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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

I never understand these context-free posts. The domain of what could be interesting to a hacker is very broad, but shouldn't we say something?

Anyway, the actual title seems to have almost nothing to do with the meat (such as it is) of the article; the point seems to be the content of a handout distributed in class by the author, a teacher of a feminist and queer theories class, called "Some Notes On How To Ask A Good Question About Theory That Will Provoke Conversation And Further Discussion From Your Colleagues". The guidelines aren't bad overall, even if they'll probably say nothing new to any curious hacker; they're mostly just addressing "Some Notes on How to Ask a Good Question" (a very important skill for everyone, hackers included), without much focus on the social-theory part of it.

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Yeah, not quite sure what it's doing here. It's kind of a glimpse into a domain that's quite foreign to a lot of the regulars.

For us, you can sort of think of this article as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sociology is a very different approach to academics than we generally get in STEM. The things you learn are more complex and more open-ended. It's not like a science class, where the correct answer is already known and it's up to you to learn it. Even the best ideas are open to critique, because they're very preliminary.

Learning to learn in that environment felt very unfamiliar to me. I would throw up my hands on the first day in class, because it felt clearly wrong. And it was, but that didn't mean that there wasn't something to learn. The field advances by discussion, but constructing that discussion is difficult because it's potentially open-ended and very prone to being derailed.

So the article is kind of interesting on that score, if only to see what other people have to be told. Though I'm not sure it'll inspire really good discussion here, either.

Hi, I posted the link. I wouldn't call myself a hacker, I'm a reader.

I'm often in awe of the stuff I read, but I love to spark conversations by posting interesting articles.

Thanks for your input!

I quite enjoyed the read. Thank you for sharing!

I didn't mean to criticise the article, or your posting it; I just would have liked to see a word or two from you to give some context, or just further to spark the conversation.

method described seems very similar to Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

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I always wonder how many people follow this sort of advice, and how many hours are they spending when they do follow this advice

Adler's advice is meant to make your reading more efficient and effective, not to increase the amount of time you spend.

In fact he advocates taking just a short time to quickly size up a book, rather than make the mistake of starting to read a book only to discover halfway in that it is not a good book, or that it doesn't address what you want to know, or whatever else.

He is addressing an audience that will read large numbers of books to learn something, or in preparation for writing, etc.

I came away from the article with a completely different opinion than this, I wonder if that may be because I was reading it through a very different lens. The hacker domain tends to be deal in matters that are mostly quantitative with a relatively small number of known variables. Other fields like the social sciences, politics, religion, and life itself, are far more complex, and where much of our perceived understanding is based on unconfirmed theory, on top of which sits many additional layers of unconfirmed theory. I wonder if spending the majority of one's adult life dedicated to working within one of these domains might tend to render much of the other domain indiscernible to some degree.

Reading this through this other lens, I found all sorts of passages that I thought were very insightful and important. I wonder if we could somehow spread these cognitive capabilities throughout our societies, might some of the numerous intractable social issues we're fighting over finally move past the deadlock situation we seem to be stuck in?

Just one random excerpt I found compelling:

> One challenge is that theory is not theology, though it sometimes tries hard to be, and though students, particularly students looking for language with which to critique various forms of power, often treat it that way.

It's not just students that do this, this behavior is incredibly common in the news we consume as well as internet forums (including this one, when the topic of discussion is within a complicated social domain). So many people rest their worldview upon axioms that are simply incorrect in various ways, from objectively incorrect, to mistaking matters of opinion for matters of fact.

> So while a great deal of the work of the classroom is excavating the argument and work of the text (as I will discuss below when I talk about the form of the presentation handouts that I expect students to share with each other), the next step is to get students to interact critically with the writing, to begin to push at the limits of not only the content, but also the shape of the thinking contained within the content.

The internet and media are absolutely chock full of extremely important discussions that are severely lacking in critical thinking.

https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/what-nietzsche-really-...

When Nietzsche declared God to be dead, he seemed to be ultimately concerned that it would be replaced with Nihilism. It seems to how it has actually turned out is that we've replaced it with another religion: science and rationality. While these are both powerful forces, it seems not many people realize that they have limitations, one of which is that they currently do not even come close to encompassing the entirety of reality (strictly speaking, they make no claim to, but it seems like almost no one realizes this). To me, the end result of all this seems to be that religion has been replaced by mass delusion, at least for the time being, and I don't see many people in positions of power/influence (or anywhere, really) who appreciate the importance of this.

Although I vehemently disagree with the idea that "science and rationality … [is] another religion"—I'd be OK if we substituted 'dogma' instead—this is exactly the kind of thing that I would have liked to see when I came here, to give me some context and an idea of whether I wanted to read the post. I still think that many of the ideas, even if phrased within a socal-theory framework, don't apply just in that setting—interacting critically with anything is an important skill, soft science, hard science, or non-science—but your alternate perspective is much appreciated.

Not science and rationality themselves of course, but human's faith that they're all we need. Religions, flawed as they may be, offered some guidance that we kind of just assume will work itself out. The news seems to suggest otherwise.

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