Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things".
If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
As an example of the problem he's addressing, look closely at your constructions like "is not a broadly understood term", "it's not clear", "it seems odd", and "your comment does not make it well".
These are all your personal opinions, and yet you've cast them in the language of objective fact, of truth. You assert without evidence that your view is identical with reality. Others reading you could take on those fact-shaped opinions as actual fact, especially if you have high social standing.
So by talking about "truth" or "reality", I believe he refers to the jointly held, socially constructed opinions that people mistake for fact.
An obvious political example of that is the way the various US state declarations of secession during the civil war assert that black people are naturally inferior, fit only to be slaves. To them it was experienced as truth.
There are also plenty of examples in the sciences; look at any major paradigm shift and you can see "truth" diverging from truth, "reality" diverging from reality. This is why Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
It's going to be great once AI exists and we can point more concretely to something that doesn't work the way you describe (ie a purely evidence driven epistemology).
While we wait for that, I'll just point out that the pace of technological progress we're seeing in society -- faster than a cycle per generation -- indicates that technical theories don't work the way you claim. Math theorems don't become "true" because the opponents die.
There would be something deeply wrong with a theory that requires ignorance of the old ideas for someone to accept it. If science actually worked that way it would be no better than the humanities.
And science really does work that way, which is exactly Planck's point. And Kuhn's, of course. It's a human enterprise, an essentially social one.
I also think that you're overfocused on Kuhn's words. He was being modestly hyperbolic. People are modestly capable of relearning, but the ability declines with time and they're better at it for marginal learning than foundational change.
Technology is not a counterexample. I've been coding for 30+ years now, and my dad started coding 50 years ago. I work very hard to keep up, but it's easier for someone new because they don't have to unlearn anything. They don't have to reconcile new data with a vast amount of old data.
A lot of technological progress happens because our field has been continuously expanding for decades, providing a flood of new people who seize upon the latest trends. And we work in a commercial context that heavily rewards innovation. Most major tech companies were founded by people who were young. There's a reason for that.
More broadly I think you will find that for every relativity-like-theory that was slow on the uptake (which is to say difficult to prove), there are also 10-100 promising theories which were discarded... and that the very real risk that a theory could be wrong is the principal reason for the eventually-winning-theories' slow uptake among scientists.
(Incidentally while double checking this critique and my DNA example, I found out it's one of the more common critiques of Khun's work. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/#6.1)
With that out of the way, let's take a closer look at your claim that technological progress isn't a counterexample. Your point that the expansion of new people into tech should count as a new generations is well received, and I think a good and interesting one... but you also admit you yourself have changed paradigms in your lifetime. Does that not count as you putting yourself forward as a counterexample, and agreeing with respect to tech more generally?
I do agree that as I've gotten older I grumble a bit more when I have to learn a new way of thinking about something I'm already familiar with... but when it can be shown concretely that the new way is better (for example the results from deep learning) I do spend the time to relearn. This reticence seems more than enough to account of the data Kuhn is using, so don't see why a fancier hypothesis involving me (and more broadly everyone) secretly refusing to give up on lesser ideas is needed.
As to this:
> you also admit you yourself have changed paradigms in your lifetime
I don't know that I have, really. Sure, some things have changed. But I'm still writing OO code that isn't that different than what I was writing in the late 1980s. I still build systems on Unix-ish OSes on collections of discrete servers. The major difference is that the servers are virtual, but that's hardly a difference.
As an industry, the phrase "virtual server" is a sign we're still struggling to make a paradigm shift. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage". But look at how much hate the possible alternatives, like containerization or serverless computing get. And that pattern of hate is a common thing in technology. A large proportion of people just won't use anything new unless circumstances force them. [1]
> Does that not count as you putting yourself forward as a counterexample, and agreeing with respect to tech more generally?
No, because nobody is claiming that people never change. The notion is that they change more slowly than a completely rational actor would, especially when social status is on the line. The actual speed depends on a variety of factors. Planck exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
> so don't see why a fancier hypothesis involving me (and more broadly everyone) secretly refusing to give up on lesser ideas is needed.
I don't think that's the right question to look at.
The pattern of people holding on to old ideas because they're comfortable or socially beneficial is pervasive. For example, consider this graph:
http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...
The change there is very close to the death rate. Or look at the way religions change.
