Speaking of French (not exactly postmodernist) theory, you really should take a look at Gilles-Gaston Granger's _Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man_, where the last chapter is structured as follows:
CHAPTER VII. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 150
The Clinical Situation and Structures in Psychoanalysis 152
Diachronic and Synchronic: Personalities as Informational Systems 160
Practice as Art and the Individual 163
Individual and Alienation 167
History as a Clinical Undertaking without Practice 168
Isn't it ironic when a leading figure in AI/ML—the field that rose to prominence by arguing that inquiry into data-generating mechanisms should give way to algorithmic methods judged primarily by predictive performance—turns around and blames statistical thinking for the resulting culture of optimization and performance metrics? That has matters exactly backwards.
The lesson of statistical science is not that truth is socially constructed, nor that competing perspectives are equally warranted. The lesson is that claims earn their standing only by surviving severe attempts to reveal their errors. Far from encouraging relativism, statistical thinking was built to combat it, and it remains one of the few systematic resources for doing so.
Granted, machine learning, platform capitalism, monetization, optimization, and performance metrics have altered which errors receive attention and which quietly disappear from view. But statistical thinking does not merely describe this shift; it provides tools for criticizing it, for asking what has been sacrificed in the pursuit of predictive success, what forms of understanding have been abandoned, what errors have slipped from view, and what new vulnerabilities have been introduced.
To blame statistical thinking for the consequences of the AI/ML turn is to mistake one of the principal sources of resistance for the source of the problem. These developments raise questions about changing regimes of error control and their epistemic, scientific, political, and ethical consequences. In this connection, I hope to encourage Recht and his readers to consider contributing to a recent call for papers Synthese: Topical Collection: Severity and Learning from Error. https://link.springer.com/collections/ebjdhfadcd
It's only ironic if you presume that people cannot change positions in response to careful examination and reflection. Perhaps "the lesson [of statistical science] is that claims earn their standing only by surviving severe attempts to reveal their errors" is itself a claim to be severely tested. Regardless, vive la Résistance.
I don't get your drift. Is it that statistical science changed its goals to care only about performance and optimization based on examination and reflection? Did statistical science fail to achieve knowledge pursuing its earlier pre-AI/ML goals?
Sorry for the confusion. You seemed to suggest that it was ironic that the blog's author, a "leading figure in AI/ML," "turns around ..." Perhaps the apparent turn-around was not unexpected but instead a mature response to reflection upon the social value of optimization, comparable to Weizenbaum or Polanyi.
Whether or not stat-sci achieves "knowledge"---pre or post AI/ML---is, I think, an idea to be tested. For example, did the biometrics used in eugenics achieve knowledge? Or should a 1% decrease in test error on MNIST be considered a knowledge achievement? I imagine many yes's and no's for each question.
I'm a bit shallow on this admittedly, but I'm not really sold that statistics = shift in the belief in standard, pre-post-modern notions of objective truth. I can see lots of support for the argument about motivation -- that lots of post-modern truth-seeking shifts from seeking truth for intrinsic reasons to instrumental reasons.
But I don't see how that argument makes much progress arguing that this statistical truth seeking is any less objectivist than pre-modern truth seeking.
Grabbing hold of statistics and saying it is about populations-not-individuals or number-go-up and not grand narratives seems a bit quaint. Post-1930s truth seeking has aimed at some pretty complex questions and complex systems. The Higgs Boson was pretty much sought for its intrinsic value and the hope of confirming a grand narrative. But it was completely based on statistics. So? I don't think we used those tools because we have a more fluid sense of objective truth in physics, but because statistics is the only flashlight that shines far enough to illuminate the problem.
Intriguingly, it's also hard to make the post-modernist argument when EBM can be more tractable to mechanism and explanation than traditional expertise.
In the traditional model, a brilliant doctor's intuition reveals what to do when time is short and data is limited. You can try to gain that experience yourself, but you've reached the frontier of what we can declaratively know. You need the great (probably) man's eye for it.
But Goldman's heart attack algorithm is way simpler, saying a real heart attack is almost always revealed by one of these four signs. It's also interesting that one side effect of that was to free some less-empowered patients from the power-laden biases of expert intuition...
