Obviously you’re going to get downvoted for this. But would you mind saying where the Easter egg is?
I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important.
The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.
It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy.
Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
Would your hypothetical someone append the word 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating bogus research?
And now he changed the search terms.[3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400495
And it seems like he has removed the word ‘whiteness’.
Is he still ‘denying the existence of white supremacy’?
Changing the search terms is just more evidence he wasn't pointing to any particular research.
And ‘sneering’ doesn’t seem unrealistic, given that he used the word bogus.
But the thread we are having this discussion on is about him ‘Denying the existence of white supremacy’.
I don’t think anyone has said anything which justifies such a charge.
I think one can easily accuse him of is intellectually immature behavior or narrow-mindedness. But not a lot more.
1. you deny white supremacy exists - in my opinion, that's the more generous reading, or,
2. you acknowledge that it exists but wish to publicly state the view that it is not worth any research hours. That is itself white supremacy, plus the intent to cause harm.
There is no credible third option. You suggest intellectual immaturity or narrow-mindedness (from someone with a PhD), but those would come in addition to either 1 or 2 applying, not instead of.
Using childishness as an excuse for racism is still racism, especially if you are a grown adult. Your excusing this as just childishness is embarrassing.
If this statement were true, then would be merit to your conclusions.
However it’s obviously not true.
The link clearly does suggest that the kinds of academic paper that search yields are bogus.
The original search was for “hermeneutic” “dialectics” “hegemonic” “intersectionality” “whiteness” (as best I can reconstruct).
This is quite obviously not a search for ‘any research on race’.
Indeed it is clearly a search for a very narrow kind of academic writing on ‘whiteness’, which itself is a term only used in a subset of academic theorizing about race.
Most kinds of research on race do not include these search terms.
Obviously PG does think this narrow subfield is bogus.
It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
The best way I can made sense of this is to figure that you think that any criticism of academic writing about race is equivalent to denying white supremacy.
So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Half of the results on Google Scholar which mention 'white supremacy' contain at least one of those three words, broadly consistently since 1990.
How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words? Awkwardly, in modern academia.
- You can't now easily define what "white" means in your context (since this definition is not fixed or absolute), for example, so how can we understand the foundation of your work?
- You don't now have a word for talking about how the experience of being a woman or disabled or gay etc is different (or not) for black people than it is for white people.
- You don't now have a word for the experience of ethnic or cultural groups becoming discriminated against with political involvement.
It's akin to saying research in computer science is fine, but the words 'algorithm', 'lisp', or 'big data' show it to be bogus.
Again, a puzzling interpretation.
A couple of points, it’s fairly obvious that PG doesn’t expect people to go through every single search result past the first few.
Search results with the conjunction of those words are listed first. You have mistakenly used the word ‘or’, but search engines place ‘and’ results first.
PG doesn’t use the term ‘white’ anywhere. That has been introduced by you. He uses the term ‘whiteness’.
I am a little surprised you conflate these two terms, since in both the academic discourse, and in activism about race, these words do not mean the same thing.
> How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words?
It’s not clear what this question has to do with what PG wrote, and the rest of your post seems to hinge on its relevance.
PG didn’t say anything about people not using words. He posted a link to a search he expected would prioritize examples of the kind of research he thinks is bogus.
Generally when we do a Google search, we assume that the first few results will be the most relevant, not that every result is equally relevant.
See my earlier point - search prioritizes results that contain as many of these terms as possible.
To summarize: Your comment seems to be based on two misunderstandings. One about how Google search works, and the other about how the meaning of the word ‘whiteness’ differs from the word ‘white’ in contemporary discourse on race.
Also, I note that you conflate search results with research. These aren’t the same thing.
There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he denies the existence of white supremacy.
That just isn’t implied by the link.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
- no, he did not read the results and had no specific academic work in mind, he just listed some words he didn't like
- he still doesn't like words about the academic study of race
- he somehow didn't learn the meaning of "phenomenology" in his Ivy-League philosophy degree, either
Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes. But the paper is highly relevant to current US politics with the influence of evangelical churches and their embrace of a white-centered model of the world. (Although it doesn't explicitly get into politics.)
One irony of linking to this paper is that religion is highly marked by earnestness, and this paper even more so. The paper's author is clearly genuinely interested in this subject as a "theology nerd". She is writing not for personal gain but to make the world a better place.
This is a common way of converting a difference in judgement about the value of particular activities into a characterization of dishonesty and fraudulent activity; when done accidentally it is a sign of lack of ability to recognize differences in viewpoints, when done intentionally it's technique of avoiding debate on the issue on which agreement is assumed through the distraction of casting moral aspersions at those who disagree.