I think question with science is, "Is it essentially different than almost anything else people do?" And I think the answer there is no. Science is somewhat better due to having real data. But it's still a social enterprise among people embedded in status-driven primate dominance hierarchies. This leads to results like the issues surrounding the measurement of the mass of the electron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...
That's easily explained if you treat science as another human social activity, but hard to explain otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
> I don't know that I have, really. Sure, some things have changed. But I'm still writing OO code that isn't that different than what I was writing in the late 1980s.
Hmm, okay, I think the issue we're hitting here is something like "no true paradigm shift" -- I would have thought that the introduction of, say, the world wide web in the 1990s would count as a paradigm shift with respect to technology. Perhaps it is incremental? That you have experienced no paradigm shifts working in tech since the 1980s (or at least none you have adopted) seems like a surprising claim.
> Crick and Watson didn't discover it; they just showed how this particular molecule fit well into people's expectations for what was going on.
With respect to Watson and Crick I have to admit I only have surface knowledge of the history of science here. I can say that googling for "Watson Crick discovery" does show a bunch of pages discussing a discovery, many of which seem to think of it as a paradigm shift.
> The notion is that they change more slowly than a completely rational actor would, especially when social status is on the line. The actual speed depends on a variety of factors. Planck exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
I agree with this. Inferential differences in humans has been experimentally demonstrated in the Cognitive Biases literature (psychology, not sociology).
> I think question with science is, "Is it essentially different than almost anything else people do?" And I think the answer there is no.
This is a place that we disagree then, although you may (perhaps rightly) come back and claim I'm taking a "no true scientist" position. To me the remarkable thing about science is how radically it differs from normal human cognition. The desire to submit ideas to falsification, and discard them in the face of data is not a very natural idea for humans, at least judging by history.
> it's still a social enterprise among people embedded in status-driven primate dominance hierarchies.
And here's the bit where you can claim I'm no-true-scientisting: I think much of good science is about subverting the status-hierarchy. This is why you're linking material on electron charge (which requires a stunning amount of agreement on physics to be of interest). If science and scientists behaved like the rest of society, it seems to me we'd still be dealing with the question of atoms existing. For another more concrete difference, willfully falsifying results isn't always grounds for dismissal in other professions (it mainly depends who you falsified them to). That's not true for science.
Which is to say I agree with you broadly ("yes, science is done by scientists who live in a social hierarchy"), but I disagree that this is a particularly useful insight -- if you had tremendous amounts of experience on other professions operating in a social hierarchy your predictions of scientists would be poor.
> [link] That's easily explained if you treat science as another human social activity, but hard to explain otherwise.
"A Bayesian is one who, vaguely expecting a horse, and catching a glimpse of a donkey, strongly believes he has seen a mule." - https://doingbayesiandataanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/07/horse...
Which is to say I don't think the principal feature of that story is that scientists didn't want to embarrass themselves or others, but rather that there was a real possibility that their experimental apparatus was faulty. The Feynmann quote you linked to doesn't even believe they were doing it for status reasons, but rather something akin to the the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
The web was a paradigm shift for, say, newspaper publishers. It totally upturned their world. But from a technology perspective, it was pretty straightforward. It created new possibilities, but I'd call it a new frontier. The day before, we were writing daemons to output text over a network socket; we did the same thing the day after. Likewise, we were showing people text and images and getting them to enter data in forms. Indeed, I think the rapid spread of the web was only possible because it wasn't a paradigm shift.
I'd say a better example of a tech paradigm shift would be from mainframes to personal computers. Or from physical servers to whatever thing comes after virtual servers. Or from isolated computers to networked computers.
As to Crick and Watson, they did discover something, but I don't think some people on the Internet saying it's a paradigm shift means that it meets Kuhn's criteria for a paradigm shift.
I agree that the scientific method is important and valuable, but disagree that the social enterprise of science is therefore essentially different. Humans have always been social primates with modest empirical tendencies. The (social) mechanisms of science turn the knobs a bit away from "social primate" and toward "empirical", but it's a difference of degree, not of kind. It is still a social enterprise. We're still status-oriented primates.
As an example, look at the story of Barry Marshall. Sure, he eventually got the Nobel. But he endured enormous resistance because his opinions did not accord with those of the people with power in his field. There is no way to estimate the number of people who we've never heard of because they were not as stubborn as Marshall, but I'm sure it's not zero.
