Your phrasing (twice in the essay and now in that comment) is pretty much indistinguishable from proud declaration of ignorance as social signaling. Invoking straw postmodernists is neither big nor clever.
Contrary to many rationalists’ views, postmodernism is not composed entirely of bullshit—it is a useful critical method to keep on hand when talking about mushy social and artistic things, like almost all of what humans do that might be called “culture”. Humans are incredibly full of shit, and postmodernism and critical theory can be somewhat useful in cutting through it and calling them on it.
However, as the product of humans, it is itself horribly susceptible to bullshit in turn, particularly when overapplied to actual reality. It’s also really, really badly lacking in rigor, and pretty much crashes and burns on Vladimir M’s tests. So that’s a reason not to bother with it unless you’re interested in it for its own sake, as I am. I suspect you need to have worked out a usable amount of it yourself to get use out of it.
Nevertheless, it is about something and useful. I’d say that any effective writer of fiction needs a working knowledge of postmodernist techniques, whether they call it that or not.
Starting point for the curious: it works pretty heavily on Bayes structure—Bayesian epistemology being the way to resolve the dilemma of things that are both subjective and objective: how to say communicable things about things that are a matter of opinion, like art and feelings. Very few postmodernists can count above twenty without using their fingers, so a few people have noticed it in passing but the rigorous work pretty much hasn’t been done; but if you know what postmodernism is for and you know how Bayesian epistemology works, the Bayes structure is pretty obvious. (This is my cue to try to infect my postmodernist academic friends with Bayes.)
I find postmodernism useful in my years-long interest in record collecting and popular music. Useful (to the reader) popular music criticism requires understanding the horrendous forces of bullshit involved in its production. If you want to see what postmodernism would look like as the basis for engineering, ’80s pop music in the UK would be a good example, culminating in “The Manual” by the KLF: a step by step procedure on how to have a number-one record.
I wouldn’t say people should go out of their way to learn it, but I wouldn’t mark it something to avoid. My problem is I’ve spent far too long as a music critic, so the stuff is actually interesting and useful to me. This is, arguably, a fate to avoid.
I need to write up something on the subject. One day.
Edit: I’ve pointed friends at this comment to rip it to shreds and belabour me about the head with wherever I’m being not even wrong, which I probably am in a few places—I come to it as an autodidact because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.
I’d delight in telling you you’re wrong, but you’re mostly not.
I would say that I don’t think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I’d have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.
I’m also not sure it does as badly as you say on Vladimir M’s heuristics. Looking quickly, for my own field, there’s still a ton of low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the major canonical works of literature assigned to undergraduates are pretty well-covered in the literature, but if you’re working in popular culture of any era, you have basically no excuse for running out of things to say. The ideology test is a little trickier, since there are areas of literary criticism—feminist, queer, and racial studies, most obviously—that are explicitly ideological. But, of course, we have to be careful with ideology as a warning sign, because arguably at this point climate science and biology are ideologically poisoned. Ideology takes place heavily outside of the academy, and I’m loathe to say that just because something has become a political hot potato the academics of it are prima facia problematic.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias. The thing that it is most easy to completely miss about postmodernism is that it is, by and large, a study of epistemologies. Yes, postmodernist literary criticism makes massive use of Freudian psychoanalysis despite the complete discrediting of Freudianism as an empirical practice. But we don’t psychoanalyze real people. We psychoanalyze fictional people. The question is not “does there exist a real person with an Oedipus complex,” it’s “is the Oedipus complex a sufficiently well-known concept that it would be either included in a work of fiction by an author or read into a work of fiction by a reader?” In other words, since we’re generally dealing with man-made structures, the question is less “Is foo true” and more “Is foo part of what is talked about and thought about regarding this subject?”
This helps a lot with the ideological bias issue, because it means that postmodernism can actually be ideologically neutral on the political issues it seemingly invests in. This is something I tell my students whenever one of them gets fussy about the fact that I assign literature with gay people in it. You don’t actually have to accept the premise “homosexuality is not a valid basis for discrimination” in order to understand how gay writers articulate their own experience in literature.
Now, in practice, of course, literary scholars are generally liberals who are supportive of gay rights, feminism, and further work towards racial and economic equality. But then again, the ideological bias in the academy extends far beyond humanities departments—it’s increasingly hard for an American climate scientist to be a Republican too. At the end of the day, this is somewhat irreducible—after all, reality probably does, in the long run, lend more support to some political viewpoints than others.
In any case, I tend to think that postmodernism is something that just about everybody should be broadly familiar with. I think there are some serious problems with how we teach it, and some serious problems with how it’s attacked (Alan Sokal should never, ever be referenced by anyone who is trying to make a serious point about humanities scholarship. His “research” on postmodernism makes his hoax article look like sound scholarship by comparison), but the basic elevator summary of postmodernism is “It’s the process of learning to account for epistemological differences when dealing with communications.” Which is something that is probably useful if, you know, you ever intend to talk to someone you disagree with in your life.
Also, can I just say that the Stanford Encyclopedia entry you linked to is absolutely terribly written? Clue for writers explaining concepts that use algebraic or pseudo-algebraic notation—it’s really nice if you bother to define what S and T mean before you start throwing them around.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias.
Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called “postmodernist” is their bias—part ideological, part fashion-induced—in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed.
To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what’s being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists—it’s falls squarely under the concept of “epistemological differences when dealing with communications.”) Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I’ve seen, they’re completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won’t earn any prestige points.
In my opinion, the main danger of reading things like postmodernism is that one might get infected by the smug attitude of superiority that looks upon rigorous, precise, down-to-earth rational thinking as blinkered and nerdy, without having anything better to offer instead.
Now of course, there are subjects that nobody yet knows how to approach with rigorous and precise thinking, and all attempts to do so regularly end up in blinkered and nerdy discussions without much connection to reality. In these subjects, a more fuzzy approach is indeed the only viable alternative. The trouble is, those humanists who, as you say, can barely count without using their fingers tend to greatly overestimate the extent of these subjects, and their self-satisfied and smug attitude can be very infections for a lot of people.
To be perfectly honest, I know far more people in hard sciences who look down on postmodernist scholars as wooly nonsense-peddlers than I do postmodernists who reject the sciences or rationalism. This is, admittedly, anecdotal evidence, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a piece of anti-science writing out of the humanities half as perniciously irresponsible as Alan Sokal’s “work.” Certainly nothing that is as reflexively cited in discussions. To be honest, I find an exasperating tendency among math/science people to simply stop their reading on postmodernism with the Sokal Affair and decide they’ve got the matter nailed, despite the fact that almost nobody bothers to mention that Social Text isn’t a peer-reviewed journal, and thus Sokal accomplished something about as hard as publishing a fraudulent piece in a local paper for a semi-major city.
