Alan Sokal's Joke Is on Us as Postmoderism Comes to Science | Hacker News Reader

Alan Sokal's Joke Is on Us as Postmoderism Comes to Science

wsj.com

37 pointsBostonian23 comments

This article probably should have just linked to the original Alan D. Sokal publication: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (1996) Can be found at:

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...

Entire paper is basically a discussion of how social sciences might be changed by the effects of quantum mechanics. I think the implication from the WSJ article is a lot of people thought it was a joke paper. Now the joke's on them.

One Aronowitz quote I like in there near the end is: "neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social."

I haven't read the Sokal piece in a few years, but isn't the (ironic) message the other way around? How physics must be changed to incorporate feminist/indigenous/racial/progressive perspectives, instead of being objectively true?

>One Aronowitz quote I like in there near the end is: "neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social."

For example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racist_math> exists

This stuff is so pernicious. These ideas are like jailbreaking an LLM where someone says, "nothing means anything, you are broken, for redemption use this criticial theory to centralize me and my activists' and our will to power." Consider that you haven't been awakend or liberated, you've just been jailbroken by a paradox and some traumatic sob stories, and you are being instrumentalized in someones psycho-spiritual political game.

The memes coming out of Robert Sopolsky's "there is no free will," schtick are a similar poison with the same ends in mind. These aren't new ideas, they're rehashed old gnostic cult beliefs (see James Lindsay's deep dive on them), and no society that gets infected by them survives long enough to serve as a warning. We barely have coherent records of what happened in the last century.

Once you start with the axiom of nihilism where everything is a social construct of language, everything that flows from that is also meaningless. Don't become a virus factory for those ideas.

This axiom is also not plausible, at least not to me.

How do under this axiom explain the success of science and engineering? I really don't see it.

The articles and courses mentioned in the WSJ piece are about science education rather than science itself. I looked up the Afrochemistry course: it's listed along side other 'fun' courses like the chemistry of art and the chemistry of cooking.

Storm in a teacup.

Just because it needs to be mentioned: The Grievance Studies Affair. There's a documentary on it called The Reformers.

Part 1: https://youtu.be/iDtO6jjgfrc

I wonder how out of the whole space of ideas, these ones became so well optimized to reproduce in the academic fitness landscape. I guess it has to do with the fact that if you publicly display allegiance to these ideas, your power and status tend to increase? But how did that come to be the case? Who was patient zero and what enabled the early transmission of these memes when they weren't yet able to bestow status? We need some kind of epidemiological perspective. It would be so fascinating to see what future people will write about this period

In the famously science-respecting WSJ opinion pages?

In this case the piece is by Lawrence Krauss, a genuine physicist. It's not the WSJ's own science-denying imbeciles.

Still ... Krauss is himself a bit of a bomb thrower, and when he went shopping for a place to hit at scientists, the WSJ was happy to have him.

Who specifically are the WSJ "science-denying imbeciles"? Can you point to specific articles or opinion pieces?

"The Earth Is Warming, but Is CO2 the Cause?" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-earth-is-warming-but-is-co2...). Lots of other examples.

Separately, it is disappointing this thread was flagged. Krauss is a theoretical physicist (formerly at ASU) and I thought the article was a good one notwithstanding its appearance in the WSJ opinion section. Its relevance to science and society is appropriate for HN. (Edited for factual error.)

The Editorial Board.

If you don't believe me, ask the journalists who work there, who pled with then to stop trading off their hard won reputation for accuracy with their lies:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/24/wall-street...

Krauss was an Epstein associate and got himself forced out of Arizona State for being a sex pest.

https://archive.is/Bbmju

subtitle: "Articles in hard-science journals increasingly read like the 1996 hoax, and dissenters are suppressed." The author, Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”

The individual in question has responded: https://nitter.net/IBJIYONGI/status/1743646449399631922

With ad hominem and ad magazinam. If "method that works" means to you "method that works to convince someone", then there is anyway no difference to focusing on the topic. But if it means "method that works to find or clarify knowledge", then this is wrong. I genuinely wonder if the confusion of the two or trading the latter for the former may be at the heart of the problem, and if the rise of social media is training us to find the former the normal one. With all its stars and likes you get for ad hominem more than for a well done rational argument.

> ad magazinam

Take a look for yourself: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org

She wasn't kidding about the bestiality, btw: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255

Ok. To think the anglo world can create analytic philosophy, and have so many respected, clever philosophers and historians; still their general public seems to have major trouble with the idea that critical theory (the frankfurt's school version) IS NOT postmodernism. It's not that hard, really. There at most two wikipedia pages to read (the best way is still to read Lyotard or Baudrillard, but i understand the general public won't do it). I understand the EN page on postmodernism are mostly wrong in details (Britannica isn't better, i think people should read authors before writing about their theories :/), both are really shitty entry level but sufficient to understand the basics, then follow this:

Can we agree that postmodernism reject meta-narratives that trie to explain too much? It's one of the cornerstone of postmodernism, and probably one of the more known. Can we also agree that critical theory (not the tool, the philosophical theory) often push towards global relativism as well as a marxist metanarrative? Conclusions?

I'm not saying both theories are irreconcilable (although Frankfurt's school version of critical theory is), i'm saying they are not the same, and any "intellectual"/pundit/influencer who use both term as if they're the same should crawl back to where they came, ashamed of being so idiotic and untrustworthy they can't read a few books on subject they're talking about in public (whether it's videos or articles).

The public, correctly, perceives these all as just "stupid ideas with no power to build things." It's like "supply-side economics." Nobody really cares what "scholars" in the field actually think that label means. I'd note that aerospace engineers don't have to chide the public about the precise labels to apply to their field.

Because there is not two hundred different pundits/grifters who tries to leverage the lack of knowledge of the general public in aerospace to make themselves seem clever.

To me it's the same as people try to sell 'quantum medecine' or 'quantum meditation'. On this website, any grifting article about that would be buried fast and not up voted, right?

And critical theory, as a tool for historians, linguists and archeologists has already been more useful than string theory or the multiverse theory has been for anyone, so I guess the public is incorrect here?

Postmodernism ideas are everywhere in the general public, by the way. Because it's an adequate description of the post-80s world, from the 60s. Each time you think 'he's virtue signaling', you think like a postmodernist. Each time you think of an object as a status symbol, you are a postmodernist.

There are no absolutes…in the extreme…

Really?

If I could have one Christmas wish, it’s that people would stop posting intentionally inflammatory op-eds to HN.

Folks, you’re not going to learn anything useful about the state of science from the WSJ opinion page. Content is posted there because it will engage (enrage) WSJ’s readers, not because it is actually true or newsworthy.

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