Since I think I came this way via Dan Davies, I should also give the cybernetics angle its due. We may decide that part of the system we're studying is a black box, and just describe its inputs and outputs and not its internal mechanisms. But that may just be the best (or only) strategy of inquiry (or management) available. I don't know that it follows that we have loosened our pre-post-modern grip on what inquiry can discover.
The post-moderns had a knack for seeing power everywhere, so much so that it probably drove Foucault insane. I wish he had survived long enough to grapple with AZT, its ability to reduce HIV/AIDS mortality, and the interaction between public health and individual sovereignty. I feel like the main thrust of the critique of public health/EBM, and rationality that supposedly underpins it, is its depoliticizing effects on subjects. That Foucault stubbornly (courageously?) rejected the sovereignty-erasing effects of technocratic rule may be his most powerful gesture. A self-immolation, of sorts. This tension has never/will never go away, it seems..
I have been reading a lot about Foucault's conception of biopower/biopolitics—that nexus of authoritarian and normative cultural constraints that dictate what Real Life is/ought—and how the neoliberal era in particular takes number-go-up instrumental rationality to 11 (see also Wendy Brown's 2015 Undoing the Demos). But good public health is probably worth the risk of an authoritarian and/or technocratic flavor, is it not? This is a topic that I've learned a lot about from Benjamin Bratton, whose Revenge of the Real (2022) is the best post-post-modern exploration of our present (poly) crisis. What do we do when the Real smacks us in the face? Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, cholera, climate crisis.. He makes it very clear that we (collectively) need a new lens/paradigm for (a) conceptualizing these realities, and (b) constructing a "positive biopolitics" that avoids de-politicizing subjects, avoids shallow anti-tech folk politics, and instead acknowledges our ability to intervene in the world. Terraforming may be our common legacy. His work has given me new language for thinking about how to thread the discursive needle on these topics. I'd be very curious to learn your thoughts on Bratton.
When it came out, I read Geoff Shullenberger's review of Bratton and decided to skip it (There he is again). Given what Geoff wrote at the time, I can't imagine that book and it's valorization of virtualized authoritarianism aged well.
Your question about the clash of biopolitics, individualism, and activism during the AIDS epidemic is a great one. I hope to come back to that soon as part of this series. Have you read any of Steven Epstein's writing on this topic?
Thanks for your response! I hadn't seen Geoff Shullenberger's work until now. After reading his Bratton review, my sense is that he doesn't really engage directly with Bratton's ideas or terms very closely. Bratton's criticism of "over-individuated" reasoning is that it leads to, "the overinflation of the term 'surveillance' to dismiss all modes of social sensing as pernicious violations." This is the Foucauldian Ick response, and it still triggers intellectual fight or flight in those trained primarily in New Left and post-modern discourse. Far from aging poorly, I think Bratton's book shows that we have learned close to nothing from the COVID pandemic--except that dogmatic virtue signaling and pandemic theater (e.g., Chlorox wiping everything, all the time) achieves little else besides further entrenching liberal mistrust of the unwashed masses (i.e., the working class). From a policy perspective, our institutional and social unpreparedness (especially in the US) led to, "the worst combination of draconian and anarchic improvisations." I don't think an honest accounting of post-COVID US could reach much different a conclusion. Besides, the existence of a highly effective vaccine obviates the need to recon with how this all could/should have unfolded differently.. Which is Bratton's point: an update to our social and institutional operating system is (still) overdue.
Does Bratton laud virtualized authoritarianism? I'm not sure. I can definitely see how his framing lends itself to early dismissal in such terms! But I still think it's worth taking seriously. His text loudly eschews the liberal and professional/managerial class flirtation with (or downright embrace of) authoritarian practices around shaming and cancelation of anyone critical of lockdowns, school closures, or masking. Nor is Bratton's take rooted in a fetishization of the most vulnerable, justifying authoritarian control of the vast majority of the public so as to not appear "ableist". Instead, he's trying to think through what it would take to build a system of "viable social self-organization." In this sense, it's not __technocratic__ (in the pejorative sense of depoliticized regimes of managerial domination); but it is unabashedly __technological__, in the sense that institutionalizing a social contract in light of epidemiological facts will require an apparatus larger than individual perception to mediate feedback and control to achieve our public-serving ends. Importantly, these means and ends must be politically contested (and contestable), rather than accepted as doctrine by the masses while administered, directly or diffusely, by plutocrats steeped in market rationality.