So I’m inclined to be skeptical about which side of that debate is more prone to being infected with bad thinking. The biggest problem postmodernists usually have with math, science, and other more rational fields is that those are not their field, and they’re not experts in them. Sit one of them down with some Feynman lectures, though, and they’ll generally be fine, because they’re generally speaking really smart people who just aren’t specialized in that stuff. But the thing is, most of them know that they don’t understand what goes on past freshman year in any math or science courses. Puzzlingly, science people seem to freely assume they understand graduate humanities work with alarming regularity. Of course, this failing on their part in no way invalidates their field—any more than the fact that someone who majored in English hasn’t taken many math courses invalidates their work. :)
Oh, I certainly don’t think that the average hard scientist’s view and knowledge of humanities are much better. However, when you order academic fields by rigor and exactness, with pure mathematics on one end and humanities on the other, then as a very general rule, in order to avoid writing nonsense in your own field, you must not have misconceptions about fields that are more exact than yours, whereas knowledge of less exact fields is normally not important for scholarly work.
Thus, for example, a physicist can be completely ignorant about philosophy and humanities and nevertheless consistently produce top-quality physics, whereas a philosopher or a cultural critic who is completely ignorant of natural sciences will inevitably end up writing nonsense at least occasionally. So while both of them may have an equally distorted and ignorant view of each other’s field, the latter’s work will likely suffer far more as a consequence.
Regarding the Sokal affair, I agree that it’s usually overblown far beyond its real significance (and physicists should also be more humble in light of the more recent Bogdanoff affair). However, I think your minimization of it is also exaggerated. Regardless of whether a journal is peer-reviewed, editors should be held responsible for what they decide to publish. I don’t think the editors of Social Text would have been so eager to publish Sokal’s essay if it hadn’t pandered so consistently to their ideology.
Well, I’m not entirely convinced the phrase “order academic fields by rigor and exactness” is a completely meaningful one. It implies a level of direct comparability that I’m not confident exists. I certainly agree that humanities makes for very bad science, but then, so does basket weaving. The flip side is that science has not developed a particularly useful vocabulary for dealing with nuance, ambiguity, or irony.
I’m also not sure a philosopher/cultural critic without significant scientific training is bound to write nonsense, so long as they actually stick to their field of expertise. Now, it may well be true that humanities sorts are more prone to straying from their actual areas of expertise—certainly a study demonstrating that would not surprise me. But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It’s certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.
And yes, the Sokal Affair clearly reflects badly on the editors of Social Text. But that’s why I compared it to getting nonsense published in a newspaper—which has been proven possible from the local level up to major international papers. I also would not describe Social Text as “eager” to publish Sokal’s essay. They rejected it initially, and only dusted it off because it was directly relevant to a special issue they were publishing and, probably more importantly for a paper journal, it was very short. But more to the point, Social Text is not a scholarly journal. I wasn’t in the field at the time of the Sokal Affair, so any sense I have of its reputation is second hand, but if an un-peer reviewed journal was being treated as equivalent to PMLA or Critical Inquiry or something, that, much more than the Sokal Affair, is damning evidence against the humanities.
I should note that I am also more hostile towards Sokal for his completely and irredeemably awful book Fashionable Nonsense than I am for the Sokal Affair. He, at least, does not overstate the significance of his own hoax. Whereas Fashionable Nonsense is a sufficiently wretched book that I would generally advise people that their time would be better spent reading up on the intricacies of crystal energy healing.
But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It’s certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.
I strongly disagree here. To write meaningfully about sexual politics, you must have a model of sexual and other related aspects of human thought and behavior, and modern science has a whole lot to say about that. (Of course, the relevant science is still very incomplete and far from settled, but that makes it even more important to be knowledgeable about it, in order to separate solid insight from speculation.) If you lack that knowledge, your model is likely to be wrong in at least some ways that could be corrected by familiarizing yourself with the relevant science, and this is likely to show in your writing. Moreover, there is a whole lot of spurious pseudo-insight in this area (Freudianism and its offshoots being the most notorious example), and if you’re not familiar with science beyond a high school level, you may well end up swallowing a lot of such nonsense believing it to be solid insight and incorporating it into your work.
I would agree if one is writing about Victorian sexual politics straight-up, however I was careful to specify the sexual politics of Victorian literature. For which Freudianism, notoriously wrong as it is, is highly relevant because it was enormously popular for a chunk of the time period, and did directly influence writers (more particularly in the early 20th century than the late 19th, but still). Certainly it had much more influence than post-Victorian science that the authors could not possibly have been aware of.
Which seems to me one of the hedges that postmodernism usefully offers. The decision to approach Victorian literary sexual politics in terms of the thinking of the time and to treat it as a phenomenon of that culture is, to my mind, quintessentially postmodernist.
I see a −1 karma on the parent post as of this writing. That seems to me a completely irresponsible use of karma points. I propose the following fix for such phenomena: if you downvote a comment, your own karma drops by two. This will bring assignment of karma more into line with real world enforcement of social rules, in which the self-appointed police wields his punishments carefully and reluctantly because of the cost to himself. Someone who is overly censorious in the real world loses social capital, and I think that is a very good thing.
Downvoting is already limited by social capital (how many times you can downvote is a fucntion of your own karma score). Causing it to also decrease one’s karma would discourage downvoting outright instead of merely limiting it, and that is an unwanted thing.
Well, I don’t think we can say a priori that my proposal would not work. I think it might, because I think it reflects what happens in the real world enforcement of social rules. The enforcer puts himself on the line in the real world. You want the would be police to pay a certain price.
But I’m glad that, as you mention, there seems to be some sort of limit. I suspect it’s not enough.
Note that downvoting isn’t particularly censorious, here. A specific comment has to get multiple downvotes on its own merits to be hidden (comments from users with net-negative karma are throttled, but not hidden); even then the comment is just hidden, not removed, and there’s a clear marker that the comment exists. Further, individual users can turn off the option of having downvoted comments hidden—I have, and if I remember correctly I’ve seen others mention that they’ve done so as well. Individuals’ overall karma scores are not especially visible and don’t affect very much, especially when one has more than 100-200 karma or so and is not especially at risk of going under the cutoff for posting to the main area of the site.
