Mind you, I’d say that the project management method that’s based on – I’m not joking – Fiddler On The Roof must run it a close second.

Especially when you find out they’ve called it Fiddler On The Project:

fiddlerontheproject.bluwiki.com/

J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2007 Oct;78(10):1055.

At least the text accompanying the figure is clear and concise – even though the image on the right did initially alarm me and make me question my (admittedly somewhat limited) knowledge of human anatomy.

Despite the wacky-ness of the article, I often find it easier to remember information presented in an amusing or interesting way – so long as there’s not too much jargon or waffle!

In which case, they’re either extremely stupid or, at a guess, had previously written the paper for presentation to a more specialist audience and hadn’t updated it.

Why would you assume that? As I noted above, the paper was associated with an LSE seminar Evolution of Group Decision Support Systems to enable the collaborate authoring of outcomes, where you’d expect delegates to come from a sample interested in Group Decision Support Systems (i.e. computing/management).

I am beginning to suspect that “decision analysis” is to deciding anything rather as “pedagogical research” is to teaching (see above).

I used to know a Professor who had come late to academia having earlier been quite high up in a major science-related industrial concern. Having tired of sitting through endless managerial seminars and navel-gazing sessions about “decision analysis”, this chap finally snapped and went in to see his boss.

“I’ve come up with a new decision aid” he told the boss “which is guaranteed to produce the correct decision 50% of the time.”

The boss was excited. What could this be? getting the key decisions right 50% of the time, according to what the company’s decision analysis consultants had told him, was well ahead of anything their “decision rhizome analysis” visioning strategies could produce.

Hand poised over the phone to alert his boss to this breakthrough, the boss turned to my friend. “Can you just give me a quick heads-up on how this decision tool works?”

“Heads up is exactly right”, said my friend, producing a 10 p piece from his pocket and tossing it in the air…

Just to address that point: recently the New Scientist did a feature on the number “e”, which was considerably longer than my post – say, 3-4,000 words. At the end of the article, I still had no idea at all what e was. Assuming that the New Scientist journalist was a reasonably competent writer who knew what they were talking about, that would seem to indicate that it would require a book chapter-length exposition to help the non-specialist understand the mathematical significance of e. That doesn’t mean that any paper utilising the concept of e is failing to advance knowledge.

I would assume that the intended audience for this Decision Hedgehog paper would understand the deleuzoguattarian concept of rhizome, which has been around for forty years and is a basic concept in their theory. So the authors would not need to explain that concept in the way that would be required if dealing with a non-specialist readership.

Good question. Take Newton. Unable to phrase his physics in some understandable way, he invented his own mathematical language, calculus. And even if you understand calculus, the Principia is a tough read, because our modern conventions in the symbols used come from Leibnitz and so you have to try to grasp a quite different system of symbols. Newton thought that Leibnitz was obfusciating though, because d/dx looks like you could simplify it to 1/x.

“The whole idea of science is trying understand the world about us. It has done a wonderful job of it in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics …”

Mathematics is not science. In fact, in mathematics I´d wholeheardedly subscribe to the “multiple truths” idea, because if the truth of Statement A is indeterminable under a set of Axioms B then you can do valid math both with a set of Axioms
B unified with {A} and B unified with {-A}. I would agree that science does a good job at trying to understand the world. I´m a paleontology student and the last time I checked that was a scientific discipline. But it does encounter problems with communication. I use terms with venacular meanings, I run the danger of being misuderstood, with the techical term being taken in its vernacular sense. I use terms I come up with, I run the danger of not being understood at all.

I gave Newton as an example for somebody who went with the second route, Darwin would be an example for the other one. And he has been misconstrued through social darwinists, quotemined by creationists and on some questions in evolutionary biology gets cited by both sides (for instance Dawkins cites Darwin as an opponent of group selection, while Wilson and Wilson cite him as a supporter).

Quite a few poststructuralists have opted for the option to err on the side of not being understood. For historic reasons, Nietzsche being a big influence on Foucault for instance and his Philosophy was abused by the Nazis to support their antisemitism and the holocaust, even though Nietzsche used antisemitism as an example for the human stupidity one was to overcome. So they went with a language that was as impossible to abuse as possible. In some cases ending up with being impossible to use as well.

