The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
What's the source for this? Why should I take this article more seriously than a random screed on social media?
E.g. did you know math only serves to oppress muslims ? Computer science has only one function : make black people slaves again ?
And the second part of the given statement is a very popular ideology on campus. Together, let's call it "applied postmodernism", because, well ... that's what it is.
That postmodernism means science isn't valid, a view unlikely to be well-considered by most postmodernists in America and on campus, isn't too surprising since the search for truth and the standards of truth in science are themselves ideological. And the ones we use are very much part of the Greek-Christian "Western Civilization" ideology and it's evolution over time. It is very much not a popular viewpoint. The evolution of most, if not all sciences, very much happened within Western Civilization, Christianity and after 2000 years of that, odds are that half of postmodernism is kind of true : that the Christian worldview is part of most sciences and that most or all other ideologies and religious viewpoints are rejected very fundamentally.
But if you look at history, Christianity is pretty unique in that it never fully exterminated science in it's world. Note: this happened despite trying repeatedly to extuinguish it, but every time other Christians saved and "re-booted" it (you could go further and point out that while plenty of countries and even international movements tried to snuff out science, the Vatican never did, and always managed to protect itself and it's archives and teachers, so you could even say that Christianity protected science). Most or all civlizations advanced in science, but it never lasted. In most or all other civilizations science was snuffed out, usually either to make a revolution happen or to protect entrenched interests. In a few, external military invasion destroyed it.
No, its not. No major world religion did that, and nothing that did that would have survived as a major world religion or culture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_o...
While this singular event obviously falls short of proving anti science attitudes fully prevailed, it is generally agreed that "the Islamic world" in 1900 had less scientific knowledge compared to in 1200, when the majority of their citizens weren't even Muslims. As the ideology permeated more and more of life science (ie. Books and courses) retreated and were rewritten again and again to fit the ideology better. Everytime something was lost. Over time a lot was lost.
Even though Islamic did not quite destroy science it certainly destroyed the essential part: where science and religion conflicted, there was no additional investigation, no reconsilliation, no compromise. They chose for the utter dominance of their ideology, and anything even threatening a contradiction was destroyed, if necessary including the people behind it.
This is in fact not weird but rather the common choice of societies. The Vatican is unique in the fact that it paid considerable numbers of people to find and study things contradicting Canon, for centuries. It should be said that their attitude to contradictions outside of their institutions was very different. The theory may have been that with enough research the contradiction would be revealed not to exist. Many say this is the result of the classical Greek heritage of the church.
There is a correlation between young adults coming of age in the era of "Recommended for you" playlists and "People who bought this also bought" recommendations. I feel that these algorithms followed for long enough cause you to end up in one extreme or another.
We have young students who are exposed to a single viewpoint for such a long time that it becomes part of their identity. Either for the right or the left.
Now at university these two sides sometimes clash. Neither side is willing to hear the other argument as listening to them will invalidate a core part of their identity.
This all seems to be a side effect of technology companies trying to maximise profit. The longer a user stays on the site the more money they make (ads, products, etc).
As techies, how can we be socially responsible while also profiting? Is it possible as a public company?
Students have been doing that for thousands of years. This isn't about racism or post-modernism. This is about longstanding mob dynamics. Communists in pre-revolution Russia and asia. Religious zealots in Scotland. Romans in their ancient senate. This is simply a group of young people storming an office to shout down an established member of an older generation. Once discovered, this power feeds upon itself. It may be how revolutions start but more often than not the young people get older/bored or things burn out as the movement grows and internal power structures destroy themselves. You cannot stop the movement by arguing its politics because those politics are beside the point. You stop them by redirecting their energy towards something new, something more cool than yesterday's politics.
It’s possible the situation is slightly more nuanced then “college students hate facts/white people”.
Like a lot of things in life, reality is probably more complex than the postmodern humanities scholars or the realist scientific scholars would suggest. There is some level of reality underlying discourse, but it's also filtered through social processes at every step.
Oh brother. Here we go again with another rant that cherry-picks a few instances and pads them out with Orwell quotes and shrill claims like this. I'm a current college student, and compared to my experience and the experiences of my peers, the author is describing another reality. Very "kids these days, get off my lawn".
Appeals to the centrist middle are only meaningful insofar as that same center is willing to act to protect the people being targeted by hate speech. If the center is frozen by its own obsolete sense of propriety in the face of this socially destabilizing hatred then I think it is not unreasonable to see a small group take the call to action on themselves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
On the other, it's ironic because the author is a specifically controversial character: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer#Accusations_of...
The point I was trying to jokingly bring up is a valid one, I think. How much of what we do leaks identity-related metadata? How much are of the responses we get are responses to that inferred metadata?
But it's something we see playing out across the anglo world - left learning "right thinkers" break down some boundry and hand the keys to people who lean right. Obama took the imperial Presidency to new heights and now Trump gets to reap the rewards. Trump really wouldn't have been possible without Obama.
The sad irony is that leftists need the rule of law and impartial justice much more than right wingers.
By what criteria?
Woolly opinion pieces mean nothing.