Note that downvoting isn’t particularly censorious, here. A specific comment has to get multiple downvotes on its own merits to be hidden
The problem is that there is bandwagon behavior: a comment with a negative score will tend to be downvoted further. (This also applies on the positive side.)
Also, while a negative score may not prevent a comment from being viewed, it will have status repercussions on the author, as readers make note of it. The tendency will be for readers to pay less attention to comments by that user.
The problem is that there is bandwagon behavior: a comment with a negative score will tend to be downvoted further. (This also applies on the positive side.)
Does this happen? I think my behaviour is actually the opposite, I sometimes upvote comments that I think have been downvoted unfairly even though I probably wouldn’t consider them worth an upvote otherwise.
It would be startling if conformity bias didn’t operate here, and I don’t see much evidence that it doesn’t.
That said, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. I often upvote after (IMO) unearned downvotes, and sometimes downvote after unearned upvotes, but that doesn’t mean I’m not subject to the bandwagon effect.
The bandwagon effect is real, I think. My own behavior is to pay particular attention to heavily upvoted or downvoted comments to see if I can see the reason for the excitement. If I can’t find a reason, I will often vote the opposite way, as you do. But I usually find the reason. And then I can’t resist adding my voice to the crowd’s.
And since the upvoting and downvoting is silent and anonymous, the reasons for it should and I think do(#) tend to resemble the reasons of democratic voting, which reasons were discussed in Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter—the point of the book being that the reasons tend to be irrational. The result is a phenomenon that is overall irrational, with occasional exceptions.
Granted, it might not be much of an improvement if voters had to add an explanation, since humans are nothing if not fantastic rationalizers.
(#) I say I think, because since the voting is silent and anonymous, no one but the voters can actually know, so anyone else is forced to come up with a hypothesis which fits the voting pattern.
Also, while a negative score may not prevent a comment from being viewed, it will have status repercussions on the author, as readers make note of it. The tendency will be for readers to pay less attention to comments by that user.
I’m fairly sure that that’s not the same thing as censorship.
(Or does ‘censorious’ refer to censure, rather than censorship? I probably should have looked that up before I used it, rather than assuming that Constant was staying on topic...)
I couldn’t help but notice that you wanted to share blame with me:
rather than assuming that Constant was staying on topic...
Do you mean that seriously? Do you want to have a discussion about what the topic was and whether I stayed on it? I’m not really inclined to, but here you’ve blamed something on me.
Your very first comment in this thread started with “while I’m on the topic of karma”. Since it was your fist comment in this thread, I assumed that that bit referred to the conversation you’d been having elsewhere, minutes before, which included themes of karma and censorship.
As I implied, that’s not an assumption that I should have made, though I think it’s somewhat understandable that I did. (What did you mean by that phrase?)
I meant I’m on the topic of karma. And I was on the topic of karma. Of karma—not of karma and hacker news, or karma and deleting comments, or karma and censorship. But of karma.
In my experience, “while I’m on the topic of X” means “I’m going to continue talking about X, but in a slightly different way” or “I’m changing the topic to a different subtopic of X than the one I was just discussing” or “I’m changing the topic to something that’s vaguely related to topic-at-hand X”. In any case, it refers to a continuation of talking-about-X, which means that it’s not completely beyond the pale to assume that various other concepts that have been used are still part of the conversation.
This appears to be turning into a pissing contest. I’m not interested in playing apey games with you.
I wasn’t challenging you to a pissing contest, I was defending myself against an attempt to deflect blame onto me. If you didn’t want me to defend myself, you probably should not have tried to use me as a convenient person to deflect blame from yourself. The problem was that you didn’t know what a word meant. That’s not my fault.
The comments are hidden in the original post’s comments section, yes—but they’re not hidden on our user pages, or on the recent comments page, and the latter is a major component of how many of the more active users keep track of conversations. (It’s where I’m typing this very reply!) They also increment the “(N children)” note for the hidden-comment marker, which I expect makes people more likely to click and see what’s being discussed.
Ironically enough, the conversation is also long enough that even with the option to have downvoted comments hidden turned off, one has to click on a link to “continue this thread »”. This takes exactly as much effort as clicking on a link to unhide a comment, and the interface doesn’t even encourage the user to do so by letting them know that there are a significant number of comments left to read. Is this also censorship?
What? What’s your context for asking me that rhetorical question? My problem in this thread was with a good, solid comment that made a good point (written by Vladimir M) getting downvoted. I didn’t say he was censored. I simply pointed out that he got a downvote for a bad reason and I suggested a possible fix.
Elsewhere I mentioned that in hacker news I had been permanently frozen out because of my first comment being downvoted. But that was to answer folks who were criticizing my decision to delete my own comment. I explained the history of my concern.
I’m not sure how your question applies to any of this.
Someone who is overly censorious in the real world loses social capital, and I think that is a very good thing.
Someone who is insufficiently censorious also loses social capital, in almost all societies throughout history. The notion that it is best to be maximally nonjudgmental is a recent idea which is not particularly prevalent outside the urban West. And not a particularly good idea either.
As regards the received view within this community on use of downvoting to express disapproval, you’d better read this.
As far as I know, no one can keep track … which fact pretty much destroys my implicit argument regarding a socially enforced duty to be an enforcer. At least as it applies to downvoting. Thx for bringing me back to reality.
The notion that it is best to be maximally nonjudgmental is a recent idea
I am not in any way shape or form pushing this idea. It is a straw man. What I suggested was an adjustment to the current system which brings it more into line with how the real world works. The real world is not pacifist. It is not nonjudgmental. And those who enforce good behavior pay a price, because freedom is not free. That is what I am using as a model, and not a maximally nonjudgmental system.
The real world is ruled by economics, by every action having a certain cost. It is the cost of action which causes us to choose wisely what we do. I am suggesting tweaking the economics of karma, because I think it could stand to be improved.
The real world is ruled by economics, by every action having a certain cost.
Yes, all actions have a cost (though, of course, not necessarily a net cost). But your suggested fix—penalizing a downvoter two whole karma points—attaches no corresponding penalty to upvoting. Why not?
If you had suggested something more balanced that penalized both up- and down-votes, then I might not have jumped in to chide you for ‘pacifism’. And if your proposal had also made upvoting and downvoting of top-level articles particularly expensive, then I might have supported you.
One way of you to have responded without leveling false accusations would have been to say something like, “let’s not forget the other side, upvoting.” Just because I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been receptive to it. I would have been very receptive, I am very receptive. But instead of putting it that way, you decided to take an oppositional posture which presupposes, falsely, that I would have been resistant to the point. You manufactured a conflict where there had been none.
