Thought

Thought is not necessarily thinking.

Don't Believe the Tripe

From Here's Proof That Most Pundits Don't Know What They're Talking About:

Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends." He asked them to assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized and in regions about which they had less knowledge ... Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing.

The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic producer poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.

Don't believe the tripe.

Useless Liberals

From Useless Liberal Intellectuals:

I have my set of words and you have yours. When we mean the same things, we can reason together to a conclusion. But suppose there are other people with other meanings for those words. They talk to each other and reach a different outcome. How can the two groups work together? They do not share a common language, and each distrusts the meanings assigned to the words of the other. Worse yet, the deconstruction crowd raises issues about the stability of words used to describe facts, so that even facts are subject to debate.

[...]

Now suppose a group like Occupy wants to make decisions in this theoretical environment. If they fall prey to the academic process of the deconstructionist-poststructuralists, discussing every word, trying to strip out the repressive meanings, and searching for ways to examine every fact, nothing will happen but process. There is no way to make a decision. Even if they start with a good deal of agreement, the process is unwieldy and irritating. And when they get done, how can they use that result to impact the decisions of others? Do they have to repeat the process of masticating every word 50 times every time they add a new person, or attempt to persuade some random person? Thank the heavens they don’t. Confronted with a disaster, they act, as in Red Hook, New York, and Rockaway.

Deconstruction and poststructuralism have proved to be a disaster for participatory democracy. They are a disaster for the public sphere. This is the outcome of the life’s work of academic “liberals” trying to solve the problem of the hegemony of words.

Meanwhile the real hegemony, the hegemony of capitalists and oligarchs, dominates the world, wrecks the global economy, crushes the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and tramples democracy into the ground. Academic liberals wring their hands, but they have nothing to contribute to understanding or a method for change.

For the most part, I certainly agree with the author's assertion.  The author dies not go far enough in examining why such theories have been allowed to thrive.  Ultimately useless intellectuals are a by-product of an academic systems which promotes their stupidity as a means to ensure nothing ever changes.  Conservatives are often used as a bogey-man to explain counter-revolutionary impulses in society, but liberals are far more likely to stymie real change.  Liberals ensure that nobody does anything but sit around and talk.  Therefore nothing ever happens and nothing changes except through reaction (which is the home turf of conservative impulses).

No True Nobel Prize in Economics

Although few realize it, the so-called "Nobel Prize in Economics."  The creation of the Central Bank of Sweden, it is really the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.”  The Nobel family, not to mention real scientists, are appalled that it is given the same billing.  From There Is No Nobel Prize in Economics:

Members of the Nobel family are among the harshest, most persistent critics of the economics prize, and members of the family have repeatedly called for the prize to be abolished or renamed. In 2001, on the 100th anniversery of the Nobel Prizes, four family members published a letter in the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, arguing that the economics prize degrades and cheapens the real Nobel Prizes. They aren’t the only ones.

Scientists never had much respect for the new economic Nobel prize. In fact, a scientist who headed Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee in 1969, was shocked to learn that economists were even allowed on stage to accept their award with the real Nobel laureates. He was incredulous: “You mean they sat on the platform with you?”

That hatred continues to simmer below the surface, and periodically breaks through and makes itself known. Most recently, in 2004, three prominent Swedish scientists and members of the Nobel committee published an open letter in a Swedish newspaper savaging the fraudulent “scientific” credentials of the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics. “The economics prize diminishes the value of the other Nobel prizes. If the prize is to be kept, it must be broadened in scope and be disassociated with Nobel,” they wrote in the letter, arguing that achievements of most of the economists who win the prize are so abstract and disconnected from the real world as to utterly meaningless.

Why the animosity?  Because economics is not a real science.  It is an ideology that means nothing as to the fundamental structure of the universe.  As such, economics does not deserve accolades, only scorn.  So the next time you hear someone mentioned as a "Nobel Prize Winner in Economics" you'll know it is a lie, just like their so-call "science."

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is a rationale for the existence of those whom would otherwise quickly perish.

Alan Sokal

Papers by Alan Sokal on the "Social Text Affair." His 1996 prank exposed the ridiculousness of post-modern bullshit. "Impostures Intellectuelles" / "Fashionable Nonsense" (by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont) is worth owning for a good laugh at the expense of Idiot Intellectuals (see Part 1).

My only effort at such humor is Against Artificial Intelligence, so I certainly appreciate Sokal's humor in "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The reactions to his Revealing the parody article were truly amusing.