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From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
At the risk of defending some really quite terrible academics, this is in fact the correct response to some texts. Here is David Stove quoting Hegel:
There really is no way to say what is wrong with this passage other than to say, “all of it, it’s just bad”. It’s not much better in context either.
You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying
A possible critique might look like
Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.
Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.
You're doing the Lord's work
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This is a perfectly sensible statement, that you can have a conversation about, but can you point to it's counterpart in the original that translates into this? I get the feeling you're engaging in poetry analysis.
The counterpart is
I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.
Ah, I thought I was going crazy for a moment.
That is a common symptom of trying to consume unmediated Hegel.
One thing that can notably help with the task of understanding writing which is bad in this way, and which did help me here: (Chat)GPT4 is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task, which is to identify what an ambiguous pronoun refers to. As such, the prompt "replace all pronouns in the following passage with their referent, in square brackets" works wonderfully to help disentangle dense obscurantist philosopher babble.
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