If the above is true, aren’t the postmodernists right?
I do wish that you would say “relativists” or the like here. Many of your readers will know the word “postmodernist” solely as a slur against a rival tribe.
Actually, “relativist” isn’t a lot better, because it’s still pretty clear who’s meant, and it’s a very charged term in some political discussions.
I think it’s a bad rhetorical strategy to mock the cognitive style of a particular academic discipline, or of a particular school within a discipline, even if you know all about that discipline. That’s not because you’ll convert people who are steeped in the way of thinking you’re trying to counter, but because you can end up pushing the “undecided” to their side.
Let’s say we have a bright young student who is, to oversimplify, on the cusp of going down either the path of Good (“parsimony counts”, “there’s an objective way to determine what hypothesis is simpler”, “it looks like there’s an exterior, shared reality”, “we can improve our maps”...) or the path of Evil (“all concepts start out equal”, “we can make arbitrary maps”, “truth is determined by politics” …). Well, that bright young student isn’t a perfectly rational being. If the advocates for Good look like they’re being jerks and mocking the advocates for Evil, that may be enough to push that person down the path of Evil.
Wulky Wilkinson is the mind killer. Or so it seems to me.
I agree with your point about rhetoric, but I think you give post-modern thought too little credit. First of all, Sturgeon’s law says 90% of everything is crap.
all concepts start out equal
I can’t understand why you think this statement is post-modern—or why you think it is wrong. Luminiferous Aether was possibly correct—until we tested the proposition, what basis did we have to say that ~P was better than P?
we can make arbitrary maps
This has clear flavors of post-modernism—and is false as stated. But I think someone like Foucault would want the adjective social thrown in there a bit. Given that, the diversity of cultures throughout history is some evidence that the proposition could be true—depending on what caveats we place on / how we define “arbitrary.”
Kuhn and Feyerabend have not always been clear on how anti-scientific realist they intended to be, but I think a proposition like “Scientific models are socially mediated” is plausible—unless Kuhn and Feyerabend totally screwed up their history.
truth is determined by politics
Again, post-modern flavored. And again, if we add the word “social” to the front, the statement is likely true. For example, people once thought social class (nobility, peasant, merchant) was very morally relevant. Now, not so much.
With the first item, “all concepts start out equal”, consider that Occam’s Razor says we should prefer simpler concepts.
With “we can make arbitrary maps”, I don’t see how adding the word “social” in there anywhere makes it any better. Although there are many different cultures, the space of possible culture-models or culture-maps is much larger still, and so if we’re trying to model how a culture works we can’t just pick a map arbitrarily.
Same issue applies to “truth is determined by politics”. A political theory is a hypothesis about what conditions will create a given sort of society. Some political theories are better than others at such predictions.
I presume that the point with “social” is that, even if some political theories are better than others, the extent to which different theories are accepted or believed by the population at large is also strongly affected by social factors. Which, again, is an idea that has been discussed on LW a lot, and is generally accepted here...
Also, (guessing from my discussions with smart humanities people) it’s saying that supposedly neutral and impartial research by scientists will be affected by a large number of (social) biases, some of them conscious, some of them unconscious, and this can have a big impact on which theory is accepted as the best and the most “experimentally tested” one. Again, not exactly a heretical belief on LW.
Ironically, I always thought that many of the posts on LW were using scientific data to show what my various humanities friends had been saying all along.
Particularly since many LWers believe things like:
The progress of science is measured as much by deaths among the Old Guard as by discoveries from the Young Idealists.
or
Psychological diagnosis (like those listed in the DSM) function to separate the socially acceptable from the unacceptable and do not even try to cut the world at its joints.
Who said those were false? My point was that these are ideas that are popular in LW and basically true, but that most LWers don’t acknowledge are post-modern in origin.
The first statement is a basic takeaway from Kuhn and Feyerabend. The second is basic History of Sexuality from Foucault.
Oh, sorry, didn’t get your point. I think the first statement has been reinvented often, by people who read enough Kelvin quotes.
The second statement is just bizarre. Clearly many people are helped by their meds. Does feeding random psych meds to random freaks produce an increase in quality of life, or at least a wide enough spread that there’s a large group that gets a stable improvement? Or are you just claiming the weaker version: symptoms make sense and are treated, but all statements of the form “patients with this set of symptoms form a cluster, and shall be labeled Noun Phrase Disorder” are false? I would claim some diagnoses are reasonable, e.g. Borderline Personality with clearly forms a cluster among bloggers who talk about their mental health. And those that aren’t (a whole lotta paraphilias, and ways to cut up umbrella terms) tend to change fast anyway.