Finally, I disagree on your interpretation of Feynman's story. Humans are, like all their cousin species, intensely status-focused. They published wrong numbers because they didn't want to be wrong in public. "Wrong" here being defined not by actual factual correctness, but by social conformance. They were looking under a streetlight, but they all picked the same streetlight through a social process, not one imposed by the scientific method.
We totally agree on the scientific ideal. But I think it's vital to acknowledge the divergence between the ideal and actual practice, and to study the causes of that divergence.
Again, I think we have a case of "no true paradigm shift" on our hands. My inner you says the same thing about the newspaper business actually: "the day before we were writing news stories and selling ads; we did the same thing the day after." Of course, in the technology case the kinds of software we were writing drastically shifted, which algorithms were important shifted, etc .. but that's also analogously true for news .. the beats and topics changed in value.
I'll go so far as to call this the central problem of sociology; the terms are vague enough that theories built on them can be bent to explain anything. Medicine has this problem too, in that tons of diseases are essentially catch-alls for unexplained pain, discomfort, or inflammation. Chemistry, Physics, or Math not so much. Psychology sometimes. I do think sociology has some value, but not more value than say science fiction or poetry (which also allows readers to think personally interesting thoughts that work with personal/non-objective categories).
^ for the record that's not an original idea. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism folk beat me to it.
> Humans have always been social primates with modest empirical tendencies. The (social) mechanisms of science turn the knobs a bit away from "social primate" and toward "empirical", but it's a difference of degree, not of kind. It is still a social enterprise. We're still status-oriented primates.
To be concrete, consider the "medicine" offered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine and then compare with actual medicine. If you'd like to call that a difference in degree that's your right I suppose... but from an external results perspective they appear to me a difference in kind. Maybe that's splitting hairs? Is a permanent marker different from a whiteboard marker by degree or kind? I dunno, I guess maybe I see the glass as 90% full rather than 10% empty here.
I do know that a dataset on the history of TCM would perform extremely poorly at predicting the progress that Chemistry has enjoyed... however a dataset on the history of Physics would do rather well. That seems like a difference of kind to me. Absolutely a difference of category from a ML clustering perspective.
> I disagree on your interpretation of Feynman's story. They published wrong numbers because they didn't want to be wrong in public.
As I'm sure you know from the link, Feynman disagrees with you here:
> When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard
Fortunately for us, your claim can actually be tested. We just need to see if scientists care about being wrong when the error won't be public. They do. As evidence I #include Neuton's massive catalog of unpublished works, and Feynman's book title "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". Much of science is an intensely single-player puzzle game. You play because it's fun, not to show off your high score.
I do agree that no one enjoys being wrong in public -- we spellcheck our work for others, not for ourselves, etc. I just think the effect size is waaaaay smaller here than most areas of human endeavor (somewhat higher, but on the order of the status effects that can be seen in crossword puzzle solving behavior). I think Feynman also believes this, as evidenced by the above quote, and his autobiography more generally.
> We totally agree on the scientific ideal. But I think it's vital to acknowledge the divergence between the ideal and actual practice, and to study the causes of that divergence.
I do have a category of "science pretenders" that I use to explain essentially non-scientists that someone has accidentally given tenure to. If you just ignore these people you can still do just fine as far as predicting the future of science goes in my experience and opinion. They don't publish anything interesting.
This is what I was meaning when I earlier freely admitted to being guilty of playing "no true scientist" -- if some university, say, adds a fashion sciences department, that won't make the people employed there scientists, or fashion sciences a science. It will be individuals applying scientific thinking (ie puzzle solving type thought). Because it all depends on small groups of puzzle solvers, that's where the modeling data is. Contrast with non-sciences where the personal tastes of big players need to be modeled, or worse yet other people's guesses as to what good personal taste of the big player is.
As you move to softer sciences I suppose I can see an argument needing to study primate behavior more, I guess I just don't see it for the hard sciences, at least if you're selected a good group to work with. Hmm... maybe not needing large grants to do you research is also important there too. So essentially I think it's important "for non-scientific purposes related to science".
I never got the chance to talk with Kuhn himself, but I'd imagine if we could bring him back and include him here we'd have a third notion of what he was talking about -- and all the models would be consistent with the text he wrote -- not a bad thing in my view, rather like differing opinions on a poem's meaning.
