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Comment by iWorshipFAANGS | Hacker News Reader

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."

First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."

I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons.

First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia. -hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. -dialetics. Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points." Term dates back to Aristotle. -Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating power." Critical term in International relations. -Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick.

So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery.

I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say.

PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness."

His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's also done, if one can believe, in earnest.

Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.

View on HN

> he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."

Yep. That rubs me the wrong way too.

One characteristic of truly earnest people is that they're non-judgemental and open to new ideas and experiences. If one can get past the boilerplate, there's some really cool ideas in postmodernism. I think PG is being the opposite of earnest in that pithy, incurious takedown.

There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot.

As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS, JavaScript ("What do you mean it has nothing to do with Java?") and so on.

Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.

Good point. I should add "non-technical" to my comment.

> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider.

In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.

> In the humanities it’s the point,

No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.

> virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.

I “earnestly engaged” with it by doing a humanities degree 20 years ago when this stuff was taking root.

The only field that seems resistant to being overwhelmed by it is history, possibly because the scholarship must be grounded in original sources.

What have you read in the humanities recently?

I think the classic essay "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" from 1993 is a counterexample: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In programming, we call this abstraction.

Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your attention to those who least deserve it.

If you want to try to read something from the humanities that doesn’t use any specialised words, you could try Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack of suitable language to express his ideas.

It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the fields you don’t really know about are trying to obscure some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted. Maybe these people are actually trying to express something complex and nuanced?

I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing being obscure but I don’t think these are unique to the humanities. Indeed I think you’ll probably find many people in humanities fields are better writers than those in the academic areas you may be more familiar with.

I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity).

And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you.

PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.

To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ).

> PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.

True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.

Also I'll just throw out, in terms of impact, Baudrillard's work kinda hits the nail on the head when it comes to the internet. You can't quantify the impact of literature or more qualitative philosophy as easily, and, one can only know as time goes on.

I'm not the first to say this, obviously. Baudrillard's quote seems scary-accurate of today:

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.”

Baudrillard was definitely onto something with his analysis of the Gulf War. For Americans it was advertised as a war, but it wasn't much more than a one-sided slaughter.

> True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.

I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc.

To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world.

Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.

Agreed! :)

>To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing.

MongoDB is webscale.

For the uninitiated: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping over something they could explain in detail.

In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic programming.

To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed said something along the lines of math is hard because it's easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.

Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points.

I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur.

I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-).

I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains.

But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1].

[1]. http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html

> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology

I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even western percussion instruments are painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to understand western harmony as a concrete particular case among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g.

https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-mus...

this is a serious textbook about ethnomusicology and linear PDE on Riemannian manifolds.

What were your ethnomusicology classes about? They might be really bad, if you ended up thinking that it is a "soft" subject.

I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include:

Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04...

Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati...

Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird

https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html?...

I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.

FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool.

Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper:

“This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.”

For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.

> I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.

Of course they were trolling. I don't claim that there isn't a lot of bogus stuff in ethomusicology (as the OP sarcastically proves), just that it is a perfectly legitimate field. You can also find a lot of pompous bullshit in machine learning publications, but that does not mean that ML is bogus.

Not trolling and absolutely serious. I've spent a lifetime exploring the world through the lens of music and I'm an admirer of the field of ethnology. Such studies have been highly useful to how I view the importance of music in society, aside from being entertainment it bonds communities and the study of it sheds fascinating light as to our cultures and ways.

Well, ok, sorry about that then. I'm much more into the "musical" part of ethnomusicology than into the philosophical/ cultural/political aspects, which I find completely uninteresting. But good for you if you find interest in it. I thought you were trolling due to the 3rd book, whose title sounds like a joke to me. As in "is dog barking literature?"; of course it isn't, literature and music are, pretty much by definition, things that humans do.

Cool : ). Yeah I honestly wasn't sure and appreciate your response : ). And I agree.

