
Academic B.S. as artificial barriers to entry - mwsherman
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/academic-bs-as-artificial-barriers-to.html
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benbreen
I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives,
but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful
content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable, but I think it's unfair
to take that article as an example of Sokal-style nonsense.

As an exercise, here's my translation of what she's saying [supplied in
brackets]:

This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in
various worlds of urban studies [clear enough] and what this might mean for
the urban question of the current historical conjuncture [reference to the
economic historian Ernst Labrousse's idea of conjuncture, basically a middle-
term historical trend on the order of decades rather than centuries]. Launched
from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have
distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents [this is going to be a paper
about urban centers in the developing world which were, until recently,
largely rural], the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it
geographies of urbanization or urban politics [cities are complex and hard to
figure out]. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to
historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global
political economy [the different historical points of origins of cities
structure how we should think about them, e.g. urban studies of London might
not tell us what we need to know about Manilla] and deconstruction as a
methodology of generalization and theorization [the author basically says, I'm
going to be drawing on the works of various French theorists here and I think
it's useful.]

Likewise the final paragraph, while overwraught, is actually saying something
substantive. Basically, "we need to study cities in terms of what they exclude
as while as what they include. Many develping world cities were rural zones
within living memory of the present, and that agricultural background
continues to persist even as they become more urban." Really nothing very
objectionable to me there - and I say that as someone who does think there are
major problems with obscurantism in academic writing, especially various
branches of philosophy and literary studies.

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im2w1l
>I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives,
but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful
content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable

But that is exactly what Noah says too! That there is content. Just that it
has been made needlessly complex to keep people out and wages up.

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RodericDay
When I started engineering, being new to atheism and the internet and all
sorts of cliches like that, I was super into "rationalism" and making fun of
"liberal arts". I brough up Sokal's essay "debunking" post-modernism a lot, I
thought Steven Pinker and his ilk were super intelligent, etc. Old me would
have loved this piece.

Nowadays a piece like this one, making fun of estoeric language with the least
amount of philosophical charitability possible, just makes me cringe a little
bit.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
And yet, postmodern bullshit does a lot of real harm in this world.

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axplusb
As an econ PhD dropout, I never quite understood why such an emphasis was made
on physics-lookalike models. I was always more encouraged to come up with a
bunch of equations that would mimic some phenomenon, than dig around and
understand this phenomenon in more depth.

A few arguments that I can agree with though:

\- Models are a compact formulation of complex theories. I remember a
professor writing a dozen equations and claiming he just taught us Marx's
Capital. In retrospect I think that's pretty funny, and quite telling of the
superficiality that is rampant in the profession. But still that might have
been a great executive summary (I still haven't read the book). Another
example is Piketty's "r > g" that really is a lot of food for thought.

\- Models can lead to actionable insight. I think there are people in Central
Banks and Economics departments of governments who rely quite heavily on some
models to forecast GDP, unemployment etc.

But this comes with a huge caveat: it's often easy to tweak a model to make it
describe pretty much the opposite phenomenon of the one intended.

So the real benefits of that kind of academia were and still are pretty
unclear to me. I believe some academics were hiding their lack of deep
understanding of economic matters behind a fog of math. Even Blanchard (former
chief economist at the IMF) admitted to something along those lines in the
wake the 2008 crisis.

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yummyfajitas
The benefit of the models is that they force you to both explicitly state all
your assumptions and also verify that your conclusions logically follow from
your assumptions.

Further, it enables others who wish to criticize it to easily derive
predictions and show that those predictions fail to match reality, while
making it impossible for you to say "that isn't what I meant". If the math
says it, that's what the model predicts.

Vague verbal reasoning just involves a lot of time wasting - "your model seems
to show this, I think" -> "no that's totally not what I meant, you don't
understand" -> etc.

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emcq
Some interesting points but it isn't limited just to academia. You
unfortunately see similar cliques in industry for things like databases,
languages, MVC frameworks, etc which is rather thin knowledge that can be
picked up quickly by competent hires.

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firasd
I suspect at some point JavaScript developers got together and decided: why
say "server-side rendering" and "editable" if you can say "isomorphic" and
"mutable"?

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rdlecler1
Unfortunately the more complex the work the more difficult it is to peer-
review it. Most peer reviewers don't want to look stupid and so there is a
higher chance that they'll give the thumbs up rather than question the
underlying work. This leads to strong selection for presentation styles that
obfuscate research. The more people who can actually understand what you're
doing the more people who will be able to challenge you if you are wrong.

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firasd
I understand (and agree to some extent with) the argument but I think the
excerpted paper doesn’t work well as an example of the issue. The concluding
paragraph is lucid and a bit poetic, and upon clicking the link it turns out
the title (and general question it explores) is an allusion to another
well-​known paper. It’s almost literary compared to what sometimes passes for
writing in academic articles.

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xamuel
For mediocre "pushing-the-envelope" publish-or-perish papers, it's often a
matter of flinging the muddy paper at enough journals until it sticks at one
of them. If so, the last thing you want is for the reviewer to actually
understand what you're talking about. So obfuscate the hell out of it and hope
you get a lazy "uhh, looks good!" referee.

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sevensor
This is true even in engineering --- I was shocked by how much B.S. I had to
add to a paper to get it published. Same content, twice as long, and vaguely
implying stuff way beyond what it's actually about.

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biot
Taken to its limit, the original paper (without the BS filler) then becomes
the abstract.

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pinaceae
Sir Karl Popper will blow your mind.

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rhaps0dy
At first, this seems to me like a false conspiracy theory. But those texts ARE
needlessly obscure.

I propose another possible explanation: signaling. By parsing and writing
complicated text, they show their verbal prowess. Or their mathematical
ability.

I thought "write simply and clearly" was basic in technical text writing.

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loourr
This really sums up what I've been thinking about Critical Theory. It seems
like such a stark contrast from science & engineering where the idea is to
explain something complex in the simplest terms. Whereas it seems Critical
theory exists to disguise simple ideas in complex terms.

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huac
no, the point is that what you consider a "simple idea" is actually extremely
complex, hence the need for very specific or obscure (and often German) terms