Crucially, Bratton is much more interested in grappling seriously with various realities that attend the fact that we live in a society. There is an unavoidable epidemiological dimension to our subject-ness. This means, necessarily, that part of being a subject is also being an object. That's life. And it _really matters_ how we (politically, socially) address the tensions that arise from this duality. Steven Epstein's book you referenced is a brilliant example of how democratic contestation can reshape how an otherwise (apparently) depoliticized and technological apparatus learns and does things in the real world (I read it long ago, and should definitely read it again! The body of work in critical epidemiology from that era, e.g. Paul Farmer's Aids and Accusations, Pathologies of Power, etc., is so rich). Bratton's take-home is that, in order to govern ourselves, we need to be able to know ourselves; part of knowing is deploying additional ways of seeing that are social, i.e., emergent, both in aggregate and distributed, to learn things that are beyond an individual's grasp. Where that leads, and how it happens, politically, is up to us (in the spirit of David Graeber).
There are lots of ways that Bratton's insistence on the political "right to be counted" are playing out today: the refusal to take seriously or adequately measure gun violence in the US; the insurance industry's denial of the reality of long COVID for many patients; the obscuring or ignoring of way-out-of-band cancer incidence hotspots in certain communities (e.g. in Iowa) affected by input-intensive factory farming. We can't solve problems that are social in nature without the means to conceptualize those problems at the adequate scales. Pushing responsibility down to the individual level (as is the tendency of our neoliberal hyper-individuated economic order) masks the dynamics at play and makes the larger forces at play impossible to identify and contest.
Anyhow, I'm more excited than ever to crack open your book (it arrived last week) to see where it takes me, further into the mine field of democracy and technology..
I found the article interesting, but above all because of what it omits and what it oversimplifies.
The Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism have nothing to do with one another; on the contrary, the Frankfurt School is rooted in a form of post-Marxism where the dialectic between structure and superstructure remains firm.
French poststructuralism, on the other hand, introduces a different level of complexity by incorporating the analysis of language, discourses, etc.
Lumping them together is a typical symptom of Silicon Valley’s philosophical tourism: treating complex European intellectual history as a flat moodboard of buzzwords. Both theories are based on a view of society that remains deterministic and on an all-encompassing philosophical framework. This description should help you understand that these are two thoroughly modern theories.
That said, I always want to point out that “postmodernity” remains a concept borrowed from avant-garde art, taken and applied as if it were a flat color to all post-Marxist philosophies. It is an “umbrella” term used to mask intellectual laziness.
Finally, Sokal’s critique was epistemological in nature; he did not criticize “postmodernity” as a societal condition, but rather the embarrassing lack of peer-review and selection criteria adopted by academic humanities journals.
Except... 'STEM literature' has not 'sokal-hoaxed itself to death', has it? The credibility and reputation of STEM research remains very high, at least insofar as we are talking about the natural sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Their studies replicate, show remarkably consistency, and seem to track some sort of reality, insofar as they produce accurate predictions and allow for the creation of extraordinary items, from bridges to aeroplanes.
Social sciences maybe, but Sokal was a physics professor, not a psychologist.
It would be nice if we could dismiss the smug scientist, luxuriant in her authority, with postmodern critique. But we cannot, because her research eventually cures diseases, predicts typhoons, and generates energy from the wind.
What happens when we compare this to the modern humanist? It is embarrassing. Why trust a historian if he claims he is constructing the past, and that in theory there are multiple valid 'truths'? You mean... You're just making stuff up?
The same can be said of the English literature major. If everything you study is subjective, why should I believe you have any expertise or disciplinary mastery? Having taught English at secondary school, I can confirm this view makes it much harder to convince pupils it is a serious subject. If every interpretation is potentially valid, then why do we need you? I suppose because I know how to score points in an exam.
This might seem harsh, but your post reads as fundamentally unserious. Yes the broadsides at tech are valid, but one hardly needs postmodernism for that. The rest is too abstract, provides virtually no evidence or proper research, whilst simultaneously casting shade on disciplines that are robust, and do improve human life.
