From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Thu Aug 29 2002 - 16:37:39 MDT
Saying that the postmodernists have nothing useful to contribute is more
or less equivalent to saying that the poets have nothing to contribute.
This is to say: it captures something correct about what they do, but at
the same time it's a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to a very
important part of our society.
Scientists actively pursue solidarity around a shared interpretation of
the world, in the hopes that this trick will lead us towards truth.
(It's a good idea; one of the best we've ever had.) But the poets and the
postmodernists present us with new and *interesting* interpretations of
the world. It's an art form all its own.
They do this for fun, mostly, which, in that regard, makes them seem
somewhat parasitic. But to think of this activity as parasitic is to miss
the point. "Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble
pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance,
love, these are what we stay alive for."
There's also the well-known kick back factor we get from our creative
endeavors: sometimes, a postmodernist's fancy can spark a key insight in
the mind of a scientist, who may then go on to develop a better scientific
theory.
Of course, extropians and singularitarians are in the business of
examining culture, science, truth and such from the perspective of
oncoming existential risks. Do these existential risks affect the way we
should tell this story? Should we put art/creativity on the back burner
until we're past the rough spots?
Well, no. Art still has as much a claim of importance as science; not
just as the raw fuel for scientific creativity, but as a significant
candidate as the purpose of life.
Furthermore, directing this argument rather pointedly at SingInst's
current approach to Friendliness: one of the most important arguments that
postmodernism has brought to bear in favor of its (hard-won!) relevance
has been the argument against the possibility of JOOTSing your way into
objectivity. You can Jump Out Of your own System into a different System,
but you can't Jump Out Of all the Systems at once, Jumping Out Of *The*
System.
This argument comes down against naive objectivists AND relativists alike.
What remains isn't a facile ambivalence ("perhaps all of us have an equal
claim on the truth,") but rather a more thoughtful and more pragmatist
approach: "I'm stuck in my own skin... what can I do/say from here?" This
is a key *postmodernist* insight.
This non-JOOTSing attitude is now a non-trivial part of why Friendliness
is the game. (Section 3.4.3 of CFAI.) Why shouldn't we just expect the
computer to figure out the Truth by itself? The answer is that we're just
going to have to follow our own trajectory, from within our own skin,
because we even can't expect a computer to JOOTS into the truth.
We can thank the postmodernists for thinking about this kind of stuff, for
getting Godel and Hofstadter to think about it, to get you to read it.
They do matter.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> 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.
They'll never do this, because, again, they're looking for interesting
"readings." Postmodern analysis is a creative art form in itself that is
quite proud of having freed itself from the need to agree with the facts.
Imagine if poets were forbidden to use metaphors unless they had
well-argued reasons to think that they were true! Or imagine if painters
were only allowed to ape photographs!
Postmodern literary critics can say: "Hey! I found an interesting way of
looking at what this book means!" without expecting the world to say: "No!
The author didn't mean that at all!" Because, hey! it *is* interesting,
even if the author couldn't have meant it that way.
Similarly, your criticism of cultural studies for not hunting down and
smiting their connection to Margaret Mead misses the point: they're not
doing facts, they're doing interesting interpretation. It doesn't matter
if she was right because her "insights" were interesting: she sparked our
creativity. She may not be scientific, but she may be inspiring
nonetheless.
Being interesting is as difficult, thought not as "rigorous", not as
rigid, as finding/building solidarity in science. It takes insight, even
genius, to be plausible enough and yet alien enough to form a really
interesting original outlook on a well-known domain.
> 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.
All you're saying here is that they aren't working hard enough to figure
out whether their musings are correct. And that's fine. So long as they
capture something interesting (perhaps we'll accept it as true, perhaps
not!) they're following through with their goal.
> Like many relativists, postmodernists are unable to distinguish between a
> claim of current objectivity and the profession of objectivity as a goal.
There are dumb postmodernists. The good ones aren't. I recommend Richard
Rorty, if you're interested.
> 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.
Postmodernists are a big group. They don't really have that much in
common across the board; I'd be especially wary before I ascribed to them
any psychological characteristic in common, and especially not
scientistic envy.
Some of them do attack science out of envy, but many others simply point
out bias as part of an act of mind opening. It therapeutically helps us
to *try out* the really weird theories; we remember to give them room to
breathe because, as weird as they might sound, they might be right.
Similarly, the Kuhnian "paradigm" arguments from scientific revolutions
aren't attempts to argue that art has as significant a claim on "truth" as
science. They're trying to show us that our shared interpretation is
trapped within our own culture: that we can't just JOOTS into objectivity,
but that we have to test hypotheses against our own cultural truth
detectors. The upshot of this isn't to throw the whole thing away, or to
be perfectly ambivalent about which cultural detectors we should use; at
most, it leads us towards a little more open-mindedness and care.
Nobody, not even the postmoderists, wants engineers to be ambivalent
between medieval and Netwonian physics when bridges are built. That
should be your take-away from this message, especially if it helps you to
appreciate that a lot of smart people in academia are working on some very
cool stuff.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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