domain:city-journal.org
thejdizzler
13hr ago
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
birb_cromble
13hr ago
assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion
Be the change you want to see in the world. I'd be interested in a thread on any of those things.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
Would he have kept his job had he refused to sign the open letter? Remember Steve Hsu.
aeqno
13hr ago
conservatives are ~50% of the U.S. population, while academics are a fraction of a percent (or maybe slightly larger)
Quality > quantity.
Supah_Schmendrick
13hr ago
If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.
What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn).
(Bolding mine) I don't think anyone ever in any side of politics is particularly good at the part I bolded, but certainly the last 10 or so years have been transformative for me in learning of how unimportant this was to self-described liberals. Of course, liberalism doesn't necessarily imply free exchange of ideas and discourse, but it's certainly something I used to associate with them, and too many times I'd hear from a friend about how he went into or wanted to go into an argument with someone with [wrongthink] ideas, with or looking for some tactic to cut through that person's defenses in order to convince them without also looking for tactics by which to allow that person to convince him that [wrongthink] is actually correct.
Going into a conversation or argument looking to convince someone else without allowing for the possibility of oneself being convinced in reverse is just not a winning strategy unless your goal isn't the truth and you have overwhelming force on your side to enforce what you believe is right anyway. Because people can tell when they're being lectured to instead of being engaged with, especially in the long run.
Which reminds me of 2 separate but related phenomena that I keep seeing over and over among the woke left. One is that of "wokeness didn't fail, it was failed by the bigoted populace that was just too bigoted to accept it." This is just a continuation of the "feminism didn't fail, it was failed by the misogynistic populace that was just too misogynistic to accept it," a common sentiment among feminists before "woke" as we understand it today was a common term. I see this commonly enough among both the left and the right and in non-political contexts as well. People love avoiding accountability and blaming others, everywhere and in all contexts.
However, it is entirely and only the responsibility of the ideologues who support an ideology that requires mass buy-in from large swathes of society due to the severe societal changes it pushes to make a convincing case for their ideology, and any failure of the ideology to take hold is entirely the ideologues' fault, and you'd think that these ideologues would be motivated to realize this, in order to more effectively push their ideological changes in society (that they don't seem to realize this indicates either they care more about feeling righteous than about accomplishing meaningful political change or they genuinely believe that they have overwhelming force, or both). It's like how it's always and only the movie studio/marketer/etc.'s fault when a movie bombs, even presuming that it bombed due to society being so filled with bigots who were bigoted against the movie's message/actors/directors/marketers/etc., since no one has an obligation to give money to movie studios.
The other phenomenon is that of ideologues gutting out credible organizations and wearing them as a skin suit in order to launder their ideas through the inertial credibility of the organization while the rest of the world catches up to notice. Academia is the obvious one that people are talking about right now here, but also mainstream journalism and also even fictional media, with stuff like the Hugo awards for science fiction or the Star Wars film franchise or game companies like Bioware or Bungie, where these organizations huff and puff as if people still respect them like before the more recent ideological takeovers without seeming to recognize that you can only wear the skin suit for so long before people notice that the underlying thing isn't delivering on the promise of the label and adjusts their credibility rating accordingly.
In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces. You can choose your message, but you have no vote on how other people respond to it. If you want other people to respond to your message in a certain way, it is only and entirely your responsibility to sculpt your message to get the results you want.
As much as I hate this analogy, it reminds me of the "nice guy" phenomenon that was all the rage on feminist think pieces about a decade ago, referring to men who appear to believe they're entitled to sex for following all the instructions they were given for attracting a woman, and then lashing out at women when the sex isn't delivered. Instead of taking responsibility for his own failures (i.e. believing the instructions he was given, instead of understanding that part of the test is correctly interpreting these instructions) and fixing it, he just blames women for not filling their role. The opposite gender counterpart would be a woman in her 30s or 40s who had her sexual fun with a large set of male partners while also building her career blaming high value men in their age range for not fulfilling their role of finding them attractive and instead going for younger, less successful, less sexually experienced women. In neither case, does blaming others actually help the person in question, not without overwhelming force to enforce it (which has arguably been the case over the last few decades for the latter case), and in both cases, taking accountability for one's own failure and learning from it seems to be - to me, anyway - the most likely method to bear fruit. But people hate taking accountability more than they love their ideology winning.
jkf
13hr ago
Naturally loquacious writers :: LLMs
are as
homely girls :: MTFs
modernity, amirite?
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
We can have universally-beneficial/long-term scientific research, or we can have politicization of science, but we can't have both at the same time.
The Soviets did.
Throwaway05
13hr ago
public trust with the polio vaccine
I know where you are going with this but ironically the polio vaccine ended up being a long term public relations disaster once the pain of polio started to fall off. Check out the whole Salk vs. Sabin thing if you want to dig in.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
I’m pretty sure Tao and his team receive high salaries(and while I DON’T understand his work I’m well willing to believe those high salaries are well deserved).
Throwaway05
13hr ago
This is advice for the last conflict - when the ACLU wanders around as a shambolic corpse that refuses to support the rights of "those people" you know the old institutions can no longer help.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
13hr ago
Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.
