I’m honestly not wanting to be mean here. Seriously, I’m sure there’s value in this paper:
“The Decision Hedgehog – Enhancing Contextual Knowledge For Group Decision Authoring And Communication Support”
But I just can’t help daydreaming about the bit in the seminar where the audience start thinking, you know, I could see where you were going with this initially, but I’m just not sure if the hedgehog thing is going to carry the whole thesis…
.
The diagrams are what really hangs it all together for me.
.
.
Read it for yourself here:
www.psych.lse.ac.uk/ifip-dss/Papers/HumphreysJones.pdf
.
Dudley said,
December 8, 2007 at 6:50 am
Sorry, something just occurred to me.
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.
R.B. said,
December 8, 2007 at 11:50 am
Dudley,
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
Ambrielle said,
December 8, 2007 at 4:57 pm
If a paper requires another paper (ie. Dudley’s expansive post) to even begin to understand what is going on, then that paper has failed dismally as something intended to advance knowledge.
Not to mention a hedgehog without organs is, er, dead, and thus the analogy is literally non-functional. đ
Here’s another amusing scientific paper generator:
www.wjst.de/blog/2007/02/10/random-news-oxymorons-and-paper-generator/
susu.exp said,
December 8, 2007 at 6:36 pm
@Dudley “Deleuze is fundamentally anti-capitalist, and in that phrase Iâm using the word âfundamentallyâ 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 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 âthinkersâ 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 Darwinâs name is an âautapomorphyâ? It doesnât 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.
Acleron said,
December 9, 2007 at 3:36 am
Susu.exp said “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.”
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!
raygirvan said,
December 9, 2007 at 3:52 am
Barash is also mistaken about the nature of dictionaries. Mainstream ones, even top-flight ones like the full OED, don’t necessarily include specialist terminology. “Autapomorphy” is in the pipeline for the OED: it’s in the online edition as a draft entry dated March 2006, with the first citation dated 1959.
warumich said,
December 9, 2007 at 11:48 am
Sheesh, Acleron, the postmodern essay generator is a brilliant piece of satire, but do you honestly think it would fool somebody in the field? It may fool you (and to an extent me), but that’s because we both don’t know much of the meaning of the words and therefore can’t spot when they’re applied in a meaningless way.
Sokal notwithstanding, because he actually did a hell of a lot of research before writing his parody.
And I seem to remember two computer scientists successfully submitting a generated & meaningless abstract to a conference last year, what’s sauce for the goose…
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.
susu.exp said,
December 9, 2007 at 3:23 pm
@Acleron:”How does any branch of human knowledge explain anything by obfuscation?”
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.
Dudley said,
December 9, 2007 at 4:06 pm
“If a paper requires another paper (ie. Dudleyâs expansive post) to even begin to understand what is going on, then that paper has failed dismally as something intended to advance knowledge.”
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.
raygirvan said,
December 9, 2007 at 9:13 pm
>Dudley: I would assume that the intended audience for this Decision Hedgehog paper would understand the deleuzoguattarian concept of rhizome
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).
NuttyBat said,
December 11, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I just came across the “puppy sign”, published in:
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!
synthesist said,
December 13, 2007 at 10:24 am
We have a manager here who absolutly loves this kind of c**p – I was tempted to send him the link, but he might take it seriously and attempt to apply it – I really couldn’t cope with the fallout !.
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