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I agree that postmodernism, or at least your definition of it, is so much nonsense (in the realm of hard sciences, at least - soft science unfortunately does suffer from human contextual bias issues).

I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing).

I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing.

I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?

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GoblinSlayer 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Postmodernism has a bit of relevance for hard sciences, because relativity is known to be counterintuitive, and as a consequence theories will have absolutist bias. Consider Roger Penrose's Andromeda argument, where he tries to reason about synchronism in the context of special theory of relativity, but ends up assuming Galilean absolute synchronism, because Lorentz synchronism is counterintuitive.

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smaudet 7 days ago | parent [-]

Bad interpretations of data or theories are always a possibility, however that's only relevant to the interpretation.

Unless the data itself is fabricated, i.e. unscientific, the hard sciences are "hard" because they don't suffer from these flaws of interpretation (as much). There of course issues with observability, replicability, however these are issues that can be dealt largely without invoking any societal biases, aka through the scientific method.

Rejecting the scientific method completely because humans are involved at any step, is a form of absurd-ism, yes, we are not perfect, but our methods are a lot better than a) nothing b) your choice to reject hard science because it doesn't match your personal belief (hard bias).

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GoblinSlayer 6 days ago | parent [-]

It doesn't reject scientific method completely, but you also can't trivially ignore social dynamics, because scientific method routinely deals with issue simply by waiting for the old generation to go extinct, then consensus can be naturally reached.

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smaudet 6 days ago | parent [-]

I think you'll find upon inspection the hard sciences are based on consensus reached and not overturned for centuries, not generations.

If you were arguing with me in the 11th century perhaps you'd have a valid concern, at the point at which we've been successfully doing this for almost a whole millennia, I strongly disagree with your assertion(s).

	▲	GoblinSlayer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		In the past science waited to overturn a consensus, today it waits to reach a consensus.

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kmeisthax 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.

Reason is right-libertarian and has to occasionally shoot at least a few bullets in the direction of the opposing front on the culture war lest the conservative barrier troops[0] shoot them. Likewise there's a lot of right-wing authoritarians who try fishing for new suckers in the right-libertarian pool. This weird interplay between libertarians and authoritarians on the right side of the political compass has been a thing since at least when capital-L libertarian figures were talking about "paleoconservatives" and Ron Paul was paying ghostwriters to write all those hilariously racist newsletters back in the 90s.

[0] Barrier troops are soldiers in an army whose job it is to shoot at their own deserters.

	▲	mindslight 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		As a libertarian whose thinking has gone through the whole spectrum of left-right and back again, the fundamental problem is that [pure] right libertarianism is inherently contradictory, despite its simplicity making it extremely attractive. A core principle of rightist thinking is an assumption that there is some bedrock of moral axioms, and as long as we follow them then the resulting situations must also be morally right by construction. This directly clashes with Gödel's famous results in logic, which show that complexity itself creates new logical contradictions. Rightest libertarians (eg the bulk of the Libertarian party, Constitutional fundamentalists, etc) are still running off the failed ideas from the 1910's that produced efforts like the Principia Mathematica. The way I've come to see it, left and right essentially correspond to two modes of reasoning, inductive versus deductive - they are both required to get anywhere worthwhile. The current highly divisive political environment is essentially making everybody think with only half their brains. This is both lucrative (it feels good to have lazy answers validated rather than criticized), as well as disempowering (it keeps individuals from agreeing on substantive political opposition to ever-growing corporate authoritarianism).