Just for fun I'll throw out Ursula le Guin as one of my favorite science fiction authors because she explores issues of human nature via anthropology and such.

Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`?

I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".

Exactly! Whoever said humanities academics have a monopoly on obscurantism?

Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-understood meanings.

Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes - they'd say the same thing.

Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant of us to assume we can do the same in the humanities, because it means we assume the humanities are easy / trivial and so on, which they are not.

It's like the "my kid could paint that" cliche of Modernist painting - maybe your kid could, but, you saying that just indicates that you aren't educated about what the artist is doing, why they choose to do it, and the previous works of art the artist is responding to or in dialogue with.

Kind of like, "why can't everything be HTML/CSS, with maybe a little JQuery?" Sure, you have a point, but there are clearly more sophisticated use-cases where that approach is not the most effective, and, your saying that kinda indicates you may not have encountered or had to deal with those use-cases.

Truth be told I think computer science, at least the parts of it where you get to create abstractions which then define the bounds of what is possible within that programming paradigm (see - word jumble!) is closer to the "soft" humanities than many are aware of or would care to see.

Tech folks tend to love/desire "certainty" in one form another, and, the easiest way to achieve that is to rule out everything which is "uncertain", and, constrain your domain until "certainty" can be achieved. Which can be a great approach for certain technical problems, but also IMHO results in ignorant behavior towards anything which threatens said certainty.

I enjoyed this comment - as someone that is occasionally skeptical of these lofty ideas in the humanities, the analogy to abstractions/concepts in programming never occurred to me.

On the certainty thing, though - I see what you're saying about tech folks desiring certainty, but I've also found that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is, and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that. For example, proving the efficacy of a vaccine: we really can be extremely certain that a vaccine is effective. Other areas of study (that I believe are still entirely valid and important), just can't achieve that level of rigor.

I should note my views may be skewed as the entirety of my career has been as a software engineer at an options trading firm, where we are buying and selling uncertainty in a sense, so we have to be comfortable with it.

After writing that all out.. maybe I'm just confirming you example of constraining uncertainty until there can be certainty, or at least a well-quantified form of uncertainty.

Thank you! Much appreciated.

> I've also found that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is, and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that.

That's an excellent point and I agree with you. My statement about tech folks and certainty was a bit too broad, tbh, and maybe expresses some personal frustration as much as anything.

At the end of the day we're all human and vulnerable to the same tricks of psychology and human foibles.

[EDIT: I want to share in a quote another poster shared that's relevant to our discussion: 'Math is hard because it is easy. The humanities are easy because they are hard.'

It's not just about math being quantifiable, but that there's a much lower barrier of entry to discuss "the humanities" - justice, ethics, the meaning of life, etc. Maybe a good analogy would be we can all discuss the weather, but that means sometimes we think meteorologists are just quacks? : )].

[EDIT EDIT: If interested in learning more about the humanities I highly recommend the Socratic dialogues as starting point. They're still the foundation of all Western Philosophy, including the postmodern stuff people love to hate on. They're pretty approachable and interesting and readable and short and don't have any jargon, really. A course of some kind is ideal but you could read them on your own.]

But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness"?

And why a researcher should use it?

Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"

> But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness"?

"A deep dialogue on the overwhelming power wielded by white people".

> And why a researcher should use it?

I get that fields have their different choices of jargon, my point is it's hard to misrepresent bad content when it's written like the above example.

> Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"

touché

Your paraphrase loses some of the reference of the original. The terms chosen there have legacies and specific meanings within their disciplines

Also want to add to the parent post that "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness" is actually just a bunch of keywords and I doubt a competent academic would use that particular phrase.

It's easier for me to imagine, "The hermeneutics of hegemonic whiteness", "The dialectic of whiteness and hegemony", etc.

I have a hard time imagining "hermeneutic" and "dialectic" together because of what those words actually mean. I feel like you'd see one or the other in the kind of phrase / term / sentence we are discussing.

