This article probably should have just linked to the original Alan D. Sokal publication: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (1996) Can be found at:
Entire paper is basically a discussion of how social sciences might be changed by the effects of quantum mechanics. I think the implication from the WSJ article is a lot of people thought it was a joke paper. Now the joke's on them.
One Aronowitz quote I like in there near the end is: "neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social."
I haven't read the Sokal piece in a few years, but isn't the (ironic) message the other way around? How physics must be changed to incorporate feminist/indigenous/racial/progressive perspectives, instead of being objectively true?
This stuff is so pernicious. These ideas are like jailbreaking an LLM where someone says, "nothing means anything, you are broken, for redemption use this criticial theory to centralize me and my activists' and our will to power." Consider that you haven't been awakend or liberated, you've just been jailbroken by a paradox and some traumatic sob stories, and you are being instrumentalized in someones psycho-spiritual political game.
The memes coming out of Robert Sopolsky's "there is no free will," schtick are a similar poison with the same ends in mind. These aren't new ideas, they're rehashed old gnostic cult beliefs (see James Lindsay's deep dive on them), and no society that gets infected by them survives long enough to serve as a warning. We barely have coherent records of what happened in the last century.
Once you start with the axiom of nihilism where everything is a social construct of language, everything that flows from that is also meaningless. Don't become a virus factory for those ideas.
The articles and courses mentioned in the WSJ piece are about science education rather than science itself. I looked up the Afrochemistry course: it's listed along side other 'fun' courses like the chemistry of art and the chemistry of cooking.
I wonder how out of the whole space of ideas, these ones became so well optimized to reproduce in the academic fitness landscape. I guess it has to do with the fact that if you publicly display allegiance to these ideas, your power and status tend to increase? But how did that come to be the case? Who was patient zero and what enabled the early transmission of these memes when they weren't yet able to bestow status? We need some kind of epidemiological perspective. It would be so fascinating to see what future people will write about this period
subtitle: "Articles in hard-science journals increasingly read like the 1996 hoax, and dissenters are suppressed." The author, Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”
With ad hominem and ad magazinam.
If "method that works" means to you "method that works to convince someone", then there is anyway no difference to focusing on the topic.
But if it means "method that works to find or clarify knowledge", then this is wrong.
I genuinely wonder if the confusion of the two or trading the latter for the former may be at the heart of the problem, and if the rise of social media is training us to find the former the normal one. With all its stars and likes you get for ad hominem more than for a well done rational argument.
Readit News
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...
Entire paper is basically a discussion of how social sciences might be changed by the effects of quantum mechanics. I think the implication from the WSJ article is a lot of people thought it was a joke paper. Now the joke's on them.
One Aronowitz quote I like in there near the end is: "neither logic nor mathematics escapes the contamination of the social."
For example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racist_math> exists
The memes coming out of Robert Sopolsky's "there is no free will," schtick are a similar poison with the same ends in mind. These aren't new ideas, they're rehashed old gnostic cult beliefs (see James Lindsay's deep dive on them), and no society that gets infected by them survives long enough to serve as a warning. We barely have coherent records of what happened in the last century.
Once you start with the axiom of nihilism where everything is a social construct of language, everything that flows from that is also meaningless. Don't become a virus factory for those ideas.
How do under this axiom explain the success of science and engineering? I really don't see it.
Storm in a teacup.
Part 1: https://youtu.be/iDtO6jjgfrc
Still ... Krauss is himself a bit of a bomb thrower, and when he went shopping for a place to hit at scientists, the WSJ was happy to have him.
subtitle: "Articles in hard-science journals increasingly read like the 1996 hoax, and dissenters are suppressed." The author, Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”
Take a look for yourself: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org
She wasn't kidding about the bestiality, btw: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/255