Postmodernism is destroying our brains, culture and civilization

[The Brain]

The overwhelming problem is that people who go on about social constructs are often retards who practice postmodernism. If ever there was taint this is it.

[The Minsky Moment]

The overwhelming problem is that people who go on about social constructs are often retards who practice postmodernism. If ever there was taint this is it.

Right
Tribe A no like Tribe B
That's a summary of the thread in a nutshell.

[The Brain]

The overwhelming problem is that people who go on about social constructs are often retards who practice postmodernism. If ever there was taint this is it.

Right
Tribe A no like Tribe B
That's a summary of the thread in a nutshell.

Elaborate.

[The Minsky Moment]

Elaborate.

I though it was rather pithy.

[The Brain]

Elaborate.

I though it was rather pithy.

I don't want your pithy.

[frunk]

The point of it was that gravity exists as a mathematical/physics proof, one that is used in the sciences - it also exists without the mathematics in the minds of people, and that mental map is very likely quite different from the formal scientific one.  One is the universal symbolic language of numbers, the other is the cultural bound symbols of human language.

For the vast majority of situations people encounter the mathematical and common sense definition of gravity is very close.  Things fall toward the earth at a given acceleration.  In fact there is evidence that the human brain is hard-wired to anticipate falling.  Once we move beyond the earth that intuition fails, but I question the importance of culturally significant expectations about gravity that vary from the reality for situations that the culture hardly ever encounters.

I am not sure why the concept of a cultural construct seems so alien to some folks.  The imperfections of human language, the need to communicate in metaphors and understood symbols, and the traditions of group dynamics should impact how the universal facts are filtered through the lens of human existence...

It's not a question of how alien it is, it's a question of how important it is for interpreting universal facts.  The extent to which people munge the universal facts in favor of their cultural construct is the extent to which that culture is going to do a face plant at some critical point.

I think there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding on why Sokal perpetrated the hoax.  I wasn't to take down post modernism, it was to point out that much of the supposed scholarly material being published had little or no peer review.  Any article that sounded vaguely right or quoted the right people could show up in print. Anybody familiar with physics or mathematics would recognize the paper as complete gibberish.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding on why Sokal perpetrated the hoax.  I wasn't to take down post modernism, it was to point out that much of the supposed scholarly material being published had little or no peer review.  Any article that sounded vaguely right or quoted the right people could show up in print.

A problem by no means confined to "postmodern" journals or that particular academic tribe.

[Malthus]

The point of it was that gravity exists as a mathematical/physics proof, one that is used in the sciences - it also exists without the mathematics in the minds of people, and that mental map is very likely quite different from the formal scientific one.  One is the universal symbolic language of numbers, the other is the cultural bound symbols of human language.

For the vast majority of situations people encounter the mathematical and common sense definition of gravity is very close.  Things fall toward the earth at a given acceleration.  In fact there is evidence that the human brain is hard-wired to anticipate falling.  Once we move beyond the earth that intuition fails, but I question the importance of culturally significant expectations about gravity that vary from the reality for situations that the culture hardly ever encounters.

I am not sure why the concept of a cultural construct seems so alien to some folks.  The imperfections of human language, the need to communicate in metaphors and understood symbols, and the traditions of group dynamics should impact how the universal facts are filtered through the lens of human existence...

It's not a question of how alien it is, it's a question of how important it is for interpreting universal facts.  The extent to which people munge the universal facts in favor of their cultural construct is the extent to which that culture is going to do a face plant at some critical point.

I think there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding on why Sokal perpetrated the hoax.  I wasn't to take down post modernism, it was to point out that much of the supposed scholarly material being published had little or no peer review.  Any article that sounded vaguely right or quoted the right people could show up in print. Anybody familiar with physics or mathematics would recognize the paper as complete gibberish.

I'm not so sure that is totally true, given that Sokal was co-author of a book entitled "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

It wasn't to take down "postmodernism", but the abusive, charlatan-y application of "postmodern" concepts to the realm of science.

[PDH]

For the vast majority of situations people encounter the mathematical and common sense definition of gravity is very close.  Things fall toward the earth at a given acceleration.  In fact there is evidence that the human brain is hard-wired to anticipate falling.  Once we move beyond the earth that intuition fails, but I question the importance of culturally significant expectations about gravity that vary from the reality for situations that the culture hardly ever encounters.