"Hermeneutics" is defined as: "the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts." Back in the day people did close reading/analysis of the Bible so they could understand what God meant and called it hermeneutics. Today it can encompass close reading and analysis of literature (since techniques of analyzing one book - the Bible - also work when analyzing other books) or be used in a more general way to talk about a sort of abstracted, looking-at-the-symbols-within approach to analyzing something.

"Dialectic" is literally a dialogue between two people, the term originating with Ancient Greece and Socrate's approach to philosophy. Hegel retconned it to also include a sort of evolution-through-competition where two things (for lack of a better word) logically opposite to each other butt heads and produce a "synthesis" - not unlike the "marketplace of ideas".

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

"This “textbook” Being-Nothing-Becoming example is closely connected to the traditional idea that Hegel’s dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, which, when applied to the logic, means that one concept is introduced as a “thesis” or positive concept, which then develops into a second concept that negates or is opposed to the first or is its “antithesis”, which in turn leads to a third concept, the “synthesis”, that unifies the first two "

Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"

---

The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light of day, because by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html

Why did you choose the name “Y Combinator?”

The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.

https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/

Then he named his startup incubator after a LISP function.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Y-Combinator-get-its-name

I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago. But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned lack of sleep.

No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or interestingness, consider some examples:

> Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √–1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (–1).

This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes √-1. I got this reference from “Postmodernism and its problems with science” by Jean Bricmont (the original link has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...).

Bricmont co-wrote the book Impostures intellectuelles (French) / Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book:

* (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonse...) Bruce Fink accused the authors of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings."

* Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc² is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us […] privileged what goes the fastest”, and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has, in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled “Opaque Writing Style”, which, if I'm reading correctly, says that it is intentional. The London Review of Books carried a review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pau... , reference via https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also the many links on Sokal's page: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's book that defends her by saying:

> Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.

My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse writers, you can find people “playing the game” or being unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand, to trust that the authors are in fact saying something meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal), and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the authors aren't failing to be clear; they aren't even trying! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems reasonable to suggest non-earnestness.

(This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important—it may very well be—the point is only whether earnestness is considered a value.)

--------

Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever have a section in their biographical entry justifying their “opaque writing style”, nor have it said that in their world it's better to be “wild” than correct. This IMO is a genuine value difference between the fields.

I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these humanities for the make believe they are. These people basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and that's damning. They even published a rewrite of mein kampf. Why should my tax dollars go towards that? These people should get a real job and contribute to society. Bogus is being too charitable.

It made for one of my all time favorite episodes of Joe Rogan though. Worth a listen.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_acad...

Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?

>These people should get a real job and contribute to society

Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.

> Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?

Research is a process through which we unlock various technological orchards to harvest for the betterment of all mankind. The problem we have today is we're running low on new orchards. It's a crying shame how little we spend on research - compared to e.g. weapons.

> Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.

Do I dignify that with a reply? That's got nothing to do with what I said.

> Why should my tax dollars go towards that?

Why should your tax dollars go towards CS research, when nearly half of all sampled papers (circa 2015) can't be reproduced [1]?

As a society, we delegate funding based on perceptions of expertise: someone who knows more than you or I about these specific fields decided that they deserved some amount of funding (probably significantly less than you think). Sometimes that means that junk and fraud[2] gets through; that's the cost of doing business in every field.

These kinds of embarrassing mistakes should be read as an indictment of academic culture and the failures of the peer review system as a whole, not a "gotcha" against a field that you or I aren't qualified to evaluate. Which, again, is why nobody asked for my opinion or yours about which things to fund.

[1]: http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/

[2]: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...

I have no problem with funding CS research. It's at least somewhat productive to society. Not hugely, but that's academia for you. Even batting 50% is great compared to 0%.

These kinds of woke gender studies, socialist, racist, fields etc are a joke. I don't accept your implication that only someone inside the nut house are credentialed to evaluate it - if anything those seem like the people least likely to be able to make a clear judgment. These kinds of people are dangerous - they advocate for tearing down the system we have that works pretty well - with no coherent idea of what to replace it with. If they ever got into power we'd all be screwed.

