Academic B.S. as artificial barriers to entry

I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable, but I think it's unfair to take that article as an example of Sokal-style nonsense.

As an exercise, here's my translation of what she's saying [supplied in brackets]:

This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies [clear enough] and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture [reference to the economic historian Ernst Labrousse's idea of conjuncture, basically a middle-term historical trend on the order of decades rather than centuries]. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents [this is going to be a paper about urban centers in the developing world which were, until recently, largely rural], the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics [cities are complex and hard to figure out]. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy [the different historical points of origins of cities structure how we should think about them, e.g. urban studies of London might not tell us what we need to know about Manilla] and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization [the author basically says, I'm going to be drawing on the works of various French theorists here and I think it's useful.]

Likewise the final paragraph, while overwraught, is actually saying something substantive. Basically, "we need to study cities in terms of what they exclude as while as what they include. Many develping world cities were rural zones within living memory of the present, and that agricultural background continues to persist even as they become more urban." Really nothing very objectionable to me there - and I say that as someone who does think there are major problems with obscurantism in academic writing, especially various branches of philosophy and literary studies.

When I started engineering, being new to atheism and the internet and all sorts of cliches like that, I was super into "rationalism" and making fun of "liberal arts". I brough up Sokal's essay "debunking" post-modernism a lot, I thought Steven Pinker and his ilk were super intelligent, etc. Old me would have loved this piece.

Nowadays a piece like this one, making fun of estoeric language with the least amount of philosophical charitability possible, just makes me cringe a little bit.

As an econ PhD dropout, I never quite understood why such an emphasis was made on physics-lookalike models. I was always more encouraged to come up with a bunch of equations that would mimic some phenomenon, than dig around and understand this phenomenon in more depth.

A few arguments that I can agree with though:

- Models are a compact formulation of complex theories. I remember a professor writing a dozen equations and claiming he just taught us Marx's Capital. In retrospect I think that's pretty funny, and quite telling of the superficiality that is rampant in the profession. But still that might have been a great executive summary (I still haven't read the book). Another example is Piketty's "r > g" that really is a lot of food for thought.

- Models can lead to actionable insight. I think there are people in Central Banks and Economics departments of governments who rely quite heavily on some models to forecast GDP, unemployment etc.

But this comes with a huge caveat: it's often easy to tweak a model to make it describe pretty much the opposite phenomenon of the one intended.

So the real benefits of that kind of academia were and still are pretty unclear to me. I believe some academics were hiding their lack of deep understanding of economic matters behind a fog of math. Even Blanchard (former chief economist at the IMF) admitted to something along those lines in the wake the 2008 crisis.

Some interesting points but it isn't limited just to academia. You unfortunately see similar cliques in industry for things like databases, languages, MVC frameworks, etc which is rather thin knowledge that can be picked up quickly by competent hires.

Unfortunately the more complex the work the more difficult it is to peer-review it. Most peer reviewers don't want to look stupid and so there is a higher chance that they'll give the thumbs up rather than question the underlying work. This leads to strong selection for presentation styles that obfuscate research. The more people who can actually understand what you're doing the more people who will be able to challenge you if you are wrong.

I understand (and agree to some extent with) the argument but I think the excerpted paper doesn’t work well as an example of the issue. The concluding paragraph is lucid and a bit poetic, and upon clicking the link it turns out the title (and general question it explores) is an allusion to another well-​known paper. It’s almost literary compared to what sometimes passes for writing in academic articles.

For mediocre "pushing-the-envelope" publish-or-perish papers, it's often a matter of flinging the muddy paper at enough journals until it sticks at one of them. If so, the last thing you want is for the reviewer to actually understand what you're talking about. So obfuscate the hell out of it and hope you get a lazy "uhh, looks good!" referee.

This is true even in engineering --- I was shocked by how much B.S. I had to add to a paper to get it published. Same content, twice as long, and vaguely implying stuff way beyond what it's actually about.

Sir Karl Popper will blow your mind.

At first, this seems to me like a false conspiracy theory. But those texts ARE needlessly obscure.

I propose another possible explanation: signaling. By parsing and writing complicated text, they show their verbal prowess. Or their mathematical ability.

I thought "write simply and clearly" was basic in technical text writing.

This really sums up what I've been thinking about Critical Theory. It seems like such a stark contrast from science & engineering where the idea is to explain something complex in the simplest terms. Whereas it seems Critical theory exists to disguise simple ideas in complex terms.