Ah but there have been many cultural and false experience based notions of gravity - objects falling at different speeds, notions of attractions, and similar things.  While many of these have undergone change due to the discovery and continued refinement of the theory of gravity, the fact that the natural explanations were not the same before show how human culture does impact things that even seem hard-wired.  Even today, the further one is from science, the more such outdated notions are likely to be held as true.  There are two narratives here, and to an anthropologist both need to be examined rather than one dismissed.  To an anthropologist, the humans are bio-cultural beings with feedback from both happening all the time.

It's not a question of how alien it is, it's a question of how important it is for interpreting universal facts.  The extent to which people munge the universal facts in favor of their cultural construct is the extent to which that culture is going to do a face plant at some critical point.

I think there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding on why Sokal perpetrated the hoax.  I wasn't to take down post modernism, it was to point out that much of the supposed scholarly material being published had little or no peer review.  Any article that sounded vaguely right or quoted the right people could show up in print. Anybody familiar with physics or mathematics would recognize the paper as complete gibberish.

Culture does face plants all the time.  Myths (to an anthropologist this is a "fundamentally true story") are constantly changing due to the basic fact that culture changes - it is an amalgam of the past, narratives, and lived experiences.  Culture gives humans the tools to make a sense of the world, but culture is not some monolithic thing.  It is a living part of the social experience of groups of people.

I might have been unclear.  The notions of cultural constructs predates postmodern ideas by decades.  Despite being tossed off because of a perceived connection, the basic idea that culture provides a lens to make sense of the complexities of the world has been part and parcel of anthropological thought for more than a century.  Post modernism is merely a subset of this, desiring to push that thought (in my mind often far too aggressively) in the face of concrete theories of perception and existence.

Postmodern thought has become a self-perpetuating misuse of culture theory - in part it is a symptom of the need to publish and find some special niche in which to academically live.  In part it is the natural conclusion to the initial ideas of postmodernism that we as humans are indeed influenced by the culture we live in - in ways that need to me shown explicitly in order to study that culture.  Of course, like many good ideas, this often goes too far (see "in part" number 1).

Tossing off the idea of a cultural construct simply because it is used by postmodern scholars seems the sort of facile argument that does not seek to understand what is argued and instead relies on knee-jerk reactions that miss any point.

Is postmodernism overused and often worthless?  Yes.
Is postmodernism devoid of content and totally worthless?  No.

The devil is in the details, and understanding these details is important to realizing that, like many things, the problem is far more nuanced than people give it credit for being.

[Monoriu]

I surrender. 

[The Minsky Moment]

Postmodern thought has become a self-perpetuating misuse of culture theory - in part it is a symptom of the need to publish and find some special niche in which to academically live.

And this is aspect of the Sokal hoax that Sokal himself didn't really get.  Steroidally enhanced publish or perish pressures corrupt all disciplines.  Postmodern literature is particularly exposed because a reasonably intelligent layperson can recognize the shoddier work as gibberish.  But the problem extends beyond that.  Witness e.g. the debates over "mathiness" in economics.  Econ papers that contain the veneer of model specification and statistically technique may look superficially rigorous but are empty or flawed in content.  Postmodernism is a soft target but the stakes are low: Congress, the Executive, the Courts, and the Fed rarely make policy based on the reported results of a postmodern theory paper.  But papers in the harder social sciences can and do have that kind of impact.  Concern over shoddy academics should focus there IMO.

[Admiral Yi]

Can you give an example or fifteen of shoddy papers that have impacted policy Joan?

[MadImmortalMan]

Can you give an example or fifteen of shoddy papers that have impacted policy Joan?

Anything written by any economist. 

[frunk]

The devil is in the details, and understanding these details is important to realizing that, like many things, the problem is far more nuanced than people give it credit for being.

I agree, and I'm quoting just this bit cause I hate huge blocks of copy/paste.  I remember in college I had to read several papers that tried to po-mo their way through a topic as an easy way to raise the word count without saying anything.  OTOH I did have a lit class that did a good job of covering the non-retarded uses of it though.

[Capetan Mihali]

Postmodern thought has become a self-perpetuating misuse of culture theory - in part it is a symptom of the need to publish and find some special niche in which to academically live.

God, yes. This how I end up reading information science papers about "information seeking behavior as demonstrated in The Big Lebowski," which have the potential of being interesting, but are just rote garbage instead -- not that that particular paper even invoked postmodern thought in any meaningful way.