To answer your question:
But your suggested fix—penalizing a downvoter two whole karma points—attaches no corresponding penalty to upvoting. Why not?
let me rephrase it:
Why didn’t you think of everything?
I think the answer is obvious.
So, let’s turn to upvoting. One solution for upvoting is to end it. Make it just downvoting. If the purpose of moderation is to protect the community from trolls, then all you need is the downvote.
Does karma even matter once you have enough to not get silenced instantly? It is more a measure of experience with the site than intelligence. I cannot think of a short series of comments i could make that would drain all of my karma at this point, which would not get me banned even if I had several thousand.
I think that karma could potentially be more useful as an assessment of the quality of a post if it were assigned more judiciously than it is currently on just about any karma based site. It might be possible to refine the karma system to improve it. It does not seem to me that the possibilities have really been explored. Currently, karma tends to enforce groupthink on most sites. On digg and reddit, I see massive groupthink. Both sites have become useless to me—they’ve become a mix of self congratulation, juvenile humor, and predictable politics. I remember when they found interesting stuff on the web.
I need to write up something on the subject. One day.
Please do it soon. It isn’t the first time I read here about actual usefulness of postmodernism (unfortunately don’t remember who has argued for that before), but the claim was never demonstrated or discussed in a greater detail.
It was probably me ;-) I’ve pointed friends at the above comment to rip it to shreds and belabour me about the head with wherever I’m being not even wrong, which I probably am in a few places—I come to this stuff as an autodidact on it because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.
I doubt I’d call popular culture an important problem. (And I was, fairly clearly I thought, talking about pretty much the entire decade, not just two guys at the end of it.) Except possibly as a threat. It is one that involves moderate quantities of money sloshing back and forth. But, more importantly, undue influence. Most recently, it got its hooks into things that actually affect the rest of the world. I submit that understanding how an industry that small can punch so ridiculously far above its economic weight may be useful. (Not that PM/crit is fully up to that task yet, and I’m greatly disappointed by that, but it’s the right direction.)
As my comment notes, it’s not something to bother with unless you’re interested already, but Luke’s invocations of straw postmodernists do come across as declaring ignorance as social signaling rather than as saying something that helpfully places these fields in their contexts.
Postmodernism isn’t even a subject, really; more of a theme. That’s a nitpick, though; any of the fields usually cited as postmodernist (critical theory’s the first one to come to mind) would have worked in that context.
But to answer your question, what I’ve read of folks like Derrida is frustrating and unproductive, but most of the parts that seem to function as basilisks to the uninoculated parse as not even wrong. On that other hand, that might not reflect everyone’s experience; there are a lot of branches of cultural criticism inheriting from postmodern philosophy, and it’s quite likely that some of them will end up being flattering to our higher-level instrumental values. That could lead to a couple of different failure modes, which I probably don’t need to belabor.
To answer your question, though, what I’ve read of folks like Derrida is frustrating and unproductive, but most of the parts that seem to function as basilisks to the uninoculated parse as not even wrong.
That certainly agrees with my intuition. In fairness, I’ve also had the experience of (1) reading something in a postmodern text that looks obviously wrong or not even wrong, (2) reading some more texts that gave me a better idea of how postmodernists use their words, and then (3) revisiting the original text and seeing that it actually had something worthwhile to say. Nonetheless, I’m far from convinced that reading postmodern texts is the most cost-effective way to get these insights.
On that other hand, that might not reflect everyone’s experience; there are a lot of branches of cultural criticism inheriting from postmodern philosophy, and it’s quite likely that some of them will end up being flattering to our higher-level instrumental values. That could lead to a couple of different failure modes, which I probably don’t need to belabor.
I’m not sure that I understand. Are you saying that we might give too much respect to postmodernists because they use postmodern reasoning to support ends that we also support?
If so, I actually think that that is a reason to study postmodernism more closely.
Suppose that you had almost no familiarity with postmodernism, but you were good at epistemic rationality. Then you hear someone utter some postmodern jargon, followed by, “And that is why religious dogma is not a secure foundation for morality.” You might think to yourself, “I couldn’t quite parse all that jargon, but the conclusion was right, so maybe these postmodernists are on to something.” On the basis of this second-hand exposure, you go and read some postmodernist texts, working slowly and carefully, trying to understand this potentially-useful method. Instead, you find that you still can’t parse the jargon. If postmodernism is really that bad, first-hand exposure will leave you with less respect than you had after second-hand exposure. Its incomprehensibility will be a greater strike against it.
Are you saying that we might give too much respect to postmodernists because they use postmodern reasoning to support ends that we also support?
More or less, although I’d cast it in terms of giving too much respect to incoherent arguments rather than to postmodernism. It’s an arguments-as-soldiers thing; if we find ourselves nodding along with an argument that leads to a conclusion we like, and the internals of the argument are later shown to have been nonsense, we look at minimum very silly. Worse, we might along the way have internalized some related nonsense.
On the other hand, we should also be careful not to demonize particular postmodern thinkers or conclusions on account of coming out of the postmodern movement, for the same reasons—a test that many on the empirical side of the Two Cultures divide have failed, unfortunately. Themes and methods characteristic of the movement are, of course, still fair game.
Your secondary-exposure method seems solid in principle, but I’d also say that that’s a good time to revisit the concerns about cost-effectiveness that you raised earlier; it’s a heavyweight method, and I doubt that the certainty it gives you is likely to be worth the time spent on gaining it. Even a prerequisite as basic as learning the vocabulary of, say, deconstructionism is a daunting task, at least comparable in complexity to reading the Sequences.
there are a lot of branches of cultural criticism inheriting from postmodern philosophy, and it’s quite likely that some of them will end up being flattering to our higher-level instrumental values.
This is how I got into it. I had just started getting seriously into thinking about popular music (and unpopular popular music) and the horrifying quantities of bullshit surrounding it, and found Mythologies by Roland Barthes at the local second-hand bookshop, and went “HOLY CRAP THIS NAILS IT.” Bits were opaque and bits were stupid, but enough made what I’d already been thinking make more sense that I got quite a lot out of it. (It’s generally regarded as a classic, and IMO it’s a great book, and Barthes is really pretty easy to read as critical theorists go, but I have no idea if this is a good introduction to anything whatsoever, so am not recommending it to anyone as such. But it was the right book for the right person at the right time.) Possibly the main failure mode was helping encourage me to think listening to records was much more important than it actually was.
(Oh, and Paul Morley in NME. Yes, thatPaul Morley.)
tl;dr: It’s better if you’ve got an actual use for it. In this regard, it’s like the broader field of philosophy.