The problem is that science itself does not have a metaphysical system. Scientism, the sort of religion that has grown up around science, has a particular moral outlook. Science as a praxis, a way of discovering empirical truths, does not and cannot have much to say on moral questions, as morality and metaphysics are definitionally outside of the domain of science.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
13hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.
It was the idea that occurred to me while reading the text, so I just went with it!
I fully admit I'm engaged in a "motivated" reading. I'm more concerned with trying to extract a coherent philosophical idea from the text rather than with reconstructing Irigaray's exact mental state. But I don't think my interpretation is baseless either.
Backing up to give more context:
What is left uninterpreted in the economy of fluids—the resistances brought to bear upon solids, for example—is in the end given over to God. Overlooking the properties of real fluids—internal frictions, pressures, movements, and so on, that is, their specific dynamics—leads to giving the real back to God, as only the idealizable characteristics of fluids are included in their mathematicization.
Or again: considerations of pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in terms of laminated planes, solenoid movements (of a current privileging the relation to an axis), spring-points, well-points, whirlwind-points, which have only an approximate relation to reality. Leaving some remainder. Up to infinity: the center of these “movements” corresponding to zero supposes in them an infinite speed, which is physically unacceptable. Certainly these “theoretical” fluids have enabled the technical—also mathematical—form of analysis to progress, while losing a certain relationship to the reality of bodies in the process.
What consequences does this have for “science” and psychoanalytic practice?
Roughly: Science can't just give a direct description of every single microdetail of reality. It has to "symbolize" things -- create simplified and idealized theoretical models. These models are inevitably attached to linguistic imagery.
And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids).
Honestly not entirely sure what this part means. I assume that she's saying that solid imagery is more metaphorical, and fluid imagery is more metonymic, and her questioning here is impugning the privilege that the current imagery of physics grants to solids over fluids.
Or—suspending the status of truth accorded to these essentially metalinguistic “categories” and “dichotomous oppositions” — to reply that in any event all language is (also) metaphorical,+ and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the “‘subject” of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids.
They key part is really the line at the end, "the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids". The current "symbolization" of physics grants precedence to solids. But she's implying that that could change. We could imagine an alternative symbolization that grants precedence to fluids instead (without changing the content of the underlying physics).
it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows.
Again the suggestion is that the imagery could change without changing the math.
Solid objects are already a lot more "fluid" than they might initially appear. See for example The Problem of the Many. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative conceptual landscape where we view the world of macro objects as being fundamentally populated by fluids, with "solids" being an exotic deviation from the fluid norm, if they even exist at all.
Throwaway05
13hr ago
This is unfortunate-- disastrous for some people I know. Of the anecdotes I've heard, such as jdizzler's below, everyone thus far has earned my sympathies.
Let me register myself - when the election was running the few people I felt comfortable sharing my leanings with hit me with the "dude you might lose your job or whatever" and I said yes that's fine.
Months later I missed out on a major professional opportunity because of a funding cut and people expected me to complain.
No, this is what I asked for.
Fixing the rot instantiated by social justice is going to be painful. We need to accept that.
I am sorry for the people hurt in the process...but it's necessary and I encourage others to mentally frame it that way.
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
I’m not sure that was the turning point- in practice lots of people just decided to hell with it around Easter.
Garfielf
13hr ago
Progressives already do that, and have loudly proclaimed for years it is OK to do. So I will not be upset because it is expected behavior from them.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
14hr ago
My quest to the 200 54# Kettlebell Snatch goal is taking some detours. I seem to have plateaued at around 160 where my exhaustion hits a point where the fatigue overwhelmed my form and injuries happen. Nothing major, torn calluses, back gets a little tweaked, etc. I think I'm going to start trying to do 2-5 sets of 100, since knocking out 100 in a row has gotten fairly easy. Did two sets today as a try out and it seems promising. Might add a 3rd set of 100 next week. Fingers crossed. I'm hoping after stacking enough of those sets, once day I can just drop the rest period and go for 200 straight.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.
I'm going to venture a wild guess and say this was before Goodhart's Law had it's way with that measure.
Tanista
14hr ago
I mean, not all of them. There are definitely SJWs who believe that SJ doesn't count as politics but indeed "just common fucking decency"*, although there are certainly others who'll yell at anyone who thinks it's possible to be apolitical.
I think the "personal/everything is political" is a better explanation of the mindset than "just common fucking decency". Especially because it's paired with a sort of almost gnostic/mystery cult mentality. The Onion parody of the general mindet of "if only you were educated as I was" is instructive: "just decency" doesn't require induction into a political discipline.
"It's just decency" can be taken as an attempt to build consensus that ran out of control, precisely because of the dynamics you note.
zoink
14hr ago
From January 31, 2015 The Parable of the Talents
Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
As I said, they failed, utterly. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the academy became more and more exclusive of any opposing views. It turns out that a key part of enforcing ones free speech rights is force.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14hr ago
Yeah, I think most people complaining about this now were either directly participating in the censorship, approving of it, or at most not all that bothered by it.
Sure, there were some pro-free speech groups, I think FIRE is the most prominent. Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
14hr ago
This is the culture war thread, not the random hypothetical thread.
And they failed.
Principled free speech defenders strongly benefit from the shoe on the other foot.
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