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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I was about to say that this guy is about 15-20 years late to the party with the polemic, but noticed from the footer that this essay is in fact 16 years old. Maybe someone could add a (2000) to the title?

For more background on the period this essay came out of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

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The weird thing here is that if everything is social construct, then science as social construct is just as true as it would be as objective reality. Then you can just pick science as your favorite construct and call it a day.

But for some reason "social constructionist" seem to be often incredibly biased. Some things are "false" because they are constructs, but some things are "true" because they are constructs. And some things are just objectively horrible, while others are constructed as horrible.

Examples: rape culture is social construct, but mental distress from rape is suddenly not. Nationalism is "false" social construct, but Marxism is "true" social construct.

I think you're conflating quite a few different people there. I mean, there probably are some people who simultaneously hold all those views, but most don't. For example many people doing social studies of science do find science interesting, which is partly why they spend so much time studying people who follow that methodology— they just don't think it's a methodology that is independent of the human culture that it arose from, and are particularly interested in how its social practices developed (even if the scientists themselves don't like to see what they do as "social practices"). Bruno Latour goes in this category, as something of a 'science-o-philic' social constructionist (although he's also a "soft" constructionist, because he views both humans and non-human entities, like lab apparatus and materials, as jointly doing the construction, vs. it being a purely cultural phenomenon). And generally (most) social constructionists and (most) Marxists don't see eye-to-eye, precisely because most Marxists do think there is a scientific, objective method (historical materialism) for analyzing social relations, history, economies, etc., and orthodox Marxists even tend to believe objective factors ultimately determine culture rather than the reverse.

The spesific dude/dudette who invented the "nationalism is modern social construct and pretty false" is in my understanding quite left leaning. People who say this stuff out loud in real life (all three of them) are very left leaning. Being completely opposed to nationalism makes sense in very few instances, and comitern sympathies are one.

Yes, I had updated it to reflect the dates, but must have made a mistake in submission. I could rectify that in short order.

*edit: silly me, looks like I can't edit it. Perhaps someone with more karma/mod privileges could help out.

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