I read Barthes a couple of decades ago and I remember liking him, though at the moment the only thing I vaguely remember is an analysis of the strip tease. I’ve carried with me one of his insights ever since—the notion that the act of stripping is highly erotic but full nakedness markedly less so.
Two minutes with a postmodern philosopher. :)
Your phrasing (twice in the essay and now in that comment) is pretty much indistinguishable from proud declaration of ignorance as social signaling. Invoking straw postmodernists is neither big nor clever.
Contrary to many rationalists’ views, postmodernism is not composed entirely of bullshit—it is a useful critical method to keep on hand when talking about mushy social and artistic things, like almost all of what humans do that might be called “culture”. Humans are incredibly full of shit, and postmodernism and critical theory can be somewhat useful in cutting through it and calling them on it.
However, as the product of humans, it is itself horribly susceptible to bullshit in turn, particularly when overapplied to actual reality. It’s also really, really badly lacking in rigor, and pretty much crashes and burns on Vladimir M’s tests. So that’s a reason not to bother with it unless you’re interested in it for its own sake, as I am. I suspect you need to have worked out a usable amount of it yourself to get use out of it.
Nevertheless, it is about something and useful. I’d say that any effective writer of fiction needs a working knowledge of postmodernist techniques, whether they call it that or not.
Starting point for the curious: it works pretty heavily on Bayes structure—Bayesian epistemology being the way to resolve the dilemma of things that are both subjective and objective: how to say communicable things about things that are a matter of opinion, like art and feelings. Very few postmodernists can count above twenty without using their fingers, so a few people have noticed it in passing but the rigorous work pretty much hasn’t been done; but if you know what postmodernism is for and you know how Bayesian epistemology works, the Bayes structure is pretty obvious. (This is my cue to try to infect my postmodernist academic friends with Bayes.)
I find postmodernism useful in my years-long interest in record collecting and popular music. Useful (to the reader) popular music criticism requires understanding the horrendous forces of bullshit involved in its production. If you want to see what postmodernism would look like as the basis for engineering, ’80s pop music in the UK would be a good example, culminating in “The Manual” by the KLF: a step by step procedure on how to have a number-one record.
I wouldn’t say people should go out of their way to learn it, but I wouldn’t mark it something to avoid. My problem is I’ve spent far too long as a music critic, so the stuff is actually interesting and useful to me. This is, arguably, a fate to avoid.
I need to write up something on the subject. One day.
Edit: I’ve pointed friends at this comment to rip it to shreds and belabour me about the head with wherever I’m being not even wrong, which I probably am in a few places—I come to it as an autodidact because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.
I’d delight in telling you you’re wrong, but you’re mostly not.
I would say that I don’t think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I’d have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.
I’m also not sure it does as badly as you say on Vladimir M’s heuristics. Looking quickly, for my own field, there’s still a ton of low-hanging fruit. Yeah, the major canonical works of literature assigned to undergraduates are pretty well-covered in the literature, but if you’re working in popular culture of any era, you have basically no excuse for running out of things to say. The ideology test is a little trickier, since there are areas of literary criticism—feminist, queer, and racial studies, most obviously—that are explicitly ideological. But, of course, we have to be careful with ideology as a warning sign, because arguably at this point climate science and biology are ideologically poisoned. Ideology takes place heavily outside of the academy, and I’m loathe to say that just because something has become a political hot potato the academics of it are prima facia problematic.
But I think that postmodernism, broadly speaking, also hedges well against ideological bias. The thing that it is most easy to completely miss about postmodernism is that it is, by and large, a study of epistemologies. Yes, postmodernist literary criticism makes massive use of Freudian psychoanalysis despite the complete discrediting of Freudianism as an empirical practice. But we don’t psychoanalyze real people. We psychoanalyze fictional people. The question is not “does there exist a real person with an Oedipus complex,” it’s “is the Oedipus complex a sufficiently well-known concept that it would be either included in a work of fiction by an author or read into a work of fiction by a reader?” In other words, since we’re generally dealing with man-made structures, the question is less “Is foo true” and more “Is foo part of what is talked about and thought about regarding this subject?”
This helps a lot with the ideological bias issue, because it means that postmodernism can actually be ideologically neutral on the political issues it seemingly invests in. This is something I tell my students whenever one of them gets fussy about the fact that I assign literature with gay people in it. You don’t actually have to accept the premise “homosexuality is not a valid basis for discrimination” in order to understand how gay writers articulate their own experience in literature.
Now, in practice, of course, literary scholars are generally liberals who are supportive of gay rights, feminism, and further work towards racial and economic equality. But then again, the ideological bias in the academy extends far beyond humanities departments—it’s increasingly hard for an American climate scientist to be a Republican too. At the end of the day, this is somewhat irreducible—after all, reality probably does, in the long run, lend more support to some political viewpoints than others.
In any case, I tend to think that postmodernism is something that just about everybody should be broadly familiar with. I think there are some serious problems with how we teach it, and some serious problems with how it’s attacked (Alan Sokal should never, ever be referenced by anyone who is trying to make a serious point about humanities scholarship. His “research” on postmodernism makes his hoax article look like sound scholarship by comparison), but the basic elevator summary of postmodernism is “It’s the process of learning to account for epistemological differences when dealing with communications.” Which is something that is probably useful if, you know, you ever intend to talk to someone you disagree with in your life.
Also, can I just say that the Stanford Encyclopedia entry you linked to is absolutely terribly written? Clue for writers explaining concepts that use algebraic or pseudo-algebraic notation—it’s really nice if you bother to define what S and T mean before you start throwing them around.
Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called “postmodernist” is their bias—part ideological, part fashion-induced—in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed.
To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what’s being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists—it’s falls squarely under the concept of “epistemological differences when dealing with communications.”) Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I’ve seen, they’re completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won’t earn any prestige points.
In my opinion, the main danger of reading things like postmodernism is that one might get infected by the smug attitude of superiority that looks upon rigorous, precise, down-to-earth rational thinking as blinkered and nerdy, without having anything better to offer instead.
Now of course, there are subjects that nobody yet knows how to approach with rigorous and precise thinking, and all attempts to do so regularly end up in blinkered and nerdy discussions without much connection to reality. In these subjects, a more fuzzy approach is indeed the only viable alternative. The trouble is, those humanists who, as you say, can barely count without using their fingers tend to greatly overestimate the extent of these subjects, and their self-satisfied and smug attitude can be very infections for a lot of people.