I enjoy Latour's view that 1) truth is socially determined, 2) objective reality is one of the most important social actors. If you want career success as a scientist, Nature is a very powerful patron. Very hard to get a meeting with but always fair.
Still don't understand what I'm supposed to think if two medical practitioners offer different views? Last time you said "they're both right"? Again what does that mean? Do we start accepting chiropractic is actually fine? And what are the "other political orders" one gets out of Lyotard?
What about vaccines? No individual will ever know whether being vaccinated helped them specifically, because they might have avoided being infected anyway.
Shouldn’t population statistics be enough to approve a vaccine? Do we have anything better?
I suppose there was also an argument about there being a plausible mechanism, which is why the RCT was done. But since that’s not enough to approve the vaccine, we don’t seem to have all that much faith in such arguments.
So this seems a bit much:
> Evidence-based medicine promised a reprieve from ambiguity through cold calculation. Its proponents still insist that biometry alone will lead us to universal truths.
> Except, of course, it can’t. As I’ve been yammering on about, medical statistics tell us about population-level optimization and can’t say much about individuals.
Why do we even need universal truths instead of statistical claims? It seems like too high a standard.
While the optimization of number go up may indeed be post-modern, the *competition* over who has the biggest number is often pre-modern ("between unequal numbers, force decides"). The signified of the number ultimately points towards coercion.
This reminds me of an early post-Gpt3 experiment called the infinite conversation in 2022. The poster used the LLM to put a facsimile of Sizek and Werner Herzog into conversation with each other.
Mark C. Taylor, another postmodern philosopher, similarly discusses the connection between a postmodern condition and the optimizing tech bros of Silicon Valley. I don’t have the book ready to hand, but in his magnum opus After God, he describes it as a kind of hyper modernism.
No no it's not postmodernism when I hide statistical uncertainty behind technical jargon, it's only postmodernism when you point it out!
> "I watched a panel last week that revealed this was still widely held amongst STEM researchers."
I'm always amazed at how this is pretty much still the case.
[also I think there is some co-morbidity of this and a weird fixation on the idea of Popperian Falsification (we've once discussed this here: https://argmin.substack.com/p/popperian-falsification?r=2k6f6v&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=54704131) ]
Speaking of French (not exactly postmodernist) theory, you really should take a look at Gilles-Gaston Granger's _Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man_, where the last chapter is structured as follows:
CHAPTER VII. THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE INDIVIDUAL 150
The Clinical Situation and Structures in Psychoanalysis 152
Diachronic and Synchronic: Personalities as Informational Systems 160
Practice as Art and the Individual 163
Individual and Alienation 167
History as a Clinical Undertaking without Practice 168
History and the Present 170
Individual and Field 174
Conclusions 175
Isn't it ironic when a leading figure in AI/ML—the field that rose to prominence by arguing that inquiry into data-generating mechanisms should give way to algorithmic methods judged primarily by predictive performance—turns around and blames statistical thinking for the resulting culture of optimization and performance metrics? That has matters exactly backwards.
The lesson of statistical science is not that truth is socially constructed, nor that competing perspectives are equally warranted. The lesson is that claims earn their standing only by surviving severe attempts to reveal their errors. Far from encouraging relativism, statistical thinking was built to combat it, and it remains one of the few systematic resources for doing so.
Granted, machine learning, platform capitalism, monetization, optimization, and performance metrics have altered which errors receive attention and which quietly disappear from view. But statistical thinking does not merely describe this shift; it provides tools for criticizing it, for asking what has been sacrificed in the pursuit of predictive success, what forms of understanding have been abandoned, what errors have slipped from view, and what new vulnerabilities have been introduced.
To blame statistical thinking for the consequences of the AI/ML turn is to mistake one of the principal sources of resistance for the source of the problem. These developments raise questions about changing regimes of error control and their epistemic, scientific, political, and ethical consequences. In this connection, I hope to encourage Recht and his readers to consider contributing to a recent call for papers Synthese: Topical Collection: Severity and Learning from Error. https://link.springer.com/collections/ebjdhfadcd
It's only ironic if you presume that people cannot change positions in response to careful examination and reflection. Perhaps "the lesson [of statistical science] is that claims earn their standing only by surviving severe attempts to reveal their errors" is itself a claim to be severely tested. Regardless, vive la Résistance.
