Re-edition of the Sokal affair proves once again that social sciences have become a joke in the US

[uppi]

Eh, you really want to test my understanding of an article without resourcing to tertiary literature by choosing one of the most famous and debated 20th century physics articles? I obviously already heard of the EPR paradox and even studied it in college, many years ago. And answering your question: yes, it's formulated in a clearly scientific, testable and falsifiable way. They're just very hard to test, but were nevertheless tested in the 70's in France, and supported Bohr over Einstein. Also interesting is how crisp and objective their writing is, so that even an educated layman can grasp what they're talking about and understand their conclusion, while not necessarily following how they got there. Contrast and compare to the nonsense machine of critical theory / post-structuralism.

Well apparently you either didn't study hard enough or the language is not crisp and objective enough, because you failed to notice that this is not formulated in a testable or falsifiable way. To falsify their conclusions, you would need to prove that a theory which satisfies their assumptions and is compatible with reality cannot exist. How do you prove the non-existence of a theory? Well you can in this case, but no one realized this until 30 years later. For 30 years every expert in the field would have told you that this is an untestable, philosophic discussion. Which you can see from Bohr's reply, where he doesn't propose a test or anything, but says (not very convincingly) that the assumptions don't apply. No layman could have known in 1935 whether this was testable or not, when even Bohr didn't know.

And I would like to add that when this was conclusively tested is very much a matter of opinion as well - I would say 2015.

 

[MaryKB]

You're being baited, Holo. Your view on refusing a platform for misogyny, racism, xenophobia, etc is being blindfolded and led into a trap where you're actually saying conservatives should be censored.

I find conservatives often misunderstand what censorship means, and I've seen extremely hypocritical perspectives and expectations, and feelings like only his right to freedom of expression matters.

Like I'm not talking about denying platforms, I'm talking about not being required to provide them, and I thought that really makes sense?

Like for example, would you feel I'd have a right to require him to write in large glow-in-the-dark neon paint on his garage "Men Suck!"? What about my freedom of expression? He doesn't understand my rights don't mean I can dictate what he has to do. I'm certainly free to write that on my own house, but I can't make him do it on his, right?

So I don't understand why he'd feel for example YouTube would be forced to show his videos he makes if they don't like them. That's a private entity and they can associate with whomever they want, and if they feel someone's going to give them a negative image well they're totally within their rights to cancel him. And if he is published and I feel his content's problematic, well I'm within my freedom of expression to let YouTube know how I feel, and if I'm active enough maybe I can get others to say the same thing, and then YouTube can decide if they feel they'd be better off listening to me or him, and they'd weigh many factors and such and make a decision. I feel that's what freedom is all about, if you know what I mean? Censorship's about the government preventing you from talking, and if one website or paper won't publish you, you're allowed to try finding another, or if no one will then you can make your own, and that's what I was trying to talk about when I said you're not guaranteed a platform. I really don't get what's so hard to understand, you know? But like in my experience, many conservatives don't feel I have a right to express my displeasure, and websites don't have a right to decide what content they share, only conservatives have a right to free expression and everyone else has to accommodate him, which always makes me wonder if they even understand the Constitution at all.

 

[brennan]

For 30 years every expert in the field would have told you that this is an untestable, philosophic discussion.

And they'd have been just as wrong as people who didn't understand how Mendeleev could leave gaps in the periodic table. Or people who think Many Worlds is hokum. Merely not knowing how to test something does not make it unfalsifiable in principle, which is the proper standard.

 

[uppi]

And they'd have been just as wrong as people who didn't understand how Mendeleev could leave gaps in the periodic table. Or people who think Many Worlds is hokum. Merely not knowing how to test something does not make it unfalsifiable in principle, which is the proper standard.

But how do you decide whether something is unfalsifiable in principle?

For example, it is usually assumed that the various interpretations of quantum mechanics are unfalsifiable in principle. But how do you know they really are?

