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slurryon In a Car-Culture Clash, It’s the Los Angeles Police vs. Pedestrians

You're getting downvoted for the first line, but the second line is the most insightful comment so far.

slurryon Why cul-de-sacs are bad for your health

Some people like high-rise apartments right next to the train station. Some people want to prevent people from having such an option.

slurryon Free Mathematics Books

Huh. Everything from Blast into Math! to Holonomy Groups in Riemannian Geometry and well beyond, all jumbled up together in one big unsorted uncategorized list.

slurryon A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe

Not sure why it should bother us that a basic cable celebrity is getting frustrated with questions. It's not like people are asking Andrew Wiles to answer long division problems here. Low-to-middlebrow amateur political economy, by contrast, seems pretty solidly within the pay grade of a spokes-actor like Rowe.

slurryon Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

One problem with the conventional history is that it's very much oriented around agriculture on plains, using irrigation, with buildings made of stone or clay. This kind of agricultural culture is good for archaeologists because it leaves intact traces that are easy to dig for. But it's not the only kind of agriculture.

There have also been agricultural civilizations that grew rain-fed crops on forest sites and built houses of wood. Like the Maya, or ancient southeast Asian civilizations.

Luckily those peoples did help us out by building stone temples, but I would assume that probably several more civilizations have practiced slash-and-burn jungle agriculture and just not happened to have built monumental temples.

Supporting my hypothesis, one early layer of Jericho seems to reflect a forestal mode of production - something about acorn horticulture[0].

So, I think if we are to find the hidden backstory behind the sudden simultaneous 10,000 YE agricultural revolutions, the place to look would be in the trees. But what do I know.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture#Settlements "Settlements occur in the woodland belt where oak and Pistacia species dominated...The superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbrick have been found."

slurryon This Google ad has moved people to tears across India and Pakistan

Nope, had me weeping like a big white baby.

slurryon Android: The Land That Python Forgot

For doing useful things on Android? I don't think it can be reasonably disputed that Python is worse than Java.

slurryon They Loved Your G.P.A., Then They Saw Your Tweets

Really not clear what point you're trying to make. Still not clear how Kagan violated free speech by not saying much. And definitley not clear what any of that has to do with social media and admissions at a sample of schools that does not include Harvard.

slurryon They Loved Your G.P.A., Then They Saw Your Tweets

The law school isn't part of FAS. And free speech includes the right to say nothing, even if for careerist advantage.

slurryon Is The Economist left- or right-wing?

'Classically liberal' is a gesture of self-congratulation, not a useful descriptor.

slurryon “I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays

I think most of the humanists writing these are trying to bootstrap a longform journalism career and want eyes on it. ;)

slurryon “I Quit Academia,” an Important, Growing Subgenre of American Essays

Yeah, you can find basically identical complaints (not always prestige-format essays though) from bio, chem and physics PhD's. Those job markets are nearly as bad as humanities and social sciences. And since pharma is in a state of disarray, the job prospects in industry aren't so hot either.

slurryon The End of Stanford?

Sometimes a thing can be a bad idea without being illegal or even strictly speaking immoral.

slurryon The End of Stanford?

It's legitimate to ask about the ethics of administrators investing personally in a student startup, especially when the students drop out en masse.

slurryon Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower

In the short term the pay is not so great and getting worse, in the long term they still can't get fired. Your analogy does not work. Unless you are talking about their administrators. In which case yes, quite a bit like Microsoft.

slurryon Review of the DSM-V as a piece of dystopian fiction

What's wrong with "appeal to principle"?

slurryon What is it like to be a mathematician?

From the examples in your post, it seems like you only got to calculus. Which is not really advanced math.

slurryon Research Finds Outright Grants of Cash are an Effective Form of Aid to the Poor

People aren't really starving in Kenya, either.

It's not a rich country, but people eat.

slurryon G.K. Chesterton: The fallacy of success (1909)

Really a charitable understatement of the case against.

slurryon Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

The studies cited in the Slate article come out of education and speech-disorders research. Those fields have problems too, but not all of the same ones as clinical psych.

slurryon Nate Silver to would-be data scientists: Don’t sweat the degree, do the work

Nate Silver's lack of a math background? Why does this keep getting repeated. He has a BA in economics from one of the most quantitative and rigorous programs in the country, plus some work at LSE. I'm sure he has more formal math and statistics education than most self-labeled "engineers" on HN.

slurryon Research: Android taking over the tablet market from iOS

Thunderstorms like this are interesting to me because while surveys of the first two floors show the water rising, an inspection of the attic seems to indicate that not much water has actually come up here yet, at least not more than an inch or two.