Interestingly enough Sokal and Bricmont opted for an easier to understand language and then put out a paper explaining what they did not show. I hear Sokal has another book in the pipeline and I´m looking forward to read it.

Anyway, regardless of the writing skills of the people doing the analysis, willfully obscure or not (for which you still haven’t offered any evidene, I find the accusation crass), the problems susu.exp points to are worth studying, and I would like to hear your opinion about that instead.

How does any branch of human knowledge explain anything by obfuscation?

The whole idea of science is trying understand the world about us. It has done a wonderful job of it in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics …

It is natural that some people even scientists are unable at times to express themselves well, but only an idiot would conclude that it’s ok for everyone to express themselves badly and that this should be the main aim of life.

The post-anything idiots need to get a grip on reality. It is rather stupid to talk about many realities/many truths when you are dressing up both a post- and pre- pomposity to disguise that you cannot understand what is actually going on. No software has yet passed the Turing test, yet software is available to produce the posturing, content free verbal wanderings of these idiots, completely indistinguishable from the ‘real’ thing. Go figure!

I wouldn´t even start there. The very basic premise of coming up with a single formalized process that leads from the need for a decision to that decision is pretty much antithetical to D&Gs use of Rhizome (as far as I understand it).

@Dr Aust”For the later self-styled post-Deleuzian “thinkers” who as far as one can tell do seriously believe – or at least argue – that science, scientific research and the resulting knowledge are simply another text, humourous scorn and a touch of rant seems rather appropriate”

To me the worst thing is the word “simply” in here. It falls into the same category as “only a theory”, I´d argue that all science is text. But that´s not a put down of science, because it´s simply impossible for science to be anything but text. If some idea is to become intersubjective knowledge, it has to be comunicated and that requires it to become a text. If I´ve got a hypothesis I can test it as long as I want, it won´t be science until I publish it, or at a minimum tell somebody over a beer on a conference about it. And where I think poststructuralism can inform science is analyzing the problems that occur in this process. That however requires knowledge of the scientific discipline and for that reason Latour writes glibberish, while Gould, who did read his share of poststructuralists and ocassionally uses the lingo (check the Mismeassure of man for a great treatment on reification) actually does point out where these problems occur.

He even posthumerously exposed an evolutionary psychologist as quite uneducated:
“But what in Darwin’s name is an “autapomorphy”? It doesn’t even appear in my beloved, unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (along with several other Gouldisms)”, David Barash wrote in his review of Goulds “Structure”, which he felt was “a platitudinous parcel of impenetrable ponderosity, regrettably but manifestly lacking in clarifying conciseness or concatenated cogency; in short, too many big words.”

Now autapomorphy gives me 34.500 google hits. And two journals are on the ISI top 10 for evolutionary biology where you´ll have a hard time finding a paper not using this term. It´s also in most undergrad textbooks.

Here’s another amusing scientific paper generator:
www.wjst.de/blog/2007/02/10/random-news-oxymorons-and-paper-generator/

Which Richard Dawkins quote are you referring too? From what I understand of Dawkins’ take, using the word ‘transcendent’ comes off like a derogatory misrepresentation of what kind of truth he puts stock in. The point Dawkins’ would make is that physical reality is a certainty, and what truth transcends our capacity for comprehension is only transcendent by virtue of our inability to observe it in it’s entirety, which isn’t to say that, in time, it can’t be inferred (the orbiting teapot.)

This is actually a form of agnosticism that Dawkins admits he must accept for the sake of intellectual honesty. You might argue that taking a stance on the reality of reality is contrary to that point of view, but I would liken it more to a logical pragmatism that steps away from the old philosophical tradition of arguing just because you can. You could run around in circles until the end of time coming up with propositions like “up is down, left is right, blue is red, the beginning is really the end, and what is real is really imagined.” These might be good exercises in academic rigor for the humanities, but for a man of science, you realize it will get you nowhere.

This is when I think you’re being unfair when you liken Dawkins to the God botherers he would persecute. Religion is still stuck on this philosophical game of exploring the logical viability of ever single possible thought that can be imagined by a human brain — religion also exploits that game. Whereas Dawkins admits that he has to remain, to some extent, agnostic on the subject of existence in its entirety, in knowing everything about everything, an archbishop, for example, would say that Dawkins’ agnosticism is proof of a particular truth, which is rubbish.