Paul:
I don't get your drift. Is it that statistical science changed its goals to care only about performance and optimization based on examination and reflection? Did statistical science fail to achieve knowledge pursuing its earlier pre-AI/ML goals?
Mayo
Sorry for the confusion. You seemed to suggest that it was ironic that the blog's author, a "leading figure in AI/ML," "turns around ..." Perhaps the apparent turn-around was not unexpected but instead a mature response to reflection upon the social value of optimization, comparable to Weizenbaum or Polanyi.
Whether or not stat-sci achieves "knowledge"---pre or post AI/ML---is, I think, an idea to be tested. For example, did the biometrics used in eugenics achieve knowledge? Or should a 1% decrease in test error on MNIST be considered a knowledge achievement? I imagine many yes's and no's for each question.
I'm a bit shallow on this admittedly, but I'm not really sold that statistics = shift in the belief in standard, pre-post-modern notions of objective truth. I can see lots of support for the argument about motivation -- that lots of post-modern truth-seeking shifts from seeking truth for intrinsic reasons to instrumental reasons.
But I don't see how that argument makes much progress arguing that this statistical truth seeking is any less objectivist than pre-modern truth seeking.
Grabbing hold of statistics and saying it is about populations-not-individuals or number-go-up and not grand narratives seems a bit quaint. Post-1930s truth seeking has aimed at some pretty complex questions and complex systems. The Higgs Boson was pretty much sought for its intrinsic value and the hope of confirming a grand narrative. But it was completely based on statistics. So? I don't think we used those tools because we have a more fluid sense of objective truth in physics, but because statistics is the only flashlight that shines far enough to illuminate the problem.
Intriguingly, it's also hard to make the post-modernist argument when EBM can be more tractable to mechanism and explanation than traditional expertise.
In the traditional model, a brilliant doctor's intuition reveals what to do when time is short and data is limited. You can try to gain that experience yourself, but you've reached the frontier of what we can declaratively know. You need the great (probably) man's eye for it.
But Goldman's heart attack algorithm is way simpler, saying a real heart attack is almost always revealed by one of these four signs. It's also interesting that one side effect of that was to free some less-empowered patients from the power-laden biases of expert intuition...
Since I think I came this way via Dan Davies, I should also give the cybernetics angle its due. We may decide that part of the system we're studying is a black box, and just describe its inputs and outputs and not its internal mechanisms. But that may just be the best (or only) strategy of inquiry (or management) available. I don't know that it follows that we have loosened our pre-post-modern grip on what inquiry can discover.
The post-moderns had a knack for seeing power everywhere, so much so that it probably drove Foucault insane. I wish he had survived long enough to grapple with AZT, its ability to reduce HIV/AIDS mortality, and the interaction between public health and individual sovereignty. I feel like the main thrust of the critique of public health/EBM, and rationality that supposedly underpins it, is its depoliticizing effects on subjects. That Foucault stubbornly (courageously?) rejected the sovereignty-erasing effects of technocratic rule may be his most powerful gesture. A self-immolation, of sorts. This tension has never/will never go away, it seems..
I have been reading a lot about Foucault's conception of biopower/biopolitics—that nexus of authoritarian and normative cultural constraints that dictate what Real Life is/ought—and how the neoliberal era in particular takes number-go-up instrumental rationality to 11 (see also Wendy Brown's 2015 Undoing the Demos). But good public health is probably worth the risk of an authoritarian and/or technocratic flavor, is it not? This is a topic that I've learned a lot about from Benjamin Bratton, whose Revenge of the Real (2022) is the best post-post-modern exploration of our present (poly) crisis. What do we do when the Real smacks us in the face? Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, cholera, climate crisis.. He makes it very clear that we (collectively) need a new lens/paradigm for (a) conceptualizing these realities, and (b) constructing a "positive biopolitics" that avoids de-politicizing subjects, avoids shallow anti-tech folk politics, and instead acknowledges our ability to intervene in the world. Terraforming may be our common legacy. His work has given me new language for thinking about how to thread the discursive needle on these topics. I'd be very curious to learn your thoughts on Bratton.
