Postmodernism Generator
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The Sokal affair gets mentioned in threads such as this. But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that _Social Text_'s editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.
It puzzles and saddens me that so many intelligent scientists and empiricists repeatedly point to such instances of "postmodernity" as proof that the postmodern emperor has no clothes because such a broad statement is simply untrue. The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation. Their work is not easy to understand and, yes, they can be interpreted in many different ways.
They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.
Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation and we would all--humanists, scientists, and intellectuals of all kinds--be better off and richer if they stopped serving as propaganda that postmodernity has no cultural or intellectual value.
EDIT: grammar, readability, spelling. Added penultimate, single-sentence paragraph.
I don't know about the Social Text bullying issue (I'd never heard of Social Text, so I didn't think its publication that significant), but Sokal's Intellectual Impostures picks apart most of those writers' abuse of scientific concepts extremely fairly and sensitively. He takes great care not to comment on their philosophical writing outside of its scientific content, and even then takes care to distinguish between literal and metaphorical use.
The article I was remembering discusses how Sokal refused to make the edits requested by _Social Text_'s editors. [0]
> Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did
> ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him (a)
> to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and
> (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed resistant
> to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost
> all of his footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the
> grounds that his peers, in science, expected extensive
> documentation of this sort. Judging from his response, it
> was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at
> all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a "difficult,
> uncooperative author," a category well known to journal
> editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish,
> not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest
> to readers if published in the company of related articles.
Maybe this postmodernist word salad phenomenon is the result of humanities students and professors (mistakenly) thinking that their area of study contains no more legitimate things to investigate.
Consequently, we're now seeing this mere intellect signaling being passed off as worthwhile content. Come on. You can do better.
For me, the reason I did it was simple: if you want good grades/academic-approval in this field... writing like that works!
I do think there is signaling going on--if your paper has the 'gestalt' of what a 'good paper' looks like, then you get an A. Because you 'get it'.
Similar signaling happens in all fields though, including software. For instance, when you're looking at a coder's website/github/resume, there are certain things hiring committees look for before passing on to the next level of the hiring process.
It's the same thing, I think. But the ultimate cause is most likely laziness. We use gestalt evaluation as a way to make quick judgments about whether a person understands our field. If they do--that means we don't have to read/evaluate that closely, and it's less effort for us.
Like all behaviors that are reinforced, there is motivation to encourage from both sides. Everyone wins on the deal.
Except those who are new to the field, yet still have worthwhile contributions. They are shut out.
Removing this bullshit signaling and standards is what we've been trying to do in academics for decades, to allow even children from lower class families to actively contribute without any disadvantage to their peers.
Yet, now you're saying that this signaling is a "win-win situation"?
Maybe you should write a paper :)
Those new to the field would not appreciate why something is immutable and monadic, they are shut out. (Doesn't mean they can't churn out a simple form in VB).
It's not reasonable to hold everyone hostage to the least common denominator. That only foster mediocrity. Thankfully computer science has not suffered much from this, and I don't think social sciences should be held back either.
If you publish an algorithm in a paper, it's acceptable to do it in any language, pseudocode, as flowchart, structogram, etc.
I've seen papers describing algorithms in Scheme, Haskell, but also in python before.
Similarly there's no reason to expect a random person off the street to understand the language of a modern philosophical book.
Each field of study (social sciences and computer sciences) has its own domain specific language and concepts that requires some work to get your head around.
If you're going to say everything is up to interpretation, you're making a positive claim. That requires empirical proof, at least in the rigorous social sciences.
Otherwise, your entire literature and peer review process is subject to the prior beliefs of the reviewers. That can, and has, led to an equilibrium state of ideological homogeneity in some subfields of sociology and philosophy (also some edge cases of cavalier empiricism passing review when it confirms priors in, say, social psychology). Once enough of a group thinks the same things, and ideas are not held up to some positive external standard, outside ideas don't get in anymore.
The hate for postmodernism expresses the disdain for an ideological group trying to give credence to its ides without being subject to the same standard as other ideas in science, social or not.
Positive questions are subject to empiricism, period. There is no cop out saying a positive statement is not testable. Even prohibitively difficult empirical questions (like in macroeconomics, psychology, biology, etc.) Are subject to testing.
