

Re: Earnestness

#255

Post by __float »

throwawayback wrote: post #244
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…

In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879... https://twitter.com/Rea…

That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are very often tax advantaged.

If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare there must not be any?

Re: Earnestness

#256

Post by nullsense »

adamsea wrote: post #214
dvt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.…

To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ). > PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus. True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think t…

>To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing.

MongoDB is webscale.

Re: Earnestness

#257

Post by iWorshipFAANGS »

throwawayback wrote: post #244
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…

In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples: https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879... https://twitter.com/Rea…

Hello! I think I addressed some of the points you are making in my response to the user dvt. TLDR, there's low-quality research in "falsifiable" fields too.

But actually, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding what your point is, could you help me? I mentioned a specific line that Paul Graham wrote, then said it was "dumb" for the reasons I outlined. Then, in defense of Paul Graham, you posted links to tweets to snippets of research absolutely without any context at all. How would I know whether that research is good or not? I have no training in any of those fields.

I'm really confused about how what you posted defended Paul. Did you want me to see that someone wrote the words "decolonizing" and "math" together and subsequently think that it is stupid, after all, to write the words "hegemonic" and "whiteness" in the same paper?

Re: Earnestness

#258

Post by inglor_cz »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #105
Dumblydorr wrote: post #38

I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?

Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were meaningful to me: A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll." https://genevieve…

"people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days"

Thank you for a perfect description of the situation.

Re: Earnestness

#259

Post by woodruffw »

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…

It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense.

What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense.

In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.

Re: Earnestness

#260

Post by telesilla »

enriquto wrote: post #251
dvt wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.…

> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even…

I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include:

Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04...

Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati...

Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird

https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?...

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