I appreciate these essays. Cannot believe all of the negativity and cynicism in the comments.
Earnestness
271–280 of 478 posts
Re: Earnestness
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: Earnestness
#273If 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…
While it's not very Hacker News, 'humour' can have some value. Here's Calvin and Hobbes on much the same stuff https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849...
Ah man, humor! I like humor too.
I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers.
Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.
Re: Earnestness
#274Earlier 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".
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"
Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"
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The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light of day, because by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
Why did you choose the name “Y Combinator?”
The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.
https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
Then he named his startup incubator after a LISP function.
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Y-Combinator-get-its-name
I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago. But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned lack of sleep.
Re: Earnestness
#275I have never bothered to classify the personality traits of the people I enjoy spending time with, but there is nothing more exciting and interesting than being around a group of nerds who are trying to solve a problem or whatever. people who never get a chance to experience that process really just cannot understand the mindset. It is nice to get paid, but I would probably want to be involved in that sort of thing anyway. I simply thought that is how nerdy and eccentric people behave.
Re: Earnestness
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler past. There has always been externalities than the tech companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them to make money.
I think that's wrong, though. Through 2010 or so (very roughly) there was still a ton of unmined valued in straightforward applications of technology. I mean, sure, stuff goes wrong and there are bad aspects of culture, but looking at the industry through the Web 2.0 period it was really easy to convince yourself that this was all a Net Good Thing and making the world a better place (and that's true of Airbnb too!).…
In 2010 it was old old old news that:
The world was drowning in electronic devices garbage, many containing toxic materials.
American companies were taking advantage of highly exploitative conditions in the third world, especially China.
Microsoft made millions "extorting" high licence fees for its software in many cases from poor 3rd world countries who had few option for what it was a de-facto monopoly.
Patent trolls were rampant,SCO was trying to kill Linux, all with MS funding.
RIIA was abusing the legal system, suing for millions a grandma who downloaded a couple of songs.
You may think whatever you want, but being ignorant of basic facts make your opinion a little bit better than total irrelevance.
Re: Earnestness
#277he 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 th…
> 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.
This distinction seems completely semantic and vacuous. What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in? Then we're right back where we started.
Re: Earnestness
#278If 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…
one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny.
hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".
Re: Earnestness
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The informative question is the converse: Would your hypothetical someone append the word 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating bogus research?
If some particular research they thought was bogus was about the concept of whiteness, why wouldn’t they?
Because they could cite
the particular research instead.
Re: Earnestness
#280Earlier 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…
no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In programming, we call this abstraction.
Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your attention to those who least deserve it.