It's my opinion that these fields are a net negative to society as a whole, having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not receive public funding. They are merely thinly disguised political ideologies. It's sad what academia has come to.

> having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not receive public funding.

It's the humanities. It's not supposed to be "scientific," with whatever weight you decide to place on that adjective.

Our government (and every government) funds thousands of things, academic and not, that aren't themselves scientific: parks, libraries, public arts, aesthetic programs intended to motivate the public towards some policy goal[1]. Most people think these things should receive some amount of funding, and recognize that they themselves are not immediately qualified to distinguish worthy endeavours from un-worthy ones.

[1]: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/spring/d...

Let's not compare gender studies to a park. That's a bit apples and oranges.

Humanities are meant to have some redeeming value and some rigorousness even when you can't apply the scientific method.

History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology are all good examples of valuable humanities where there is some grounding in logic and facts. Gender studies on the other hand is just an ideology with very little basis in reality, and little grounding of any kind in facts and logic. You could call it a religion of sorts, but it would be insulting to religions which at least have a richness of tradition and culture and philosophy behind them.

> History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology are all good examples of valuable humanities where there is some grounding in logic and facts.

I'm sorry, but this is a profound misapprehension of the humanities: one of the first things you do in the study of history is learn that history is a human project, subject to human flaws. We don't take Thucydides and Herodotus at their words; we expect the "facts" of history to be distorted.

Philosophy predates what you think of as "logic," and does not use the phrase to refer solely to systems that map roughly to the constrained proof structures that programmers are taught. More profoundly, many philosophers will outright reject the idea that logic is some kind of a priori substrate: not because they think it's wrong or not, but because they think that it's the responsibility of philosophy to consider what would have to be for it to be otherwise.

I know that it's difficult, but please consider whether your own positions have become dogmatic. You don't have to agree with prevailing views in gender studies (I don't even know what they are!); you merely have to ask yourself whether you're qualified to dismiss it as "an ideology with very little basis in reality."

> I'm sorry, but this is a profound misapprehension of the humanities: one of the first things you do in the study of history is learn that history is a human project, subject to human flaws. We don't take Thucydides and Herodotus at their words; we expect the "facts" of history to be distorted.

Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a war. yes it's subject to interpretation, and there's no one right answer. But you also can't just make stuff up and get people to take you seriously. There's some rigour to making and presenting your arguments. Very different to gender studies.

> I know that it's difficult, but please consider whether your own positions have become dogmatic. You don't have to agree with prevailing views in gender studies (I don't even know what they are!); you merely have to ask yourself whether you're qualified to dismiss it as "an ideology with very little basis in reality."

Maybe. I've seen a lot of terrible examples of things from gender studies. I'm sure there have to be some redeeming ideas right? The whole field can't be 100% worthless. But by and large there's not much value in it and a lot of nonsense, incorrect, and even dangerous thinking to be found there.

> Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a war. yes it's subject to interpretation, and there's no one right answer. But you also can't just make stuff up and get people to take you seriously. There's some rigour to making and presenting your arguments. Very different to gender studies.

Except that a lot of it is just made up! Both the Greeks and Romans were happy to make up foundational and battle stories to support their cultural lodestones; we don't really know much about how Rome was founded other than that it certainly wasn't Romulus and Remus. Even our best period sources (Dionysus of Halicarnassus and Livy) were (1) 800 years too late, and (2) under immense political pressure to "prove" (there's that word again) that the myths were real.

And note: the greatness of Rome is conditioned on the greatness of their founding myth, which goes from Romulus and Remus to the great Aeneas of Troy[1]. The greatness of the Western neoclassicial period (democracy, free speech, property, capitalism!), in turn, is conditioned on the greatness and intellectual rightness of Greece and Rome. There's a reason why George Washington is apotheosized on the Capitol Rotunda, and it's not just because Brumidi thought it would look cool.