 

[bernie14]

....Bring on the revolution already! I want to put conservatives up against the wall like a good Bolshevik.

you know "the people" will put you up against the wall for helping to publish junk journals....

 

[HoloDoc]

you know "the people" will put you up against the wall for helping to publish junk journals....

I don't publish the damn things. I just get stuck with them because of the rise of content aggregators.

 

[bernie14]

I don't publish the damn things. I just get stuck with them because of the rise of content aggregators.

Collaborator!!! Off with your head!!!!

 

[brennan]

But how do you decide whether something is unfalsifiable in principle?

For example, it is usually assumed that the various interpretations of quantum mechanics are unfalsifiable in principle. But how do you know they really are?

Personally I am sceptical that anything is actually unfalsifiable in principle.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

you know "the people" will put you up against the wall for helping to publish junk journals....

"The people" love junk journals though...

 

[bernie14]

"The people" love junk journals though...

Not scientific ones though, and he make too much money if you ask me. the people can find their own books, so DEATH!!!

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Not scientific ones though, and he make too much money if you ask me. the people can find their own books, so DEATH!!!

The scientific ones are far too scarce to control what is marketable...or take command of who gets put against the wall and shot.

 

[luiz]

Well apparently you either didn't study hard enough or the language is not crisp and objective enough, because you failed to notice that this is not formulated in a testable or falsifiable way. To falsify their conclusions, you would need to prove that a theory which satisfies their assumptions and is compatible with reality cannot exist. How do you prove the non-existence of a theory? Well you can in this case, but no one realized this until 30 years later. For 30 years every expert in the field would have told you that this is an untestable, philosophic discussion. Which you can see from Bohr's reply, where he doesn't propose a test or anything, but says (not very convincingly) that the assumptions don't apply. No layman could have known in 1935 whether this was testable or not, when even Bohr didn't know.

And I would like to add that when this was conclusively tested is very much a matter of opinion as well - I would say 2015.

Huh? Of course it was stated in a scientific and falsifiable way, they even proposed an experiment to test it - only nobody knew how to carry it out in a conclusive way at the time.

But you seem to be, perhaps deliberately, missing my point. EPR expressed themselves in a.clear and scientific way. Just from the executive summary, a reasonably educated person can understand what is being discussed and what they're trying to prove. The language is objective and clear; they want to advance our understanding, not hide being jargon and complicated words. Proof being that eventually their hypothesis was tested repeatedly, and despite being today considered wrong, EPR actually greatly enhanced our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Now let's look at some nonsense peddlers,el which infest the humanities departments in the US:

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

This is the famous Deleuze. Note that unloke EPR, he is not concerned about being clear, or even coherent at all. Indeed, the above is perfectly meaningless, and a good example of using real mathematical terminology on a way that makes no sense. And it's not like I'm cherry picking small passages to make a point: Deleuze's writing is a growing crescendo of nonsense.

Or let's look at another famous passage from a major figure in humanities departments, monsieur Lacan:

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:



... is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

This of course is nonsense to such a degree that it's not even wrong. That this charlatan, this abuser of his patients, is a major figure and influence in critical theory shows the vacuousness of the latter.

Surely you can't compare such nonsense with EPR.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

And I can write a paper using a few pieces of jargon to a right-leaning journal which " proves"that black people are genetically inferior to white people, and they'll publish it. What's your point? Some journals are politically-biased? Some are just crap? Well shave my head and spank my arse, I would never have worked that out on my own!

good summary. also this thread is complete and utter garbage and makes me dread just being alive.

That's the thing - no you can't write some paper full of nonsense claiming that blacks are genetically inferior and get it published by a peer-reviewed journal - unless the KKK is running peer-reviewed journals.

the pioneer fund is. hardly makes a difference.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Thanks for the long reply. I disagree with much of it but appreciate the effort and intellectual honesty, and will reply properly later when I have more time.
I'll take issue with this part though. You don't have to be an expert in critical theory in order to judge whether it's nonsense or not. When a reasonably educated person reads entire passages of Derrida or Habermas and can't for the life of him extract an ounce of sense, there is something wrong with the passage, not the reader.It is freaking obvious that they are hiding their emptiness behind a wall of jargon. In some cases it's very easy to demonstrate that an author is spouting nonsense, such as when Lacan grotesquely misuses mathematical concepts. But in other cases we can't even comprehend what's being said - no one can, including PhD's in the field, because there's nothing to be comprehended.