The Problem that Dawkins has with religion isn’t solely its discourse, its the same problem that you yourself identify in post modernism — its application. Namely, that it can’t be applied. Just as you might cringe when dogmatic post modernist academics try to apply elaborate metaphorical abstractions to the sciences, instead of recognizing the veiled social commentary (by basically replacing coattails with syntactically correct sentences that can possibly be interpreted as a coattail, but have no existential purpose or or meaning that can substantiate a reasonable acknowledgment that coattails are, in fact, being trampled on), Dawkins would cringe when a theologian uses the same too-open-minded-to-hold-an-idea-in-your-head reasoning to affect public policy on matters of science. You can’t prove there isn’t a God, so evolution is a crackpot theory. I mean, you can see how the man could get flustered.

Also, keep in mind that Dawkins has the same fondness for Sokal’s work that you do, Dudley. As you can read in an article I’ll post below this comment, Dawkins is keenly aware of the difference between the movement of post modernism, and the academic institution that has latched onto it. He also found the same amusement that you had when Sokal exposed the sham.

If anyone, you should get the biggest kick out of the postmodernist essay generator link I posted above.

-R
www.richarddawkins.net/articleComments,824,Postmodernism-Disrobed,Richard-Dawkins-Nature,page1#29262

Honestly, it seems to me that people are half ashamed of how “easy” literary study is.

I’d kill to work in a discipline where the eyes of pretty girls didn’t glaze over as soon as they asked you to explain what you did…..

Deleuze is fundamentally anti-capitalist, and in that phrase I’m using the word “fundamentally” in its strict dictionary definition. Using Deleuzian tropes to produce management theory is like using string theory to tune a violin – both mistaken and impossible.

I’d like to argue with you, but I think you just expressed my views precisely and clearly!

I don’t think that jokes have any application in most fields of thought. I certainly hope that the chap who designed my car wasn’t fooling around when he designed the brakes. Jokes do, however, have a very real place in the humanities. A joke can often be a good way of getting across an idea in a highly compressed form. Oscar Wilde’s sayings are a good example, since half of them would require a good couple of thousand words to explicate. Jokes can also connect ideas that don’t seem on the surface to belong to the same field of discourse.

Andrew Crumey’s Mobius Dick has a fantastic piss-take of the sort of people who start taking the effect of jokes, particularly puns, too seriously. I’m always surprised by the number of people in my field who don’t seem to know when something’s revealing and when it’s just a verbal coincidence, though I guess every discipline has better and worse practitioners.

Here are the opening lines of A Thousand Plateaus:

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd [...] We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a matter of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”

Everyone will react in their own way to that, of course, but see it in the context of its times and you can hopefully see the gleeful, anarchic energy, the humour and the playing with ideas. Which is why many people have found A Thousand Plateaus an inspirational text, and why it’s such a pity that (as D&G predict in the book) it’s now become a mere repository of dull metaphors.

I do think there’s an enormous need right now for clear language in the humanities and the more humanities-like social sciences. Honestly, it seems to me that people are half ashamed of how “easy” literary study is. Chemists might get people running for cover when they start talking about their discipline, but at least they don’t have everyone and his dog assuming that there’s nothing to know. Right now (this wasn’t the case in the period 1960-90) you can usually assume that the clearer the language, the more important the thought it contains.

Agreed. Even so, the paper was still appallingly written. The abstract, for instance, could easily have begun with something like:

This paper proposes a scheme for group decision making based on the ‘rhizome’ concept of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in order to break away from models that focus on a single outcome, in favour of a exploring multiple hypotheses in depth to obtain insight into the problem.

The context was, after all, an LSE seminar on corporate decision making, where participants wouldn’t be likely to be conversant with the philosophy.

While I don’t dispute the value of cross-fertilising concepts between different fields of thought, the overall product – a seminar where delegates got to play with white latex gloves, Lego, Plasticene, Letraset and Polaroid cameras, and make a movie of the life of the Decision Hedgehog – still looks like management wank. The buffet supper looks the best bit.