Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoz123 | Hacker News Reader

Blown away by this article, thank you. I hadn't thought of the Sokal affair in ages but I remember when it happened and how gleeful everyone was in making fun of the journal at the time. To think that the author and journal co-editor at the time would wind up working together as early advocates for Palenstinian rights is an incredible plot twist.

View on HN

Is it that much of a plot twist? It’s possible for more than one thing to be true at once – that postmodernist nonsense deserves to be mocked and belittled, and that Palestinians deserve rights.

Not OP, but I think the plot twist is, maybe we need to be able to entertain "obviously absurd" ideas to be able to land on a correct position if the culture we're inside of is not ready for those ideas yet. (No idea if the journal was really that early on this particular position though)

Crucially, entertaining ideas isn't the same as believing them, it's about giving them some time and space so you can work out whether it's consistent, rich, useful. Even in math this stuff is hard to get right, just look at the resistance and ridicule that Cantor had to go through, or look at the development of non-Euclidean geometry. And that's a space where proof is actually possible. Critical theory is a real thing but is always walking this fine line between being nonsense or being revolutionary.

By its very nature, postmodernism can't be correct or incorrect. The most it can do is provide a perspective or method of analysis. Some people might find it interesting or even useful. (Personally I see it as trite intellectual masturbation, but that's just me.)

It is very, very rare that a fringe or radical ideology that holds fringe views on almost all topics happens to hold a correct and important stance that is also very rare among non-fringe ideologies. Support for Palestinian rights has definitely not been as common as it should have been in the United States, but was still quite common among many non-fringe groups and individuals. You didn't, and don't, need to go to a radical Marxist critical theory publication to be better informed about that topic. I think the author makes an admirable defense of his magazine and shows it was not quite as crazy or worthless as the Sokal affair initially made it out to be, but we don't need to go all the way in the other direction.

Despite Alex Jones watchers all citing it as a great reason to watch him, you don't, and didn't, actually need to watch Alex Jones to learn about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Alex Jones was not the person who broke that story or even popularized it - and even if he were to have been, it wouldn't mean he was factually correct about most of it or about anything else.

Sometimes there are brilliant people with fringe, contrarian views or findings that initially get ridiculed and are later found to be correct or valuable. But Cantor was already a respected individual for his past work; he was not some no-name crank mailing theory-of-everything letters to mathematicians. Ramanujan was closer to that, but Ramanujans are so incredibly rare that you really need to be extremely cautious. And math is unlike almost every other field, where fringe claims can generally be objectively and independently confirmed or refuted, so you need to be far more cautious about nearly every other field out there.

However, I agree with your point that at the very least all sides should be initially heard out. Just not necessarily heard for very long.

Agree with all this; see my other comment in thread for more color, more math. I don't want to come across as embracing pseudo-science, misinformation, etc.

I do like to think about the distinctions and boundaries for hard/soft/squishy knowledge though, and try to challenge assumptions and misconceptions about it. Invariably people have weird ideas about how "hard" their pet area is and how "soft" that thing they love to hate really is, which is itself a kind of dogma or superstition. Plus I think it's a public service to try and interest gear-headed nerds in things like criticism and philosophy (or vice versa, pushing engineering and math at the literature nerds). Last time I waded into this kind of debate I was pointing out that Frege worked on semiotics.

> early advocates for Palenstinian rights

Early? https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

Early advocates for Palestinian rights, in 1996?

Curious.

Yeah, this is an odd word choice. Even as someone only born in that decade, I've heard at least one case from someone directly about their advocacy from before that year; a history professor I had in college once told an anecdote during a lecture about a time he briefed the elder President Bush, who was apparently considering whether to try to pressure Israel to halt settlements on the West Bank (which the professor told us was an example of how much more attention to detail he perceived in the elder compared to his younger one when he became president). I'm sure there are plenty of people around who can recall things much earlier than this.

I think it's great that they were early advocates for Palestinian rights (I'm a liberal capitalist and dislike Marxism but have always been very sympathetic to the Palestinians and their cause), but, as this article states, this is a Marxist magazine. For a very long time, Marxists have been on this side. Don't see why it would be a twist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com