
Perils of pop philosophy - MaysonL
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/06/01/perils-of-pop-philosophy/
======
tow21
Salient point (IMO):

"On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to
find myself thinking: “Discourse at this level can’t possibly accomplish
anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they
wanted to believe in the first place.” This is, needless to say, not a problem
limited to philosophy."

~~~
azgolfer
Reading his other posts, he seems to think that the verbose and convoluted
discourse he prefers is somehow at a higher level. IMO, there is no reason for
philosophy to be complex and difficult to understand. If you want to solve
extremely complex and difficult problems, be a physicist, not a philosopher.

------
jackchristopher
I'm a fan of generalities, they make communicating easy, but they come with
responsibilities.

I set my expectation for piece of writing based on the format. I know I won't
get the full details of an issue reading someone's essay; I expect the gist.
It's implicit in the format.

But my responsibility is to read in between the lines and fill in the
necessary details when obvious. If someone says, "Men just care about sex", I
know they don't really mean it black and white.

On the other hand, I expect more from a scientific journal. But if I _really_
want to know something, I'll experiment personally. And even that has
pitfalls.

------
cousin_it
Summary of the part I could parse: a suggestion to pop-sci journalists to make
science sound hard instead of easy.

~~~
req2
I wonder - would people learn science if they couldn't gossip the newest pop
philosophy without it?

(Who am I kidding, we call it the intertubes, of course not.)

------
swombat
I hate to say this, but whether or not this article has a good point is pretty
hard to tell at first glance, and I'm pretty busy today, so I haven't read it.

I would suggest the following to the author:

\- break up your article into sub-sections with clear sub-headings

\- avoid long series of paragraphs of similar length. Look at your article on
the page and make sure that the white space flows in a way so that the text
doesn't seem intimidating

\- summarise your points at the end, in bold.

~~~
ewiethoff
I, too, hate your saying this. I hope you're joking. Because bullet point
summaries and trying to make the article seem non-intimidating rather
contradict what the author is saying.

~~~
swombat
I'm not joking. I write articles about what I believe to be complex subjects
all the time on my blog (<http://danieltenner.com>). Making your ideas
intelligible to others is part of the process of communicating them.

Just because an idea is hard to communicate doesn't give you an excuse to not
even try.

~~~
dave_au
I don't want to be harsh, but I took a look at your blog, and I'm struggling
to come up with some kind of reasonable measure for "complex subjects" that
matches any of the entries. And with 8 entries the "all the time" bit doesn't
seem that spot on either.

It's late here so that's probably a little grumpier sounding that it's meant
to be. Just slightly gobsmacked by the wording is all.

Edit: I just re-read this and it does sound pretty snarky and I don't want to
come across as a troll or a nuisance, but really, read both the perils of pop
philosophy article and the blog and you'll see where I'm coming from.

~~~
swombat
_I'm struggling to come up with some kind of reasonable measure for "complex
subjects" that matches any of the entries_

I would argue that the reason the subjects appear straightforward is because I
spent the time to make them so. Making your application viral, or starting up
with a friend, are both complex topics with many issues, side-issues, loops,
tangents, etc.

I'm not saying that whatever this guy is trying to talk about isn't more
complicated. Perhaps it is. I'll never know, since I can't be bothered to read
something that's so badly presented. However, the fact is he's made no effort
whatsoever to make his ideas intelligible to others, other than jotting down
his thoughts and posting them online. That's a lazy attitude.

I'd say we need more people who make a conscious effort to present complex
information in a simple way, and fewer of those who feel that the world owes
it to their brilliance to either make the effort to decipher their ramblings
or keep their little minds occupied with simpler thoughts.

PS: <http://danieltenner.com> is my new blog, stated in February. Yes, I
should update it more, but running my start-up does take up most of my time.
Before that I ran <http://inter-sections.net>, for about a year and a half.

~~~
dave_au
I wasn't knocking your blog, and I assumed from your current blogs welcome
message that there were other blogs out there and the current one might not be
representative. From what I've seen you write pretty clearly and lay your
ideas out well.

Also, the linked article isn't that complex once you get past the first
paragraph. It's actually about discussing domain specific complex topics, and
the first paragraph acts an example. From then on it's written pretty clearly
and the ideas are layed out well. But at the end of the day it's more a
thought / concern the guy had than an article.

It's not that the domain experts are all snooty and don't want to condescend
to explain things properly. It's that they have to make a choice about
explaining things to those that are familiar with the domain - in which case
they can be fairly concise and get whatever idea it is across with a minimal
signal to noise ratio - or they can try for an explanation that anyone could
understand - which might take more than a feasible amount of time, and carries
a risk that the core idea that got them motivated enough to explain things in
the first place would be lost amongst all the new information.

With that in mind, using a highly domain specific first paragraph as an
example seems to be a highly effective way of a communicating the idea - if it
was at the end, or in the middle and the reader was told it was an example
then people would have skipped or skimmed it. The stakes wouldn't be high
enough. You don't know that because you didn't read the article - kind of
amusing since you subsequently accused the author of having a lazy attitude :)

Anyhow, it seems liked you were offering advice between authors of similarly
complex works which is what caused some cognitive dissonance in me. Maybe
you've written equally complex works before, but it feels to me that if you
haven't then you can't know if your advice scales to the higher complexity
description.

I would argue that most of your subjects are reasonably straightforward but
perhaps discussed less clearly elsewhere. I didn't see any data or graphs
showing lost opportunity costs and probabilities of succes in the "College vs
Startup" entry for instance - which for my money would make it more of a
complex subject, radically more useful while still being easily explainable.
As it is pretty much anyone could have written it - perhaps with a different
style - but it doesn't seem like it's coming from a domain expert.

The merchant account article is the exception amongst them, I'm sure that's
very useful for the people who are looking at getting a merchant account.

Maybe we just have different levels for what we count as complex, which is
fine.

------
Tichy
My brain hurts...