Psychology has made significant strides in response to criticism from the post-modernists. The post-modern criticism of mental health treatment is much less biting than it once was.
Still, for halo effect reasons, we should be careful.
The larger point is that Eliezer’s reference to post-modernism is simply a Boo Light and deserves to be called out as such.
Your link does not support your claim that post-modernists had an effect.
Fubarobfusco may have a point about boo lights, but this large thread you have spawned distracts from it and thus undercuts him. In the long run, praising postmodernists may be a good approach to diffusing boo lights, but if you want to do that, make a separate post. In the short term, doing so distracts from the point. Whether postmodernists said useful things is not relevant to whether they said what Eliezer attributes to them and is not relevant to how the audience reacts to that attribution.
Many people can effectively be kept out of trouble and made easier for caretakers or relatives to care for via mild sedation. This is fairly clearly the function of at least a significant portion of psychiatric medication.
Someone is trying to set up a strawman. Kuhn didn’t advocate violent overthrow of the scientific establishment—he simply noted that generational change was an under-appreciated part of the change of scientific orthodoxy.
Psychological diagnosis (like those listed in the DSM) function to separate the socially acceptable from the unacceptable and do not even try to cut the world at its joints.
The difference is that post-modernists believe that something like this is true for all science and use this to justify this state of affairs in psychology, whereas LWers believe that this is not an acceptable state of affairs and should be fixed.
Edit: Also as MizedNuts pointed out, the diagnoses do try to cut reality at the joints, they just frequently fail due to social signaling interfering with seeking truth.
First, if physical anti-realism is true to some extent, then it is true to that extent. By contrast, if Kuhn and Feyerabend messed up the history, then physical anti-realists have no leg to stand on. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Second, folks like Foucault were at the forefront of the argument that unstated social norm enforcement via psychological diagnosis was far worse than explicit social norm enforcement. They certainly don’t argue that the current state of affairs in psychology was (or is) justifiable.
I do wish that you would say “relativists” or the like here. Many of your readers will know the word “postmodernist” solely as a slur against a rival tribe.
Actually, “relativist” isn’t a lot better, because it’s still pretty clear who’s meant, and it’s a very charged term in some political discussions.
I think it’s a bad rhetorical strategy to mock the cognitive style of a particular academic discipline, or of a particular school within a discipline, even if you know all about that discipline. That’s not because you’ll convert people who are steeped in the way of thinking you’re trying to counter, but because you can end up pushing the “undecided” to their side.
Let’s say we have a bright young student who is, to oversimplify, on the cusp of going down either the path of Good (“parsimony counts”, “there’s an objective way to determine what hypothesis is simpler”, “it looks like there’s an exterior, shared reality”, “we can improve our maps”...) or the path of Evil (“all concepts start out equal”, “we can make arbitrary maps”, “truth is determined by politics” …). Well, that bright young student isn’t a perfectly rational being. If the advocates for Good look like they’re being jerks and mocking the advocates for Evil, that may be enough to push that person down the path of Evil.
Wulky Wilkinson is the mind killer. Or so it seems to me.
I agree with your point about rhetoric, but I think you give post-modern thought too little credit. First of all, Sturgeon’s law says 90% of everything is crap.
I can’t understand why you think this statement is post-modern—or why you think it is wrong. Luminiferous Aether was possibly correct—until we tested the proposition, what basis did we have to say that ~P was better than P?
This has clear flavors of post-modernism—and is false as stated. But I think someone like Foucault would want the adjective social thrown in there a bit. Given that, the diversity of cultures throughout history is some evidence that the proposition could be true—depending on what caveats we place on / how we define “arbitrary.”
Kuhn and Feyerabend have not always been clear on how anti-scientific realist they intended to be, but I think a proposition like “Scientific models are socially mediated” is plausible—unless Kuhn and Feyerabend totally screwed up their history.
Again, post-modern flavored. And again, if we add the word “social” to the front, the statement is likely true. For example, people once thought social class (nobility, peasant, merchant) was very morally relevant. Now, not so much.