There's a reason why these sort of hoaxes abound in "critical theory" but not in say neurology, nor even other social sciences such as history. The reason is that it's often impossible to differentiate a hoax from a bona fide article in critical theory. One of the hoax papers even won a prize! I mean, there's something wrong here.

As for why the authors chose a hoax instead of an article criticizing the complete lack of scientific rigor in "grievance studies", as you suggest, we can only speculate, but it seems rather self-evident to me. There are already loads of articles, even entire books, by extremely respected academics of all possible political persuasions exposing critical theory for its many flaws. The material is out there for anyone to see, there's hardly a lack of them. And yet "critical theory" continues to flourish, the number of trash journals dedicated to it continues to rise, and its impact on the media and mainstream discourse is probably at its highest ever. The hoax exposes the fraud and charlatanism to a much wider audience than yet another article would - hell, they made it to the NYT and to Le Monde. The journals in question were forced to do some public soul-searching. The impact was far bigger than if they had written yet another article pointing out facts that have already been pointed out by dozens of scholars - so kudos to them, even if it's certainly a non-academic approach. But it's not like their adversaries are respecting the most elementary academic principles...

Thanks for the good laugh old fellow. You fundamentally have no clue what critical theory even means. No, Lacan, Habermas and Derrida do not all belong to the same strain of thinking. Not even close, actually. Lacan (Lacanian psychoanalysis) is just a weirdo and generally hard to understand (he also does not lend well to translation). Derrida (deconstructivism) is definitely obsfucating, and Habermas (crit theory / frankfurt school) is (partially) very easy to read and understand. Actually, most of the people known as critical theorists are. Especially Adorno however, some of his writings are so concise and direct that a high school student could real and understand them. The same goes for Marcuse. It's not the critical theory writers that are hard to understand, but rather the post-structuralists and deconstructuralists. But obviously you lack any nuance or fair treatment of the subject, so I did not expect you to make any meaningful distinctions.

Your argument is incredibly stupid to the point where I just do not know how to respond. A reasonably educated person can also read Kant or Hegel or Heidegger or even fiction like the legendary Ulysses and still not make sense of it. A reasonable educated person could also read cutting edge research in neurology or applied mathematics and not make sense of it, actually I suspect this would mostly be the case. Just because a layman fails to understand a theory does not make said theory bad, that is just arguing in bad faith. Which is essentially all you do, so colour me surprised.

Just because someone is a PhD in philosophy does not mean that they can read The Phenomenology of the Spirit or Being and Time without any prior knowledge and come away "fully understanding" it. (The whole idea is absurb, by the way, who is the arbiter of what the text's meaning is, and when is it considered "understood"?). This is true for just about any field of research. There are vast amounts of knowledge and, as said a million times in this thread, most researchers have trouble keeping up with all the publications in just their little niche subject. #

Post some of these "loads" of articles that dismantle the entire field of critical theory, after all there are so many. You're just the kind of guy to sum up "all the things I dislike about the state of academia" and you find your scapegoat: It's those damn critical theorists! For Peterson it's postmodernism, for Nazis it's "cultural marxism". Truth is those are all the same thing. Some term that is just vague enough to project everything you dislike onto it. What a sad thread. Peace.

 

[luiz]

also this thread is complete and utter garbage and makes me dread just being alive.

So don't read it and don't post on it.
Thanks.

 

[Yeekim]

Like I'm not talking about denying platforms, I'm talking about not being required to provide them, and I thought that really makes sense?/.../
That's a private entity and they can associate with whomever they want

While I sympathize with that position, I will point out that this argument would not hold if we were discussing, say, wedding cakes.

