From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Aug 28 2002 - 10:47:34 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> If we wish to persuade others of the virtues of this historically new way
> of living in the world, we must first abandon the old positivist line that
> science just looks at what's there and then it does what follows
> inexorably; that's just propaganda.
Whenever science identifies a specific area where cultural conditioning
has previously prevented the facts from being seen, it is treated as a
flaw and debugged.
When the postmodernists, those blathering parasites on academia who now
have their noses pressed enviously against the window of science, launch
an effort to hunt down and eliminate any remaining influences of Margaret
Mead - now known to be a case where a cultural construct got in the way of
perceived fact - then perhaps I will concede their usefulness.
Meanwhile their training is not to identify and eliminate cultural
influences, but to "deconstruct" some book or painting or whatever by
arguing that it was influenced by something-or-other. They are trained by
their discipline to rationalize arguments for alleged influences; that's
what they do. Their skill in detecting bias is limited to scanning of
surface resemblances. They do not have the scientific skill to determine
which resemblances are accidental properties of theories that have been
fully determined by available evidence, and which resemblances are
unjustified and hence likely indicators of cultural bias.
Like many relativists, postmodernists are unable to distinguish between a
claim of current objectivity and the profession of objectivity as a goal.
The general knowledge that there are some biases left in science is
neither surprising nor particularly useful; the debugging of science is
part of the frontier of science and consists of the identification of
specific biases followed by their elimination. And in this endeavor the
postmodernists are useless. Given their lack of skill, the expected
outcome would be that they would simply hop on to surface properties of
existing theories and scan them for the kind of biases they know about;
then argue these as biases without considering the alternative hypothesis
that the properties are accidental features of a correctly justified
theory; with the agenda not of contributing to the continued debugging of
the search for objective truth, but of arguing from these alleged flaws
that the whole of science consists entirely of similarly produced
material; with the goal of dragging science down to the level of their own
discipline (if "discipline" is the right word) and thereby discharging
their envy.
Sincerely,
Eliezer.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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