With the first item, “all concepts start out equal”, consider that Occam’s Razor says we should prefer simpler concepts.
With “we can make arbitrary maps”, I don’t see how adding the word “social” in there anywhere makes it any better. Although there are many different cultures, the space of possible culture-models or culture-maps is much larger still, and so if we’re trying to model how a culture works we can’t just pick a map arbitrarily.
Same issue applies to “truth is determined by politics”. A political theory is a hypothesis about what conditions will create a given sort of society. Some political theories are better than others at such predictions.
I presume that the point with “social” is that, even if some political theories are better than others, the extent to which different theories are accepted or believed by the population at large is also strongly affected by social factors. Which, again, is an idea that has been discussed on LW a lot, and is generally accepted here...
Also, (guessing from my discussions with smart humanities people) it’s saying that supposedly neutral and impartial research by scientists will be affected by a large number of (social) biases, some of them conscious, some of them unconscious, and this can have a big impact on which theory is accepted as the best and the most “experimentally tested” one. Again, not exactly a heretical belief on LW.
Ironically, I always thought that many of the posts on LW were using scientific data to show what my various humanities friends had been saying all along.
Particularly since many LWers believe things like:
or
Why is the former false?
Hrm?
Who said those were false? My point was that these are ideas that are popular in LW and basically true, but that most LWers don’t acknowledge are post-modern in origin.
The first statement is a basic takeaway from Kuhn and Feyerabend. The second is basic History of Sexuality from Foucault.
Oh, sorry, didn’t get your point. I think the first statement has been reinvented often, by people who read enough Kelvin quotes.
The second statement is just bizarre. Clearly many people are helped by their meds. Does feeding random psych meds to random freaks produce an increase in quality of life, or at least a wide enough spread that there’s a large group that gets a stable improvement? Or are you just claiming the weaker version: symptoms make sense and are treated, but all statements of the form “patients with this set of symptoms form a cluster, and shall be labeled Noun Phrase Disorder” are false? I would claim some diagnoses are reasonable, e.g. Borderline Personality with clearly forms a cluster among bloggers who talk about their mental health. And those that aren’t (a whole lotta paraphilias, and ways to cut up umbrella terms) tend to change fast anyway.
Psychology has made significant strides in response to criticism from the post-modernists. The post-modern criticism of mental health treatment is much less biting than it once was.
Still, for halo effect reasons, we should be careful.
The larger point is that Eliezer’s reference to post-modernism is simply a Boo Light and deserves to be called out as such.
Your link does not support your claim that post-modernists had an effect.
Fubarobfusco may have a point about boo lights, but this large thread you have spawned distracts from it and thus undercuts him. In the long run, praising postmodernists may be a good approach to diffusing boo lights, but if you want to do that, make a separate post. In the short term, doing so distracts from the point. Whether postmodernists said useful things is not relevant to whether they said what Eliezer attributes to them and is not relevant to how the audience reacts to that attribution.
Many people can effectively be kept out of trouble and made easier for caretakers or relatives to care for via mild sedation. This is fairly clearly the function of at least a significant portion of psychiatric medication.
Systematic execution of the old guard doesn’t count as scientific progress? Hmm, or does it?
Someone is trying to set up a strawman. Kuhn didn’t advocate violent overthrow of the scientific establishment—he simply noted that generational change was an under-appreciated part of the change of scientific orthodoxy.
Someone is just trying to make a joke.
The prose wasn’t quite as good as the joke’s intent, so part of the effect was lost. Still, it made me smile, FWIW :P
The difference is that post-modernists believe that something like this is true for all science and use this to justify this state of affairs in psychology, whereas LWers believe that this is not an acceptable state of affairs and should be fixed.
Edit: Also as MizedNuts pointed out, the diagnoses do try to cut reality at the joints, they just frequently fail due to social signaling interfering with seeking truth.
First, if physical anti-realism is true to some extent, then it is true to that extent. By contrast, if Kuhn and Feyerabend messed up the history, then physical anti-realists have no leg to stand on. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Second, folks like Foucault were at the forefront of the argument that unstated social norm enforcement via psychological diagnosis was far worse than explicit social norm enforcement. They certainly don’t argue that the current state of affairs in psychology was (or is) justifiable.
Citation appreciated. Foucault was specifically trying to improve the standards of psychiatric care.