I don't think there is an easy solution.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

So don't read it and don't post on it.
Thanks.

I'll post wherever and whenever I want, thank you very much

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

This is the famous Deleuze. Note that unloke EPR, he is not concerned about being clear, or even coherent at all. Indeed, the above is perfectly meaningless, and a good example of using real mathematical terminology on a way that makes no sense. And it's not like I'm cherry picking small passages to make a point: Deleuze's writing is a growing crescendo of nonsense.

1. first, SE correspond to dissimiliar series organized into a metastable system
2. second, SE complete themselves when a paradoxical element crosses the series, combining all singular points into one entirely random cast

These are the two statements made, or at least what I would get out of it having read zero Deleuze, nor Guattari, nor any of their colleagues, with zero context given. I'm sure someone with even a miniscule understanding of Deleuze's work could easily make sense out of this sentence. If you actually know the terminology of "SE" and "series" this is not hard to understand nor is it very obscurantist. This isn't even from one of his more noteable publications, you could have easily picked "anti odepidus" or "1000 plateaus", any more well-known work.

 

[luiz]

Thanks for the good laugh old fellow. You fundamentally have no clue what critical theory even means. No, Lacan, Habermas and Derrida do not all belong to the same strain of thinking. Not even close, actually. Lacan (Lacanian psychoanalysis) is just a weirdo and generally hard to understand (he also does not lend well to translation). Derrida (deconstructivism) is definitely obsfucating, and Habermas (crit theory / frankfurt school) is (partially) very easy to read and understand. Actually, most of the people known as critical theorists are. Especially Adorno however, some of his writings are so concise and direct that a high school student could real and understand them. The same goes for Marcuse. It's not the critical theory writers that are hard to understand, but rather the post-structuralists and deconstructuralists. But obviously you lack any nuance or fair treatment of the subject, so I did not expect you to make any meaningful distinctions.

Your argument is incredibly stupid to the point where I just do not know how to respond. A reasonably educated person can also read Kant or Hegel or Heidegger or even fiction like the legendary Ulysses and still not make sense of it. A reasonable educated person could also read cutting edge research in neurology or applied mathematics and not make sense of it, actually I suspect this would mostly be the case. Just because a layman fails to understand a theory does not make said theory bad, that is just arguing in bad faith. Which is essentially all you do, so colour me surprised.

Just because someone is a PhD in philosophy does not mean that they can read The Phenomenology of the Spirit or Being and Time without any prior knowledge and come away "fully understanding" it. (The whole idea is absurb, by the way, who is the arbiter of what the text's meaning is, and when is it considered "understood"?). This is true for just about any field of research. There are vast amounts of knowledge and, as said a million times in this thread, most researchers have trouble keeping up with all the publications in just their little niche subject. #

Post some of these "loads" of articles that dismantle the entire field of critical theory, after all there are so many. You're just the kind of guy to sum up "all the things I dislike about the state of academia" and you find your scapegoat: It's those damn critical theorists! For Peterson it's postmodernism, for Nazis it's "cultural marxism". Truth is those are all the same thing. Some term that is just vague enough to project everything you dislike onto it. What a sad thread. Peace.

Eh, did I say that Lacan, Habermas, Derrida and Co. Belong to the same "strand of thinking?"

But you won't deny that Lacan was hugely influential in critical theory - and it's impossible to deny his charlatanism - we have to question authors that build heavily upon his pile of crap, like Badiou or Zizek (and no, I'm not saying they're all from the same school of thought, I'm just saying they're all nonsense peddlers).

I find it baffling that you consider it nornal that someone with a PhD in philosophy would not be able to make sense, at least on a decent level, of a philosophy work. This is certainly NOT the case in natural sciences, where an educated reader should be able to at least understand what is being discussed and the conclusion.

There is no training in the world, no level of reading or erudition that will manage to make sense of the passages I quoted by Deleuze or Lacan, because they simply make no sense. There is also no doubt whatsoever that Lacan didn't understand the mathematics he employed.