Take care and thanks for chatting.
I am not, however, going to modify the way I speak and write to emphasize that I am speaking my own opinions, with my own assumptions. That should be obvious.
> People assume that postmodernism is an attempt by the left to weaponize rhetoric for their own ends.
Some people say postmodernism is a way of giving intellectual superiority to left wing political rhetoric
> But the right has already weaponized rhetoric.
They started it (presumably with religion)
> Postmodernism is more like "defense against the dark arts".
Postmodernism is the bullshit we use against their bullshit.
> Yes, much of the work of e.g. Derrida sounds like long-form trolling, because it is.
U mad bro?
> It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as
Derrida is psychological warfare.
> "truth" or "reality"
Postmodernists make for shitty programmers
Honestly? I get that people are skeptical and dismissive of postmodernism, but this is just petty tribalism with no basis in fact. Not every programmer is a staunch right-libertarian even though that's the stereotype. Maybe it would surprise you to meet programmers well versed in the humanities that respect or even identify with postmodernism. Human ideologies are absurd, postmodernism is just the investigation of how absurd they are.
Here's how to apply postmodernism to science in order to improve science: it helps you identify and analyze the power structures and processes that regulate and sustain the actual act of doing science. If there are systemic biases or failures within those structures they will impact the quality of the science you're doing. There is "objective" knowledge in science, but there's also absolute garbage, and there's no ideological argument to tell them apart.
Ideology influences the way we observe and interpret evidence. It even shapes the kind of experiments we run, and the kind of hypotheses we propose. It won't make you misinterpret a thermometer, but science is scarcely ever as simple as aiming a sensor at a piece of spacetime and reading the output.
I understand your need to defend left-leaning coders and to understand the ideological underpinnings of modern science, but I suggest you update your conceptual framework, just as you should be wary using an unsupported browser.
What I have witnessed is that people use postmodernism as a strawman, usually in a reactionary stance. This article is no exception, even if it brings some interesting points debated in other comments.
As a serious answer to a somewhat rhetorical question: Some have suggested realism and I find their endeavor interesting. This book is one good example.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004122&co...
Critical theory is alive and well, especially in law. I do love me some good critical theory since it's effective application can dismantle most ideologies that refuse to acknowledge their basis in violence. I don't think anyone is a "critical theorist" but it's certainly a tool many scholars use.
Postmodernism had a lot of fruits. Some of them are still perfectly juicy and nutritious and some turned out to be bitter and indigestible. Certainly, I would prefer to discuss the weirdest pomo over the vulgar scientism that's popular around here :)
> Postmodernists make for shitty programmers
To me one of the big differences with postmodernism is a deep skepticism for grand overarching theories and perfect understandings. I think that's an immensely useful trait for a programmer.
The more I code, the more I treat any digital representation as a deeply distorted image of the reality I'm dealing with. The best I can do is have the distortions match my user's purpose. As Box wrote, "All models are wrong; some models are useful." The modernist continues to seek the perfect model. The postmodernist treats perfection as a fool's errand and ships something that works well enough.
I have seen this problem over and over in my career; a lot of architecture astronautics strikes me as rooted in modernism. But perhaps a good example that everybody can look at is early concepts of AI vs today's machine learning. When I compare Cyc [1], which has spent 30 years trying to build the seeds of perfect knowledge versus today's deep learning, that strikes me as a postmodern shift.
How does a convolutional neural network recognize a dog? We don't exactly know, not in a way that makes much sense to us. [2] But we don't care. The convnet has its own very bounded, limited version of "truth"; as long as we get a 90% match, we ship it and go out for beers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
[2] https://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks-see-...
But yes. post modern word salad is pretty damn meaningless most of the time. Unless there is a oscillation between an objective-proven framework and the relativist nonsense wonders of the subjective getting lost in tulpa-creation is fairly easy. There needs to be checks and bounds, or at least something to contrast against. Metamodernity evolved out of the past years of postmodern headwankery and the absolute ridginess of modernity before hand. Balance is key, see BlackBox, Ronkko, Turner, Shia Labeouf, etc. Metamodernism [1] [2]
The compiler is the arbiter of truth, error messages the concrete we come to upon smelling of rye.
You mean: it's a cheap and riskless replacement for actually struggling against capitalism via a materialist analysis of the conditions of the working class.