Normative questions can be discussed without empiricism, correct, but you can't use this to infer on how things are. So if you want to say there should be no objective reality,fine. If you say that factual statements are a tool of oppression because there is no objective reality, you stepped into the testable.
Cultural criticism threads this line back and forth in a much too cavalier fashion. If you make a statement about how culture is, you've made a testable statement. There are plenty of ways to test cultural expectations, ask empirical psychologists and sociologists
Yes and then there's skepticism (doubt as to the truth of something) which is essentially what Postmodernism is.
Personally I'm on the fence. I totally believe human behaviour is way more complicated than can be reflected by questionnaires and simple rigged observational studies, but there is a point where we absolutely can measure something. The efficacy of medicine, subatomical particles in accelerators or human effect on global warming – those are measurable.
The point where something goes from empirically possible to measure, to impossible, is hard to find. But I do think it exists.
I guess my question is: what's your reasoning behind the statement that such a line exists?
I think it's like building a model accurately predicting the grains of sand around the world. Sure, theoretically we can get really really good at measuring everything, so we pretty much know where all those grains are, but I suspect we're not close.
Instead we must do, as you say, "decent approximation" – and this is where my line comes in. I think the crudeness of our current models to predict human behaviour are equivalent to roughly knowing where the Sahara desert is.
I think we should separate "empiricism here is currently difficult" to "absolutely impossible"
Some fields of social science are undergoing internal turmoil (eg. Macroeconomics and some subfields of psychology). This is a good sign; old models are being discarded as new evidence and better methods pop up. In fact, I'm more concerned about sociology, where there wasn't a replication crisis.
Facts are being improved upon when you see crisis in replication. That's a sign of a healthy field of study.
As an econometrics/labor econ grad student, I can tell you I (and most of macro) could answer many questions definitively if we could do things we absolutely should not (eg. Run RCTs on real cities on things like the minimum wage). In microeconomics, we've resorted mainly to look for the effect of exogenous shocks on systems we care about (eg. The Muriel boatlift made a few studies on local unemployment/immigration due to the exogenous shocks nature of the event)
On the one hand, human behaviour, culture and influences is extremely fragmented, to the point where I wonder what is it we're trying to model? The subject we're trying to predict is part of this culture and influences, and probably shifting so fast it's questionable we can, with accuracy, predict much.
On the other hand we have the interpretor, the constructor of the study, who also is colored by culture and influences to the point where we must ask why is a certain model being constructed?What is predicted and why? How are people's actions interpreted to fit that model?
Being skeptical is healthy. Inferring from your skepticism is not. Inferring leads to refusing vaccines, embracing homeopathic medicine, or asserting that a $15 federal minimum wage will have no disemployment effects in rural US counties.
But medical trials is a whole other story. Here you can very clearly construct a double blind to test the efficacy of a medicine.
If there's no technical discussion of the algorithm or an interesting bipartisan viewpoint to be had here, then all that's left is bashing that's been done before in past stories.
The problem that these generators address is much more circumscribed.
Rather, it is poking fun at the people who do not understand these literary giants, but claim to.
This kind of obscurantism is often used to hide the fact that the author doesn't fully understand what is going on.
A hallmark of deep understanding in any field is the ability to simplify complex concepts and relay them to a reader efficiently. (I'm not a physicist, but Brian Greene can explain String Theory and particle physics in a way I understand. Why can't someone do the same with Lacan?)
For example, Zizek is excellent at this. (As are many others.) If you read his papers, they do not sound like this. He uses the buzz-words necessary, but he makes straightforward arguments. And IMO, that's why he's been successful--he's helped get Hegel, Lacan, and other writers' complex philosophical ideas out to a very wide audience, efficiently--by writing good, quality prose.
Compare that with much of what comes out of undergrad/grad student writing classes, and I submit that there is a huge difference. And that's what this is poking fun at. Just my 2c.
At its deepest level, it is a question of inequality: some people are able to BS their way to tenure, fame, etc., by writing like this--because they understand the system better than others who weren't as well groomed through upbringing, good mentorship, or other circumstances. Writing this way is a strategy for certain people who know how the game is played: it has worked, and will continue to. But that's a problem, and it's one worthy of mockery.