When it came out, I read Geoff Shullenberger's review of Bratton and decided to skip it (There he is again). Given what Geoff wrote at the time, I can't imagine that book and it's valorization of virtualized authoritarianism aged well.
Your question about the clash of biopolitics, individualism, and activism during the AIDS epidemic is a great one. I hope to come back to that soon as part of this series. Have you read any of Steven Epstein's writing on this topic?
Thanks for your response! I hadn't seen Geoff Shullenberger's work until now. After reading his Bratton review, my sense is that he doesn't really engage directly with Bratton's ideas or terms very closely. Bratton's criticism of "over-individuated" reasoning is that it leads to, "the overinflation of the term 'surveillance' to dismiss all modes of social sensing as pernicious violations." This is the Foucauldian Ick response, and it still triggers intellectual fight or flight in those trained primarily in New Left and post-modern discourse. Far from aging poorly, I think Bratton's book shows that we have learned close to nothing from the COVID pandemic--except that dogmatic virtue signaling and pandemic theater (e.g., Chlorox wiping everything, all the time) achieves little else besides further entrenching liberal mistrust of the unwashed masses (i.e., the working class). From a policy perspective, our institutional and social unpreparedness (especially in the US) led to, "the worst combination of draconian and anarchic improvisations." I don't think an honest accounting of post-COVID US could reach much different a conclusion. Besides, the existence of a highly effective vaccine obviates the need to recon with how this all could/should have unfolded differently.. Which is Bratton's point: an update to our social and institutional operating system is (still) overdue.
Does Bratton laud virtualized authoritarianism? I'm not sure. I can definitely see how his framing lends itself to early dismissal in such terms! But I still think it's worth taking seriously. His text loudly eschews the liberal and professional/managerial class flirtation with (or downright embrace of) authoritarian practices around shaming and cancelation of anyone critical of lockdowns, school closures, or masking. Nor is Bratton's take rooted in a fetishization of the most vulnerable, justifying authoritarian control of the vast majority of the public so as to not appear "ableist". Instead, he's trying to think through what it would take to build a system of "viable social self-organization." In this sense, it's not __technocratic__ (in the pejorative sense of depoliticized regimes of managerial domination); but it is unabashedly __technological__, in the sense that institutionalizing a social contract in light of epidemiological facts will require an apparatus larger than individual perception to mediate feedback and control to achieve our public-serving ends. Importantly, these means and ends must be politically contested (and contestable), rather than accepted as doctrine by the masses while administered, directly or diffusely, by plutocrats steeped in market rationality.
Crucially, Bratton is much more interested in grappling seriously with various realities that attend the fact that we live in a society. There is an unavoidable epidemiological dimension to our subject-ness. This means, necessarily, that part of being a subject is also being an object. That's life. And it _really matters_ how we (politically, socially) address the tensions that arise from this duality. Steven Epstein's book you referenced is a brilliant example of how democratic contestation can reshape how an otherwise (apparently) depoliticized and technological apparatus learns and does things in the real world (I read it long ago, and should definitely read it again! The body of work in critical epidemiology from that era, e.g. Paul Farmer's Aids and Accusations, Pathologies of Power, etc., is so rich). Bratton's take-home is that, in order to govern ourselves, we need to be able to know ourselves; part of knowing is deploying additional ways of seeing that are social, i.e., emergent, both in aggregate and distributed, to learn things that are beyond an individual's grasp. Where that leads, and how it happens, politically, is up to us (in the spirit of David Graeber).
There are lots of ways that Bratton's insistence on the political "right to be counted" are playing out today: the refusal to take seriously or adequately measure gun violence in the US; the insurance industry's denial of the reality of long COVID for many patients; the obscuring or ignoring of way-out-of-band cancer incidence hotspots in certain communities (e.g. in Iowa) affected by input-intensive factory farming. We can't solve problems that are social in nature without the means to conceptualize those problems at the adequate scales. Pushing responsibility down to the individual level (as is the tendency of our neoliberal hyper-individuated economic order) masks the dynamics at play and makes the larger forces at play impossible to identify and contest.