To be perfectly honest, I know far more people in hard sciences who look down on postmodernist scholars as wooly nonsense-peddlers than I do postmodernists who reject the sciences or rationalism. This is, admittedly, anecdotal evidence, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a piece of anti-science writing out of the humanities half as perniciously irresponsible as Alan Sokal’s “work.” Certainly nothing that is as reflexively cited in discussions. To be honest, I find an exasperating tendency among math/science people to simply stop their reading on postmodernism with the Sokal Affair and decide they’ve got the matter nailed, despite the fact that almost nobody bothers to mention that Social Text isn’t a peer-reviewed journal, and thus Sokal accomplished something about as hard as publishing a fraudulent piece in a local paper for a semi-major city.
So I’m inclined to be skeptical about which side of that debate is more prone to being infected with bad thinking. The biggest problem postmodernists usually have with math, science, and other more rational fields is that those are not their field, and they’re not experts in them. Sit one of them down with some Feynman lectures, though, and they’ll generally be fine, because they’re generally speaking really smart people who just aren’t specialized in that stuff. But the thing is, most of them know that they don’t understand what goes on past freshman year in any math or science courses. Puzzlingly, science people seem to freely assume they understand graduate humanities work with alarming regularity. Of course, this failing on their part in no way invalidates their field—any more than the fact that someone who majored in English hasn’t taken many math courses invalidates their work. :)
Oh, I certainly don’t think that the average hard scientist’s view and knowledge of humanities are much better. However, when you order academic fields by rigor and exactness, with pure mathematics on one end and humanities on the other, then as a very general rule, in order to avoid writing nonsense in your own field, you must not have misconceptions about fields that are more exact than yours, whereas knowledge of less exact fields is normally not important for scholarly work.
Thus, for example, a physicist can be completely ignorant about philosophy and humanities and nevertheless consistently produce top-quality physics, whereas a philosopher or a cultural critic who is completely ignorant of natural sciences will inevitably end up writing nonsense at least occasionally. So while both of them may have an equally distorted and ignorant view of each other’s field, the latter’s work will likely suffer far more as a consequence.
Regarding the Sokal affair, I agree that it’s usually overblown far beyond its real significance (and physicists should also be more humble in light of the more recent Bogdanoff affair). However, I think your minimization of it is also exaggerated. Regardless of whether a journal is peer-reviewed, editors should be held responsible for what they decide to publish. I don’t think the editors of Social Text would have been so eager to publish Sokal’s essay if it hadn’t pandered so consistently to their ideology.
Well, I’m not entirely convinced the phrase “order academic fields by rigor and exactness” is a completely meaningful one. It implies a level of direct comparability that I’m not confident exists. I certainly agree that humanities makes for very bad science, but then, so does basket weaving. The flip side is that science has not developed a particularly useful vocabulary for dealing with nuance, ambiguity, or irony.
I’m also not sure a philosopher/cultural critic without significant scientific training is bound to write nonsense, so long as they actually stick to their field of expertise. Now, it may well be true that humanities sorts are more prone to straying from their actual areas of expertise—certainly a study demonstrating that would not surprise me. But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It’s certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.
And yes, the Sokal Affair clearly reflects badly on the editors of Social Text. But that’s why I compared it to getting nonsense published in a newspaper—which has been proven possible from the local level up to major international papers. I also would not describe Social Text as “eager” to publish Sokal’s essay. They rejected it initially, and only dusted it off because it was directly relevant to a special issue they were publishing and, probably more importantly for a paper journal, it was very short. But more to the point, Social Text is not a scholarly journal. I wasn’t in the field at the time of the Sokal Affair, so any sense I have of its reputation is second hand, but if an un-peer reviewed journal was being treated as equivalent to PMLA or Critical Inquiry or something, that, much more than the Sokal Affair, is damning evidence against the humanities.
I should note that I am also more hostile towards Sokal for his completely and irredeemably awful book Fashionable Nonsense than I am for the Sokal Affair. He, at least, does not overstate the significance of his own hoax. Whereas Fashionable Nonsense is a sufficiently wretched book that I would generally advise people that their time would be better spent reading up on the intricacies of crystal energy healing.
I strongly disagree here. To write meaningfully about sexual politics, you must have a model of sexual and other related aspects of human thought and behavior, and modern science has a whole lot to say about that. (Of course, the relevant science is still very incomplete and far from settled, but that makes it even more important to be knowledgeable about it, in order to separate solid insight from speculation.) If you lack that knowledge, your model is likely to be wrong in at least some ways that could be corrected by familiarizing yourself with the relevant science, and this is likely to show in your writing. Moreover, there is a whole lot of spurious pseudo-insight in this area (Freudianism and its offshoots being the most notorious example), and if you’re not familiar with science beyond a high school level, you may well end up swallowing a lot of such nonsense believing it to be solid insight and incorporating it into your work.
I would agree if one is writing about Victorian sexual politics straight-up, however I was careful to specify the sexual politics of Victorian literature. For which Freudianism, notoriously wrong as it is, is highly relevant because it was enormously popular for a chunk of the time period, and did directly influence writers (more particularly in the early 20th century than the late 19th, but still). Certainly it had much more influence than post-Victorian science that the authors could not possibly have been aware of.
Which seems to me one of the hedges that postmodernism usefully offers. The decision to approach Victorian literary sexual politics in terms of the thinking of the time and to treat it as a phenomenon of that culture is, to my mind, quintessentially postmodernist.
While I’m on the topic of karma.
I see a −1 karma on the parent post as of this writing. That seems to me a completely irresponsible use of karma points. I propose the following fix for such phenomena: if you downvote a comment, your own karma drops by two. This will bring assignment of karma more into line with real world enforcement of social rules, in which the self-appointed police wields his punishments carefully and reluctantly because of the cost to himself. Someone who is overly censorious in the real world loses social capital, and I think that is a very good thing.
Downvoting is already limited by social capital (how many times you can downvote is a fucntion of your own karma score). Causing it to also decrease one’s karma would discourage downvoting outright instead of merely limiting it, and that is an unwanted thing.
Well, I don’t think we can say a priori that my proposal would not work. I think it might, because I think it reflects what happens in the real world enforcement of social rules. The enforcer puts himself on the line in the real world. You want the would be police to pay a certain price.
But I’m glad that, as you mention, there seems to be some sort of limit. I suspect it’s not enough.