If you can see why these kinds of observations and analysis might be interesting, you can get an inkling of why people find gender and other critical studies interesting: they don't exist to destroy Western culture, only to reconcile its lionizations with what we actually know. And, as it turns out, we don't know a whole lot other than what our progenitors want us to know.

[1]: This, among many other reasons, is why Rome had its own reactionary anti-Hellenic scholars. Modern conservative groups frequently borrow their names. Parallels abound.

You seem to have a post factual philosophy. Just because some things are made up in history does not mean the whole field is without rigor, nor does it make it equivalent to the counter factual nonsense coming out of gender studies.

That you can find examples to the contrary does not prove the rule or make everything somehow equal.

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but those weren't supposed to be examples to the contrary (it's a matter of historical fact that people believed those myths, and acted based on those beliefs), nor do I have a "post factual" personal philosophy (I'm actually a Rawlsian and a moral realist, which is about as stodgy and non-postmodern as you can get by moral philosophy standards).

The point with that whole digression was to provide a little window into the kinds of analyses that a critical philosopher might do: they're not interested in dismantling history as a whole; they're interested in carving at the joints between phenomena that are taken for granted as conjoined. I think that's important, even if it isn't the kind of research that I personally excel at (or even understand especially well).

Sorry, I didn't mean to go at you. It's just one of my buttons when people cherry pick something bad about Y and try to use that establish that X is therefore somehow equal or not worse. There are some people out there who even like to believe all humans are equal. As if they live in some alternate reality. I'm not implying anything about you by the way, just venting.

Someone else in the comments here had the gall to say there are bad physics papers therefore gender studies is no less legitimate. Which is totally nonsensical as an argument.

> they're interested in carving at the joints between phenomena that are taken for granted as conjoined

On the surface I have no issue with that. I just think the field of gender studies in general is so toxic and full of garbage that anyone doing actual serious work in that field would do well to distance themselves from it.

That's pretty much just opinion? Of course they include politics, as does history, anthropology, literature. That means nothing.

Strawman PC gender studies you have encountered may have poisoned it for you. That doesn't mean its worthless, or even wrong.

No, but that is my opinion. I think it's a net negative to society until I see evidence to the contrary. Links welcome.

Also, that's not how you use the term strawman in an argument.

...and yet, you apparently understood. So it was a useful, effective use of the term.

While it's not very Hacker News, 'humour' can have some value. Here's Calvin and Hobbes on much the same stuff https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849...

Ah man, humor! I like humor too.

I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers.

Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.

A note for people seeing the essay now: he's quietly changed the link to be "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic racialized phenomenology." (Which makes it even clearer that he doesn't have a reasoned argument at any specific target in mind, just "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Also that he forgot he needs to hide his power level.)

EDIT: He's quietly changed the link again to remove "racialized."

In context though - 'earnestness' here is a quality looked for in academic founders and is being looked at as an ability to solve important problems that other people care about.

The humanities studying hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness don't have that. In particular, the entire field has come up with no useful commentary on 'hegemonic whiteness', hermeneutic or otherwise, that leads to problem solving. It isn't a culture that is producing strong startup founders like STEM does. It's fair to say they are less earnest in the way PG is using the term; the humanities isn't where people go to solve real-world problems.

Humanities is arguably at the base of some very successful companies (arguably Apple, for example). Hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness is the base of some profoundly ... albinophobe? I dunno, they're racist and don't like white people ... arguments and nothing admirable that I have yet encountered.

The "bogus" comment falls in a paragraph about ventures where the earnest don't generally win. So the first question to ask is: do the earnest generally win in that kind of academic field? I don't know much about that field, but I'm guessing probably not just because it is too closely tied to politics. If you earnestly persue research, you are likely to find something that contradicts the current political fashions, and end up buried. So in that sense, PG is probably right.

The next question is: is he inappropriately dismissive (or even insulting) to the field over all? Does is have value that he unfairly dismisses? You seem to think so.

But even if so, pretty much everyone needs to be dismissive about a lot of stuff. At least he's transparent about where his blind spots are.