And then you realize this flooding comes from several different storm systems and wonder why you just wasted your time with this linkbait article.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

I'd be happy to amend "inaccurate" to "disingenuous" and "dismiss the work" to "try and work out what the authors might have meant [and then dismiss]". I don't at all mind making those semantic adjustments.

But the point still stands, as you put it, that "the authors of Intellectual Impostures are at pains to limit [their inquiry] to the scientific areas."

What is the use of that? I mean, sure, it's fine for the Bruno Latour chapter, because Latour's work is actually on science. But what's the point of demonstrating that Irigaray mangles fluid mechanics and Lacan mangles topology, in books that aren't about fluid mechanics or topology? Who cares? Pointing it out isn't wrong per se. But it also, despite Bricmont's extensive handwaving, doesn't prove anything worthwhile.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve."

People don't like to admit they've been conned. Anyway, sincerity is a separate issue from quality. The editors believed the paper was sincere, just not very good.

That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities.

Alternatively, they thought it was "a little hokey" but assumed sincerity, and ran it because they had an opening and were too lazy to find another scientist willing to write for a humanities journal.

Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory".

It's not that critical theory is necessarily good. It's that Sokal's prank proves more about the efficacy of social engineering hacks than the badness of critical theory.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

And if they end up serving no practical use they end up discarded and ignored by scientists and engineers (if maybe not pure mathematicians). The author's point is that there is no such selective pressure on lit crit.

Litcrit theory is actually a pretty big commercial success. Derrida et al. sell quite well for academic books, and a Sexy Postmodernism Sex Theory Made Accessible to Undergraduates type course is a reliably decent draw for English departments, who need the enrollment.

Furthermore, if you consume entertainment products with shifting, non-linear narrative like The Simpsons, Coen Brothers movies, or Inception, you're exerting selective pressure in favor of postmodernism.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

Social Text received Sokal's piece, found it amateurish and unreadable, asked him to make changes, he got cranky and insisted it run as is. They sat on the piece. Later, they had a special issue on The Science Wars coming up, figured an amateurish and unreadable contribution by a scientist would be better than no contribution by a scientist at all, and ran it as a non-peer reviewed contribution.

http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

Retellings by Sokal fans make it seem as if they received it breathlessly as great work and rushed to put it into publication. That is not what happened. The Sokal Affair is less evidence for the fuzzy-headedness of litcrit and more evidence that you can often get what you want just by lying, being a dick, and having some kind of finished product for people to work with.

And Sokal's submission wasn't some fluke, it was in the ballpark of a lot of the heady self-referential fluff in that field.

Only if you're very insensitive to tone, style, vocabulary and methodology does the Sokal piece resemble any legit article in Social Text. From the descriptions of it you'd think Social Text was full of maniacal gibbering about how nothing is true, everything is permitted, and quantum mechanics is a tool of the phallologocracy. But in fact, the quality of work is far more pedestrian, if a bit wordy. Here's the table of contents for the latest issue (articles behind paywall, abstracts are free):

http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current

Is it self-referential nonsense? Maybe! Does it bear a reasonable surface resemblance to "Transgressing the Boundaries", if we're not being deliberately obtuse? No to me.

the terminology of science (like the term "theory")

The term theory pre-dates empirical science by a good bit, and the litcrit usage is not really orthogonal to the scientific one anyway.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

In semi-fairness(?) to trend-following humanities scholars, deconstruction is a little bit passe by now anyway. (It's telling that the article we're talking about is from 1993). Badiou is the big new star, Deleuze/Guattari is much edgier, and Zizek has a stranglehold on the mass teenybopper market. Deconstruction still retains some following but some people kept Yahoo as their homepage all through the 00's.

It's useful as an intellectual exercise to analyze the theoretical merits and shortcomings of deconstruction, but because I'm a basically shallow person I'd like to point out that in terms of hipness and relevance we may as well be analyzing the music of Hall & Oates.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

That book is essentially worthless. Its methodology is to read through philosophers and literary critics, find places where they talk about science, evaluate whether they talk about science accurately, and when they do not, to dismiss their work.

Picking out bad analogies and inapposite asides is not a good use of anyone's time.

slurryon How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)

I will even suppose that something useful and important is being done in those fields--nevertheless, at the end of the day, I can point to my computer or bike and say "Engineering and hard science made this possible", and they can't point to a damned thing anyone cares about.

Ahem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons

slurryon The Supersizing of American Colleges

There was a contention that the government subsidizes humanities research. I demonstrated that, barring the rounding error that is the NEH, it does not. You reply that yes in fact the government does subsidize humanities teaching. I don't even know what to do with that.

Anyway, if loans were given out on an ability to repay standard then the biggest losses would be to health professions, criminal justice, early childhood education and other non-prestige career degrees toward which low income students tend to gravitate.