Anyhow, I'm more excited than ever to crack open your book (it arrived last week) to see where it takes me, further into the mine field of democracy and technology..
I found the article interesting, but above all because of what it omits and what it oversimplifies.
The Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism have nothing to do with one another; on the contrary, the Frankfurt School is rooted in a form of post-Marxism where the dialectic between structure and superstructure remains firm.
French poststructuralism, on the other hand, introduces a different level of complexity by incorporating the analysis of language, discourses, etc.
Lumping them together is a typical symptom of Silicon Valley’s philosophical tourism: treating complex European intellectual history as a flat moodboard of buzzwords. Both theories are based on a view of society that remains deterministic and on an all-encompassing philosophical framework. This description should help you understand that these are two thoroughly modern theories.
That said, I always want to point out that “postmodernity” remains a concept borrowed from avant-garde art, taken and applied as if it were a flat color to all post-Marxist philosophies. It is an “umbrella” term used to mask intellectual laziness.
Finally, Sokal’s critique was epistemological in nature; he did not criticize “postmodernity” as a societal condition, but rather the embarrassing lack of peer-review and selection criteria adopted by academic humanities journals.
Except... 'STEM literature' has not 'sokal-hoaxed itself to death', has it? The credibility and reputation of STEM research remains very high, at least insofar as we are talking about the natural sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Their studies replicate, show remarkably consistency, and seem to track some sort of reality, insofar as they produce accurate predictions and allow for the creation of extraordinary items, from bridges to aeroplanes.
Social sciences maybe, but Sokal was a physics professor, not a psychologist.
It would be nice if we could dismiss the smug scientist, luxuriant in her authority, with postmodern critique. But we cannot, because her research eventually cures diseases, predicts typhoons, and generates energy from the wind.
What happens when we compare this to the modern humanist? It is embarrassing. Why trust a historian if he claims he is constructing the past, and that in theory there are multiple valid 'truths'? You mean... You're just making stuff up?
The same can be said of the English literature major. If everything you study is subjective, why should I believe you have any expertise or disciplinary mastery? Having taught English at secondary school, I can confirm this view makes it much harder to convince pupils it is a serious subject. If every interpretation is potentially valid, then why do we need you? I suppose because I know how to score points in an exam.
This might seem harsh, but your post reads as fundamentally unserious. Yes the broadsides at tech are valid, but one hardly needs postmodernism for that. The rest is too abstract, provides virtually no evidence or proper research, whilst simultaneously casting shade on disciplines that are robust, and do improve human life.
I enjoy Latour's view that 1) truth is socially determined, 2) objective reality is one of the most important social actors. If you want career success as a scientist, Nature is a very powerful patron. Very hard to get a meeting with but always fair.
Still don't understand what I'm supposed to think if two medical practitioners offer different views? Last time you said "they're both right"? Again what does that mean? Do we start accepting chiropractic is actually fine? And what are the "other political orders" one gets out of Lyotard?
What about vaccines? No individual will ever know whether being vaccinated helped them specifically, because they might have avoided being infected anyway.
Shouldn’t population statistics be enough to approve a vaccine? Do we have anything better?
I suppose there was also an argument about there being a plausible mechanism, which is why the RCT was done. But since that’s not enough to approve the vaccine, we don’t seem to have all that much faith in such arguments.
So this seems a bit much:
> Evidence-based medicine promised a reprieve from ambiguity through cold calculation. Its proponents still insist that biometry alone will lead us to universal truths.
> Except, of course, it can’t. As I’ve been yammering on about, medical statistics tell us about population-level optimization and can’t say much about individuals.
Why do we even need universal truths instead of statistical claims? It seems like too high a standard.
While the optimization of number go up may indeed be post-modern, the *competition* over who has the biggest number is often pre-modern ("between unequal numbers, force decides"). The signified of the number ultimately points towards coercion.
This reminds me of an early post-Gpt3 experiment called the infinite conversation in 2022. The poster used the LLM to put a facsimile of Sizek and Werner Herzog into conversation with each other.
Mark C. Taylor, another postmodern philosopher, similarly discusses the connection between a postmodern condition and the optimizing tech bros of Silicon Valley. I don’t have the book ready to hand, but in his magnum opus After God, he describes it as a kind of hyper modernism.