None of what you are saying responds to what the parent poster actually said.

You're constructing your own argument and then claiming the other person was arguing what you're arguing, but did a bad job of it.

> you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."

That represents philosophy in general about as well as say Theranos represents startups in general.

And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.

Philosophy, the humanities, gender studies: really only for edgy college kids who are trying to get laid.

It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense.

What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense.

In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.

This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.

Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I do think I broke the site's guidelines by not assuming good faith. So I apologize for that.

> How you can claim to read someone else's mind like this is beyond me, or even for that matter claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad curriculum 30 years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.

I studied analytical philosophy in college, like he did. I didn't take a single class on postmodernism. I bring that up because these terms are universal and not tied specifically to PoMo (or even continental) philosophy. That's where my doubt comes from: someone who studied philosophy should know these terms, and should know that popular awareness of them is limited to the spooky PoMo stuff.

Thanks for that!

I believe you and find that interesting but it seems to me you're talking about your education, not pg's. Those terms aren't universal and, as I'm sure you know, there's also a strain in analytical philosophy that takes pride in not knowing anything about that stuff. Besides that, skepticism about postmodernism generally was as widespread then as it is now, especially among technical people, and I'd be shocked if that hasn't always been his view. Certainly it was 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it was that I first read him refer to it.

In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples:

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/132655686041831424...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128234439739327284...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/131274252267491738...

(NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128226118909190553...

(NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/130979001821976166...

I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable dogma that I vehemently disagree with.

That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are very often tax advantaged.

If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare there must not be any?

It is a politico-religious movement. Of course people that side with that movement find value in funding people to produce texts in its tradition and educate students in its ways of talking. I don't.

> It is a politico-religious movement.

Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to label and then defame something they don't like.

They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to describe something, but too vague and imprecise to actually describe anything.

Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they critique society for the oppressive elements which they believe they've found.

I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques of systemic racism.

Criticize something specific so we can talk about it. But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to make would rapidly fall apart.

And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists, communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism, Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism, Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point of contention), and so on.

Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives? The entire field of Gender Studies?

Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it.

But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you criticize makes it difficult to do so.

And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles.

Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you didn't actually say it.

Hello! I think I addressed some of the points you are making in my response to the user dvt. TLDR, there's low-quality research in "falsifiable" fields too.

But actually, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding what your point is, could you help me? I mentioned a specific line that Paul Graham wrote, then said it was "dumb" for the reasons I outlined. Then, in defense of Paul Graham, you posted links to tweets to snippets of research absolutely without any context at all. How would I know whether that research is good or not? I have no training in any of those fields.

I'm really confused about how what you posted defended Paul. Did you want me to see that someone wrote the words "decolonizing" and "math" together and subsequently think that it is stupid, after all, to write the words "hegemonic" and "whiteness" in the same paper?

one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny.

hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".

I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.

I'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here.

You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne

However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses.

However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.

I'm glad you brought up Montaigne; I was going to, but then realized that people would accuse me of comparing pg to the classics and get mad about that too.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare informal quotes to "citations" in the modern sense. The point is that this is an informal, highly personal genre. There are people, as you probably know, who claim that Montaigne invented not only the essay, but the modern idea of a personal self by writing them. So to accuse pg of being too personal or self-referential in his essays is a misunderstanding. The way his writing gets under people's skin is certainly interesting though.

Alright, well said. Although I still don't agree that it'd be out of place to include citations in a personal essay, what you've said is fair too.

is your argument that he's a genre writer and his genre is his own cult of personality, and that his pieces should not be judged on the coherence of their arguments, because making strong arguments is not the point of his writing?

That's pretty obviously not my argument.

my argument is that PG's writing is weak specifically because he rejects dialectics. Your argument is essentially that he's writing in a genre that is not dialectic in nature. This is like if I said "I don't like this cookie because it is not sweet" and you said "the cookie is not sweet therefore your argument is invalid".

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