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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   32543 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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But part of a grand narrative is making connections between disparate elements, and some of those connections might have value.

What's the argument that these grand theories of everything have a decent chance of "outrunning" the previous orthodoxy? What's the evidence that they did?

As I said at the beginning of our discourse, this seems to be an argument that the grand narrative is wrong, but this issue is not whether it is wrong, but whether it is so valueless that they should be dismissed out of hand. If it helps discover weaknesses in the current orthodoxy, that is valuable, it is not. Or, in the case of GGS, if it merely causes one to conclude that geography is more important than previously thought, even though not as important as Diamond says, that, too, is valuable.

But part of a grand narrative is making connections between disparate elements, and some of those connections might have value.

But you have no way of verifying whether or not these connections do have any value, and therefore should be treated as seriously as any other unverifiable claim.

As I said at the beginning of our discourse, this seems to be an argument that the grand narrative is wrong but this issue is not whether it is wrong, but whether it is so valueless that they should be dismissed out of hand.

How have you read that into what I said? No I am not talking about whether or not a particular grand narrative is wrong, I am talking about whether grand narratives in general should be taken seriously. They should not. I explained why several times.

If it helps discover weaknesses in the current orthodoxy, that is valuable, it is not.

Please make the argument that they help discover the weaknesses in the current orthodoxy.

Or, in the case of GGS, if it merely causes one to conclude that geography is more important than previously thought, even though not as important as Diamond says, that, too, is valuable.

That's my point. You cannot use GGS to make that conclusion. He wrote a story that implied it, but it's just a story. With the amount of scholarly work available, you could mine it to create any other story you wish. Some future version of GPT might be able to spit out a GGS from a prompt.

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