I wonder if we need someone to distill and ossify postmodernism into a form that rationalists can process if we are going to tackle the problems postmodernism is meant to solve. A blueprint would be the way that FDT plus prisoners dilemma ossifies sartre’s existentialism is a humanism, at some terrible cost to nuance and beauty, but the core is there.
My suspicion of what happened at a really high level is that fundamentally one of the driving challenges of postmodernism is to actually understand rape, in the sense that rationalism is supposed to respect: being able to predict outcomes, making the map fit the territory etc. EY is sufficiently naive of postmodernism that the depictions of rape and rape threats in Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR basically filtered out anyone with a basic grasp of postmodernism from the community. There’s an analagous phenomenon where when postmodernist writers depicts quantum physics, they do a bad enough job that it puts off people with a basic grasp of physics from participating in postmodernism. Its epistemically nasty too: this comment is frankly low quality, but if I understood postmodernism well enough to be confident in this comment I suspect I would have been sufficiently put off by the draco-threatens-to-rape-luna subplot in HPMOR to have never actually engaged with rationalism.
And what about Cynical Theories and their understanding of postmodernism? They claim that a major part of postmodernism, especially one related to sociology, began to produce conflict-theoretic slop.
I suspect that postmodernism could be meant to study the potential to lock in oppressing memes (like Black people being dangerous or mentally less capable than White people) and ways to free mankind from them. What I don’t quite buy is claims like “Memes propagating among White peopleharm Black people’s ability to succeed”. What if they achieve a different effect of making some Black people more determined to disprove these memes?
There might also exist things like crab bucket mentality or other meme complexes which tend to infect people and to change the behavior of the infected towards keeping them powerless. Or memes infecting weak-willed people and making them less likely to become strong-willed, but more likely to make the meme seem plausible and infect others.
However, in practice postmodernists try to stop propagation of the memes viewed as harmful even if they reflect some ground truth. More examples of such behavior can be found, for example, in the book that I mentioned.
I wonder if we need someone to distill and ossify postmodernism into a form that rationalists can process if we are going to tackle the problems postmodernism is meant to solve. A blueprint would be the way that FDT plus prisoners dilemma ossifies sartre’s existentialism is a humanism, at some terrible cost to nuance and beauty, but the core is there.
My suspicion of what happened at a really high level is that fundamentally one of the driving challenges of postmodernism is to actually understand rape, in the sense that rationalism is supposed to respect: being able to predict outcomes, making the map fit the territory etc. EY is sufficiently naive of postmodernism that the depictions of rape and rape threats in Three Worlds Collide and HPMOR basically filtered out anyone with a basic grasp of postmodernism from the community. There’s an analagous phenomenon where when postmodernist writers depicts quantum physics, they do a bad enough job that it puts off people with a basic grasp of physics from participating in postmodernism. Its epistemically nasty too: this comment is frankly low quality, but if I understood postmodernism well enough to be confident in this comment I suspect I would have been sufficiently put off by the draco-threatens-to-rape-luna subplot in HPMOR to have never actually engaged with rationalism.
And what about Cynical Theories and their understanding of postmodernism? They claim that a major part of postmodernism, especially one related to sociology, began to produce conflict-theoretic slop.
I suspect that postmodernism could be meant to study the potential to lock in oppressing memes (like Black people being dangerous or mentally less capable than White people) and ways to free mankind from them. What I don’t quite buy is claims like “Memes propagating among White people harm Black people’s ability to succeed”. What if they achieve a different effect of making some Black people more determined to disprove these memes?
There might also exist things like crab bucket mentality or other meme complexes which tend to infect people and to change the behavior of the infected towards keeping them powerless. Or memes infecting weak-willed people and making them less likely to become strong-willed, but more likely to make the meme seem plausible and infect others.
However, in practice postmodernists try to stop propagation of the memes viewed as harmful even if they reflect some ground truth. More examples of such behavior can be found, for example, in the book that I mentioned.