I'd go a level deeper, and say that these "literary giants" also suffer from "obscurantism". Maybe it's academia, or the fact they're trying to express a truly new thought (if that's possible nowadays), but comprehensibility suffers by using long and obscure words.
They also say "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", so to expect undergrads won't to also do this is unrealistic.
The language may sometimes use long and obscure words, but it is for a reason, and it it precision. The thoughts and philosophical underpinnings are very nuanced and precise.
Synonyms exist in most languages, and english has a lot of them, and their only motivation is to express nuances.
I believe long words are a poor substitute for carefully chosen words. It's possible you think long words mean carefully chosen, that's usually not the case in my experience. Very few people actually bother to look up the exact meaning, but use those long words how they think what they mean. So length buys you nothing.
Along those lines, are you sure you mean precision and not accuracy? As long as descriptions of your thoughts are accurate, though not precise, that should suffice to convey them accurately and "truly" after a few tries - papers are long enough for some repetition :)
EDIT: And that's the most charitable interpretation. Using long or uncommon words to either obscure meaning or try and appear more eloquent are real dangers (c.f. "autoethnographic"). After all, why use "verbose" when you could use "sesquipedalianism"? I will admit that long words are fun, but in the same way insect collecting is - not appropriate or even interesting for everywhere and everyone.
For me great writing is to convey a specific thought succinctly. A lot of the writers mentioned here aren't expressing something radically new like Plato or Descartes, but rather taking a small step describing nuances from a previous thought – hence precision.
Also, like computer science, I believe the field is entitled to a language describing concepts that aren't directly available without further studies.
You assert, without proof or reference, that anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence; but even if it were true, what would it prove, besides the fact that said standards were weak in the first place? And why didn't said editors accept to publish explanations after the fact? Had they been even a little concerned with the truth (as all philosophers should be) they would have been very happy to deconstruct a hoax, them being the victims notwithstanding.
No further questions, your honour.
But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.
The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation...They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.
Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation
From your defense, postmodernism seems akin medieval theologians debating the nature of the soul. There is a lot of internal self-promotion and politicking, and a lot of attacking outsiders, but nothing of actual use to the real world.
Postmodernism is some kind of academic alternate reality that exists only in journals, so discrediting one is kind of a big deal.
The difference is that computer science is grounded in the real world. Every CS conference could fold, every journal could be disgraced, and yet Google would still answer my search queries. Therefore, I'm pretty sure 01+01=10. This unarguable power of reality is why empiricism won.
To repeat, Social Text is not peer reviewed, and it's not a prestigious journal, so it's not surprising that a hoax article got published in it. Similar hoaxes can be perpetrated in any field which has unreviewed journal or conferences, computer science included. Even physics is not immune:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...
The irony that they decided to accept it exactly for the Science Wars issue, after initially rejecting it, is amazing. If they had published it in any other issue, the impact wouldn't be as dramatic.
"We do not understand fluid mechanics as well as rigid mechanics due to sexism, fluids are associated with women, and rigid with men"
"e=mc^2 is a sexed equation, prioritizing the speed of light over other speeds which are very important in our lives"
The first one is from Lacan, and other two from Irigay (they are not exact quotes, my apologies).
As The Economist put it:
"If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you're transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You'll never get anywhere with any of them."
This is misleading. First, Social Text at the time explicitly did not practice peer review. You can't relax standards that aren't there. Second, their editorial requests were, in their own words: "We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes." He refused, and they published anyway. Sokal was certainly playing at being a recalcitrant author, but if an author's recalcitrance causes you to publish an article full of gibberish, you have still published gibberish.
The Sokal affair is not some knock-down destruction of the fields of postmodern and cultural criticism, but it's certainly a blemish. I encourage anyone who is interested to read http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html
> Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation
Or possibly it's just funny. Here's a similar one for discrete math: http://www.theproofistrivial.com/
As the submitter, this is definitely what I was leaning towards. I didn't mean this as some knockdown of all postmodern thought (I like some pomo philosophers), but just poking fun at the obscurantism in the work of some subset of authors. And, that the generation of the text is at least mildly interesting from a computer science / linguistics perspective. Very surprised to wake up and see this with so much commentary / controversy.