Even when the prose (and grasp of mathematics) is much better, as in Marcuse, there is still the inescapable fact that all of his theories are entirely made up and are in many cases unreconcilable with reality.

So yeah, while I'm not saying they're all from the same school of thought, I am saying they're all nonsense peddlers.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Eh, did I say that Lacan, Habermas, Derrida and Co. Belong to the same "strand of thinking?"

But you won't deny that Lacan was hugely influential in critical theory - and it's impossible to deny his charlatanism - we have to question authors that build heavily upon his pile of crap, like Badiou or Zizek (and no, I'm not saying they're all from the same school of thought, I'm just saying they're all nonsense peddlers).

I find it baffling that you consider it nornal that someone with a PhD in philosophy would not be able to make sense, at least on a decent level, of a philosophy work. This is certainly NOT the case in natural sciences, where an educated reader should be able to at least understand what is being discussed and the conclusion.

There is no training in the world, no level of reading or erudition that will manage to make sense of the passages I quoted by Deleuze or Lacan, because they simply make no sense. There is also no doubt whatsoever that Lacan didn't understand the mathematics he employed.

Even when the prose (and grasp of mathematics) is much better, as in Marcuse, there is still the inescapable fact that all of his theories are entirely made up and are in many cases unreconcilable with reality.

So yeah, while I'm not saying they're all from the same school of thought, I am saying they're all nonsense peddlers.

not true at all. I'm sure an ornithologist who specializes in congolese singbirds has as much trouble reading a paper about the intricacies of biochemistry as much as a scholar of the pre-socratics would have trouble with derrida. it is only natural.

I made sense of the Deleuze passage you quoted and literal tens of thousands of other people seem to have made sense of his works, so maybe the problem is with you rather than with Deleuze.

your pedestrian view about theories being "made up" (no horsehocky) and being "unreconcilable with reality" are not based in anything and you yourself haven't substantiated your claims. your notion of objective reality as something that only has to be described precisely in order to be grasped is pretty laughable.

who exactly is "all"? who of them are nonsense peddlers? since you seem to be the arbiter I would very much like to know which philosopher is worth reading and which one is not. is every single word written in a book that has deleuze on the cover nonsense? if he quotes someone else, does that become nonsense by association? are you not fed up with all the dumb generalizing? because I am

 

[luiz]

I'll post wherever and whenever I want, thank you very much

I was just concerned for your own well-being. I don't want some weak mind to start dreading life because of a CFC thread.

1. first, SE correspond to dissimiliar series organized into a metastable system
2. second, SE complete themselves when a paradoxical element crosses the series, combining all singular points into one entirely random cast

These are the two statements made, or at least what I would get out of it having read zero Deleuze, nor Guattari, nor any of their colleagues, with zero context given. I'm sure someone with even a miniscule understanding of Deleuze's work could easily make sense out of this sentence. If you actually know the terminology of "SE" and "series" this is not hard to understand nor is it very obscurantist. This isn't even from one of his more noteable publications, you could have easily picked "anti odepidus" or "1000 plateaus", any more well-known work.

Dude you just rewrote the passage, it still makes no sense whatsoever and you know it. Do you even know what metastability is?? And if that whole ridiculously verbose passage can be translated into your two sentences, why not write two sentences to begin with?

I do understand series, I do understand potential energy, I do understand what metastability is - these are all mathematics and physics concepts - and that's not how you employ these terms! I also know a bit about Deleuze to know that the SEs he is taking about are stuff like Revolutions (at least the Deleuzian concept of a revolution). You can't treat a revolution like a mathematical series! This is pseudoscience at its finest.

The reason I picked that passage in particular is because I'm lazy and writing from my phone so can't really do in depth digging - this is a passage that was unmasked by two famous physics PhD College professors as a total misuse of physics concepts and abject nonsense. So it's not just me saying he's writing nonsense and misusing terms he doesn't understand, but world renowned physicists.