Note that downvoting isn’t particularly censorious, here. A specific comment has to get multiple downvotes on its own merits to be hidden (comments from users with net-negative karma are throttled, but not hidden); even then the comment is just hidden, not removed, and there’s a clear marker that the comment exists. Further, individual users can turn off the option of having downvoted comments hidden—I have, and if I remember correctly I’ve seen others mention that they’ve done so as well. Individuals’ overall karma scores are not especially visible and don’t affect very much, especially when one has more than 100-200 karma or so and is not especially at risk of going under the cutoff for posting to the main area of the site.
The problem is that there is bandwagon behavior: a comment with a negative score will tend to be downvoted further. (This also applies on the positive side.)
Also, while a negative score may not prevent a comment from being viewed, it will have status repercussions on the author, as readers make note of it. The tendency will be for readers to pay less attention to comments by that user.
Does this happen? I think my behaviour is actually the opposite, I sometimes upvote comments that I think have been downvoted unfairly even though I probably wouldn’t consider them worth an upvote otherwise.
It would be startling if conformity bias didn’t operate here, and I don’t see much evidence that it doesn’t.
That said, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. I often upvote after (IMO) unearned downvotes, and sometimes downvote after unearned upvotes, but that doesn’t mean I’m not subject to the bandwagon effect.
The bandwagon effect is real, I think. My own behavior is to pay particular attention to heavily upvoted or downvoted comments to see if I can see the reason for the excitement. If I can’t find a reason, I will often vote the opposite way, as you do. But I usually find the reason. And then I can’t resist adding my voice to the crowd’s.
And since the upvoting and downvoting is silent and anonymous, the reasons for it should and I think do(#) tend to resemble the reasons of democratic voting, which reasons were discussed in Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter—the point of the book being that the reasons tend to be irrational. The result is a phenomenon that is overall irrational, with occasional exceptions.
Granted, it might not be much of an improvement if voters had to add an explanation, since humans are nothing if not fantastic rationalizers.
(#) I say I think, because since the voting is silent and anonymous, no one but the voters can actually know, so anyone else is forced to come up with a hypothesis which fits the voting pattern.
I’m fairly sure that that’s not the same thing as censorship.
(Or does ‘censorious’ refer to censure, rather than censorship? I probably should have looked that up before I used it, rather than assuming that Constant was staying on topic...)
Censorious means harshly critical, disapproving.
Oops.
I couldn’t help but notice that you wanted to share blame with me:
Do you mean that seriously? Do you want to have a discussion about what the topic was and whether I stayed on it? I’m not really inclined to, but here you’ve blamed something on me.
Your very first comment in this thread started with “while I’m on the topic of karma”. Since it was your fist comment in this thread, I assumed that that bit referred to the conversation you’d been having elsewhere, minutes before, which included themes of karma and censorship.
As I implied, that’s not an assumption that I should have made, though I think it’s somewhat understandable that I did. (What did you mean by that phrase?)
I meant I’m on the topic of karma. And I was on the topic of karma. Of karma—not of karma and hacker news, or karma and deleting comments, or karma and censorship. But of karma.
In my experience, “while I’m on the topic of X” means “I’m going to continue talking about X, but in a slightly different way” or “I’m changing the topic to a different subtopic of X than the one I was just discussing” or “I’m changing the topic to something that’s vaguely related to topic-at-hand X”. In any case, it refers to a continuation of talking-about-X, which means that it’s not completely beyond the pale to assume that various other concepts that have been used are still part of the conversation.
This appears to be turning into a pissing contest. I’m not interested in playing apey games with you.
I wasn’t challenging you to a pissing contest, I was defending myself against an attempt to deflect blame onto me. If you didn’t want me to defend myself, you probably should not have tried to use me as a convenient person to deflect blame from yourself. The problem was that you didn’t know what a word meant. That’s not my fault.
This very thread on karma is now hidden, including your own comment, because my comment upthread reached −3.
The comments are hidden in the original post’s comments section, yes—but they’re not hidden on our user pages, or on the recent comments page, and the latter is a major component of how many of the more active users keep track of conversations. (It’s where I’m typing this very reply!) They also increment the “(N children)” note for the hidden-comment marker, which I expect makes people more likely to click and see what’s being discussed.
Ironically enough, the conversation is also long enough that even with the option to have downvoted comments hidden turned off, one has to click on a link to “continue this thread »”. This takes exactly as much effort as clicking on a link to unhide a comment, and the interface doesn’t even encourage the user to do so by letting them know that there are a significant number of comments left to read. Is this also censorship?
What? What’s your context for asking me that rhetorical question? My problem in this thread was with a good, solid comment that made a good point (written by Vladimir M) getting downvoted. I didn’t say he was censored. I simply pointed out that he got a downvote for a bad reason and I suggested a possible fix.
Elsewhere I mentioned that in hacker news I had been permanently frozen out because of my first comment being downvoted. But that was to answer folks who were criticizing my decision to delete my own comment. I explained the history of my concern.
I’m not sure how your question applies to any of this.
Someone who is insufficiently censorious also loses social capital, in almost all societies throughout history. The notion that it is best to be maximally nonjudgmental is a recent idea which is not particularly prevalent outside the urban West. And not a particularly good idea either.
As regards the received view within this community on use of downvoting to express disapproval, you’d better read this.
Does anyone keep track of whether other people downvote?
As far as I know, no one can keep track … which fact pretty much destroys my implicit argument regarding a socially enforced duty to be an enforcer. At least as it applies to downvoting. Thx for bringing me back to reality.
I am not in any way shape or form pushing this idea. It is a straw man. What I suggested was an adjustment to the current system which brings it more into line with how the real world works. The real world is not pacifist. It is not nonjudgmental. And those who enforce good behavior pay a price, because freedom is not free. That is what I am using as a model, and not a maximally nonjudgmental system.
The real world is ruled by economics, by every action having a certain cost. It is the cost of action which causes us to choose wisely what we do. I am suggesting tweaking the economics of karma, because I think it could stand to be improved.
Yes, all actions have a cost (though, of course, not necessarily a net cost). But your suggested fix—penalizing a downvoter two whole karma points—attaches no corresponding penalty to upvoting. Why not?
If you had suggested something more balanced that penalized both up- and down-votes, then I might not have jumped in to chide you for ‘pacifism’. And if your proposal had also made upvoting and downvoting of top-level articles particularly expensive, then I might have supported you.
One way of you to have responded without leveling false accusations would have been to say something like, “let’s not forget the other side, upvoting.” Just because I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been receptive to it. I would have been very receptive, I am very receptive. But instead of putting it that way, you decided to take an oppositional posture which presupposes, falsely, that I would have been resistant to the point. You manufactured a conflict where there had been none.
To answer your question:
let me rephrase it:
I think the answer is obvious.