This is the clincher for me. How can you make a serious argument if what you say is open to interpretation? For every variable the possible meanings multiply exponentially. You may as well be saying anything, no-one will ever be able to test or refute it. In science a huge amount of effort is put into making things as clear as humanly possible, and still lots of problems in communication arise.
Postmodern writings can certainly be enjoyed in the same way as dense literature, for the use of language, references, cryptic meaning, and so on. But demanding to be treated as a meaningful addition to the corpus of human knowledge is simply narcissism.
Till then, stfu and start reading.
the joke is that from many people's perspective real papers are indistinguishable from this.
> Their work is not easy to understand and, yes, they can be interpreted in many different ways.
saying this about a paper would lead many in the harder science to question what the point of work that is able to be interpreted in multiple ways, does the paper even matter or is it just my interpretation that matters and if it's just my interpretation why should I even care about the paper to begin with, if something can mean anything doesn't it just mean nothing?
Dawkins put it well "Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: " And he quotes the psychoanalyst (!!) Félix Guattari
"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. "@RealPeerReview posts papers published in peer-reviewed journals of questionable scientific merit.
What does postmodernism accomplish?
I'm not defending it, I share the opinions of many of it's detractors, my point is only that to describe a technical subject you don't understand as incomprehensible nonsense is silly.
If one examines textual theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject Marxism or conclude that the raison d’etre of the reader is deconstruction. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a postsemantic nationalism that includes language as a paradox. Lyotard uses the term ‘Marxism’ to denote the failure of neoconceptualist class.
So I Googled it and found one legit hit and I can't really tell if it's legit.
http://blacky2poe.w.interiowo.pl/realismandneost/theabsurdit...
But it reminds me of what in chess is called a computer move, something which is contrary to the way even super-gm's think but nevertheless a good move.
I also gave a few passes manually to correct and cleanup things that were too ridiculous.
Physicist Alan Sokal got a non-sensical paper [2] with the wonderful title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity accepted and published in the journal Social Text.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [2] http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/trans...
Which, for any sufficiently complex and ambiguous sentence, any motivated reader will always be able to do.
I won't speculate on how large a percentage it is, but some percentage of these papers are straight up Rorschach ink blots, even if the authors themselves believed they were writing something coherent and intelligible.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=If+one+examines+textual+theo...
[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I dare you to do this on e.g. a Physics paper. This doesn't mean badly written Physics papers don't exist, but unless it's an awful paper or you aren't familiar with that field, the statistics and data analysis should stand on it's own. So you always have this fallback. Of course they aren't infallible either, but it's one extra BS detection layer.
For social science, extra BS detection could be had via reference checking. Unfortunately, this is effort and tedious, in part because almost all papers are long-winded and hard to read. So instead, form/style/reputation of cited authors/buzz-words is used. All of these are easy to fake.
I don't know what the solution is. I've seen in Philosophy, students would mark text with logic symbols. Then, you can see a bit more easily if "therefore" really means something follows. Maybe that kind of rigorousness is needed, in an explicit form?
But you're right in that it's mostly laziness, and the random generators don't hold up to too much scrutiny. It's more that it's a mirror, a way of pointing out the shortcomings of the field. Which is why it's funny.
Trying to read the generated article gave me a very similar feeling compared to the feeling I get when trying to read an article that's much too difficult for me. I read a sentence or two and try to grasp at the meaning of the sentences and how they relate to each other. I reread these words a few times, and eventually draw out a little bit of understanding and move on to the next sentences.
In this case with the generated text though, eventually my mind concludes that it's all nonsense and gives up on finding any meaning. With a real text, hopefully, I'd derive more meaning little by little as I struggled on.
What's interesting to me here is that a nonsensical text can produce the same "in over my head" feeling as a highly intellectual and difficult text. It seems to imply that we could be fooling ourselves when reading difficult texts - perhaps a text is all nonsense, or perhaps it's brilliant, but we have little way to tell.
For details
Of course, actually reading Nietzsche or something would be better but that's not really an ELI5.
Part of the reason why these people originally wrote in such a strange way was because they wanted to try and write without applying the traditional categories and modes of thought we've all been raised with.
Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to tell you this and you shouldn't listen to me. I'd welcome correction from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.