As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004. The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I'm all in favor of smiting the very dangerous cont…
Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth: The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages: 1. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make p…
The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
81–90 of 151 posts
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#82A company was holding a competition for 'a great new idea to solve heart disease' with a huge million $ prize. our research group of 30+ people consisting mostly of faculty wanted to win it, so we broke our group into 6 or so sub-groups to come up with ideas and submit it to the greater group. my group wanted to submit as an idea 'tax on soda'. I was adamantly against the idea. Ignoring the fact that I don't think it…
Sounds like wisdom of the crowds. A tax on soda is a fairly pragmatic choice that's implementable with minimum fuss and could show a fairly decent improvement across the population of maybe 2-3%
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Responding to your first paragraph. If you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream on every issue , it almost certainly means you're incapable of independent thought. Not just one issue.
I still disagree. Many issues usually fall into 2 or a few sides (abortion, taxes, gun control, etc), so statistically, it's fairly easy to come up with your own opinion on any one issue and match the mainstream. There are also many people that go to the extremist views because they want to be different. They are guided by the mainstream and choose a different side, just so they can feel like a rebel. I don't really…
Actually, this right here is a stellar example of how political concerns and the vying of organizations for power warps the way we think about nuanced concepts on a fundamental level. It ends up the detailed, even-handed treatments make for poor slogans.
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
extremism /ɪkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m,ɛkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m/ noun the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism. Update: My point is that you are redefining what "extremism" means. e.g. The far-right is extremism. To think that you can create colonies in Mars in the next 10 years is "unorthodox". If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defini…
>If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words. Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extr…
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#85> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or…
Just because you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream population, doesn't mean your are incapable of independent thought. "That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom" Conventional wisdom usually is a result of many generations passing down wisdom and knowledge down to the next generation. It's not always correct, but…
On the other hand, as people get older they start to lose fluid intelligence and deliberative capacity and instead more regularly fall back on gut feelings and intuitions that might no longer apply in the present the same way they did in the past without thorough examination. There's also simply the fact that things we believed and people may have internalized from the past are often extremely questionable in light of the scientific and social progress that we've made today.
https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/three-behavioral-insight...
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#86As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004. The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I'm all in favor of smiting the very dangerous cont…
Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth: The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages: 1. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make p…
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#87One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.
Considering the subject matter of the article, I think this is a fair question... misogynistic: - strongly prejudiced against women - feeling, showing, or characterized by hatred of women What aspect of Peterson's "message" do you consider to be misogynistic, and with respect to which of the above definitions (or, another accepted definition)? I'd ask the same about the "confused" part, but that's even more vague. (A…
Peterson has consistently made two arguments (that come to mind) that cause these accusations:
- his arguments that "dominance hierarchies" naturally favour men, as they are more aggressive, more disposable, more risk-taking and less burdened by the necessities of child-rearing, and are not an invention of "the patriarchy". He supports this argument by pointing out its near-universal equivalent in nature, especially lobsters. These structural realities inevitably hinder women's achievements in the workforce, which he suggests is purely natural.
- He notes that families with two parents are, on the whole, more stable and successful than families with only one, and suggests that society should make it less easy to create so many single-parent families, for example by placing limits on divorce.
Both of these arguments make a, to some, very unwelcome point - that perhaps gains in women's rights have, and will, come at a huge cost to society that is only going to get worse, and that we're a couple of decades into a giant experiment that, for a lot of people, could turn out very badly indeed.
This kind of thing is simply unsayable in today's climate and, not surprisingly, he's public enemy #1 in some circles. That said, I don't think his ideas are merely "misogynistic" and he just hates women. Needless to say, however, some of these ideas have been seized upon by actual misogynists to justify their ludicrous beliefs, which rightly or wrongly has not exactly helped his cause in the eyes of the twitter mob.
For what it's worth, I both agree and disagree. I do think single-parent families are a real problem, and I agree that the necessities of childrearing structurally hold women back from their full career potentials. I don't, however, agree that the solution is to roll back divorce laws, or send women back to the kitchen (not that he said this, but he hasn't said NOT THIS!). Perhaps society can offer (much) more child-raising support. Maybe we need to retreat from the idea of the nuclear family altogether, and raise children in extended families or even communities (there are examples of this in different cultures). We need to do something - but I can't stomach the idea that we can just go back to the "good old days (for some)".
He's right about many things, but he's also curiously stuck in the past, and very boxed-in by his own personal experiences - which has been a double edged sword. We can't simply roll back people's rights in order to solve a problem, whether that problem is real or not! His real blindness is not being able to offer palatable solutions, or to understand why people might not like the ones he has made.
Anyway, that's the (perhaps unfair but anyway highly unsurprising) reason people think he's misogynistic.
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#88The "furious exchange of proper nouns" made me lul. "Derrida and Badiou at Tanagra!" It's like this because like the Tamarians, everyone in the discussion is assumed to be familiar with all of the background material -- and if you are not, then what the hell are you doing here? I saw this kind of elitism unfold here on Hackernews once. Someone once asked for an explanation of what deconstruction was and was told basi…
Here's an explanation of deconstruction I liked:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070610103653/http://www.info.u...
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
A classic written by a software engineer, mostly about what deconstruction is, with background about what postmodernism is. Quite long but very well written.
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#89Social sciences has yet to find their scientific method. Natural science was mostly bullshit before the scientific method and it set them straight. So in my opinion listening to social scientists today is kinda like reading Aristotle to learn about physics. A lot of thoughts for sure, and it sounds smart, but it totally lacks any connection to reality.
My part of political science has been (attempting to) follow scientific method since the 1940s. Its results have been... underwhelming. The main reason for this, bluntly, is that people are really damned complicated . They're difficult to model, they behave irrationally, even a minimal model has way too many variables. Hell, they don't even vote using the same heuristics that they did 50 years ago. There's a reason w…
Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
#90One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.