So, let’s turn to upvoting. One solution for upvoting is to end it. Make it just downvoting. If the purpose of moderation is to protect the community from trolls, then all you need is the downvote.
Does karma even matter once you have enough to not get silenced instantly? It is more a measure of experience with the site than intelligence. I cannot think of a short series of comments i could make that would drain all of my karma at this point, which would not get me banned even if I had several thousand.
I think that karma could potentially be more useful as an assessment of the quality of a post if it were assigned more judiciously than it is currently on just about any karma based site. It might be possible to refine the karma system to improve it. It does not seem to me that the possibilities have really been explored. Currently, karma tends to enforce groupthink on most sites. On digg and reddit, I see massive groupthink. Both sites have become useless to me—they’ve become a mix of self congratulation, juvenile humor, and predictable politics. I remember when they found interesting stuff on the web.
Please do it soon. It isn’t the first time I read here about actual usefulness of postmodernism (unfortunately don’t remember who has argued for that before), but the claim was never demonstrated or discussed in a greater detail.
It was probably me ;-) I’ve pointed friends at the above comment to rip it to shreds and belabour me about the head with wherever I’m being not even wrong, which I probably am in a few places—I come to this stuff as an autodidact on it because I found it useful, not as someone who trained up in it properly.
Followed by another. Seriously. Politics is the mind-killer. Back away from the edge.
I have studied two of the items on his list extensively: theology and literary theory. And I agree that they are worse than worthless.
Here’s your evidence: what significant problems have these fields ever solved?
Well, if you wanted to succeed in pop music in Britain in the 1980s …
Not to belittle KLF’s achievements, but is that really the best example you can come up with?
I doubt I’d call popular culture an important problem. (And I was, fairly clearly I thought, talking about pretty much the entire decade, not just two guys at the end of it.) Except possibly as a threat. It is one that involves moderate quantities of money sloshing back and forth. But, more importantly, undue influence. Most recently, it got its hooks into things that actually affect the rest of the world. I submit that understanding how an industry that small can punch so ridiculously far above its economic weight may be useful. (Not that PM/crit is fully up to that task yet, and I’m greatly disappointed by that, but it’s the right direction.)
As my comment notes, it’s not something to bother with unless you’re interested already, but Luke’s invocations of straw postmodernists do come across as declaring ignorance as social signaling rather than as saying something that helpfully places these fields in their contexts.
I would grant that postmodernism is probably
a dangerous subject of study for someone who is not already good at rationality, and
not worth our time to study in depth.
But how likely do you really think it is that postmodernism is a stupid-making subject of study even for someone with rationality training?
Postmodernism isn’t even a subject, really; more of a theme. That’s a nitpick, though; any of the fields usually cited as postmodernist (critical theory’s the first one to come to mind) would have worked in that context.
But to answer your question, what I’ve read of folks like Derrida is frustrating and unproductive, but most of the parts that seem to function as basilisks to the uninoculated parse as not even wrong. On that other hand, that might not reflect everyone’s experience; there are a lot of branches of cultural criticism inheriting from postmodern philosophy, and it’s quite likely that some of them will end up being flattering to our higher-level instrumental values. That could lead to a couple of different failure modes, which I probably don’t need to belabor.
That certainly agrees with my intuition. In fairness, I’ve also had the experience of (1) reading something in a postmodern text that looks obviously wrong or not even wrong, (2) reading some more texts that gave me a better idea of how postmodernists use their words, and then (3) revisiting the original text and seeing that it actually had something worthwhile to say. Nonetheless, I’m far from convinced that reading postmodern texts is the most cost-effective way to get these insights.
I’m not sure that I understand. Are you saying that we might give too much respect to postmodernists because they use postmodern reasoning to support ends that we also support?
If so, I actually think that that is a reason to study postmodernism more closely.
Suppose that you had almost no familiarity with postmodernism, but you were good at epistemic rationality. Then you hear someone utter some postmodern jargon, followed by, “And that is why religious dogma is not a secure foundation for morality.” You might think to yourself, “I couldn’t quite parse all that jargon, but the conclusion was right, so maybe these postmodernists are on to something.” On the basis of this second-hand exposure, you go and read some postmodernist texts, working slowly and carefully, trying to understand this potentially-useful method. Instead, you find that you still can’t parse the jargon. If postmodernism is really that bad, first-hand exposure will leave you with less respect than you had after second-hand exposure. Its incomprehensibility will be a greater strike against it.
More or less, although I’d cast it in terms of giving too much respect to incoherent arguments rather than to postmodernism. It’s an arguments-as-soldiers thing; if we find ourselves nodding along with an argument that leads to a conclusion we like, and the internals of the argument are later shown to have been nonsense, we look at minimum very silly. Worse, we might along the way have internalized some related nonsense.
On the other hand, we should also be careful not to demonize particular postmodern thinkers or conclusions on account of coming out of the postmodern movement, for the same reasons—a test that many on the empirical side of the Two Cultures divide have failed, unfortunately. Themes and methods characteristic of the movement are, of course, still fair game.
Your secondary-exposure method seems solid in principle, but I’d also say that that’s a good time to revisit the concerns about cost-effectiveness that you raised earlier; it’s a heavyweight method, and I doubt that the certainty it gives you is likely to be worth the time spent on gaining it. Even a prerequisite as basic as learning the vocabulary of, say, deconstructionism is a daunting task, at least comparable in complexity to reading the Sequences.
This is how I got into it. I had just started getting seriously into thinking about popular music (and unpopular popular music) and the horrifying quantities of bullshit surrounding it, and found Mythologies by Roland Barthes at the local second-hand bookshop, and went “HOLY CRAP THIS NAILS IT.” Bits were opaque and bits were stupid, but enough made what I’d already been thinking make more sense that I got quite a lot out of it. (It’s generally regarded as a classic, and IMO it’s a great book, and Barthes is really pretty easy to read as critical theorists go, but I have no idea if this is a good introduction to anything whatsoever, so am not recommending it to anyone as such. But it was the right book for the right person at the right time.) Possibly the main failure mode was helping encourage me to think listening to records was much more important than it actually was.
(Oh, and Paul Morley in NME. Yes, that Paul Morley.)
tl;dr: It’s better if you’ve got an actual use for it. In this regard, it’s like the broader field of philosophy.
I read Barthes a couple of decades ago and I remember liking him, though at the moment the only thing I vaguely remember is an analysis of the strip tease. I’ve carried with me one of his insights ever since—the notion that the act of stripping is highly erotic but full nakedness markedly less so.