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[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman 24 insightful - 4 fun24 insightful - 3 fun25 insightful - 4 fun -  (4 children)

James Lindsay published an article about that just yesterday.

Edit: Tbh I'm going to come right out and say it - these whackos can call me when feelings and intuition and listening to the patterns in birdsong and storytelling and all that juju bullshit put a man on Mars, or make fusion energy a reality, or find a cure for ebola.

[–]Realwoman 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Great article, thank you. I was genuinely curious what their arguments were and they turned out to be super stupid, as expected.

[–]anonymale 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Ironically, his style resembles those of some of the worst postmodernists. Tons of run-on sentences:

In few examples could it be more stark than in the effort to argue that two and two aren’t necessarily four that the objective of the postmodernism at the heart of the present Critical Social Justice (or “Woke”) movement is to destabilize any sense of solidity and meaning and then to use the ensuing confusion to advance a particular form of radical politics.

Tons of superfluous clauses, adverbs, adjectives:

The story actually starts in a private text dialogue with someone who was asking me specifically about how postmodernism thinks about objective claims about the world. She asked, at some point, what postmodernists would say...

Two of the things I love about mathematics are its delightful, head-twisting weirdness and constant examination of its assumptions. These are embodied in the Russell paradox, which began an overhaul of the subject's philosophical foundations during the 20th century. Critical theorists who think themselves radical by asking 'is 2 + 2 always 4?' are unaware of the constant critiquing of mathematical assumptions by mathematicians.

[–]ArthnoldManacatsaman 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I noticed myself that this particular essay was harder to read than his usual output, but I suppose even anti-woke academics are still academics at heart.

[–]anonymale 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Unlike Lindsay, I only have a basic undergraduate degree. As a student I learned quickly that I would be penalised for submitting work like that, if not for the bad style then for not being able to answer a question within the word limit. Like most students I had to digest a lot of dense technical arguments in academic texts. None were written in such a poor style. It's just sloppy writing.