Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Oh. So this quote is difficult to read, then? More difficult than the Nietzsche one? I guess inferential gaps must be coming into play here. I'm having a difficult time trying to not-understand it, trying to emphasize with your viewpoint. I'm having a difficult time believing that you couldn't understand the quote, honestly.

I feel like you're generalizing too much about post modernism. I like lots of it, and don't think that it's mystical oriented. I would say rather that it packs a lot of information into a small amount of words through the clever use of words and through recurring concepts and subtle variations on those concepts.

Post modernism can be difficult to understand, but I don't think it is in this case, and I think that it's complexity is justified. Scientists use obscure terminology, but for a good purpose, generally. Some scientists use obscure terminology to hide the flaws in their ideas. I view post modern criticisms in almost exactly the same way - their complexity can be for both good and bad.

Also, Baudrillard is French. It might not be his fault if there's problems with the translated text.

Nope, I'm a native French speaker and my reaction to Baudrillard is "WTF?" and building a Markov Baudrillard quote generator to see if I can tell the difference.

Jargon is good. Vaguely defined jargon isn't bad - sometimes all you can do is say "sweet refers to the taste of sugar, if you don't know what that is I can't help you".

But structure shouldn't be completely unclear. Baudrillard has a lot of "X is Y" statements and very few "therefore"s. I can't tell what is a conclusion, what is an argument, what is a definit... (read more)

4bogus14y

I'm using "mystical" in a rather specialized sense, actually. What I mean is that postmodernist texts seem to eschew straightforward arguments - instead they use rhetorical and poetical patterns in a functional way, to inspire a specific mental stance in the reader. This mental stance might be quite simply described as "emptying the teacup", i.e. questioning and letting go of the "cached thoughts" which comprise one's current understanding of reality and culture. This mental stance happens to be remarkably useful in textual criticism and social science, where one often has to come to terms with (and perhaps reconstruct, at least partially) cultures which are far apart from one's own, so that a "filled cup" would be a significant hindrance. Oh, and yes, I had quite a bit of trouble with trying to understand the Beaudrillard quote, although I did grok the gist of it, and I also got the similarity wrt. the Nietzsche one. But I'd say that grammar is clearer in Nietzsche's quote, and even his rhetoric seems more direct and to the point here.