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TimS comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I do wish that you would say "relativists" or the like here. Many of your readers will know the word "postmodernist" solely as a slur against a rival tribe.
Particularly since many LWers believe things like:
or
The difference is that post-modernists believe that something like this is true for all science and use this to justify this state of affairs in psychology, whereas LWers believe that this is not an acceptable state of affairs and should be fixed.
Edit: Also as MizedNuts pointed out, the diagnoses do try to cut reality at the joints, they just frequently fail due to social signaling interfering with seeking truth.
First, if physical anti-realism is true to some extent, then it is true to that extent. By contrast, if Kuhn and Feyerabend messed up the history, then physical anti-realists have no leg to stand on. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Second, folks like Foucault were at the forefront of the argument that unstated social norm enforcement via psychological diagnosis was far worse than explicit social norm enforcement. They certainly don't argue that the current state of affairs in psychology was (or is) justifiable.
Citation appreciated. Foucault was specifically trying to improve the standards of psychiatric care.
Why is the former false?
Hrm?
Who said those were false? My point was that these are ideas that are popular in LW and basically true, but that most LWers don't acknowledge are post-modern in origin.
The first statement is a basic takeaway from Kuhn and Feyerabend. The second is basic History of Sexuality from Foucault.
Oh, sorry, didn't get your point. I think the first statement has been reinvented often, by people who read enough Kelvin quotes.
The second statement is just bizarre. Clearly many people are helped by their meds. Does feeding random psych meds to random freaks produce an increase in quality of life, or at least a wide enough spread that there's a large group that gets a stable improvement? Or are you just claiming the weaker version: symptoms make sense and are treated, but all statements of the form "patients with this set of symptoms form a cluster, and shall be labeled Noun Phrase Disorder" are false? I would claim some diagnoses are reasonable, e.g. Borderline Personality with clearly forms a cluster among bloggers who talk about their mental health. And those that aren't (a whole lotta paraphilias, and ways to cut up umbrella terms) tend to change fast anyway.
Many people can effectively be kept out of trouble and made easier for caretakers or relatives to care for via mild sedation. This is fairly clearly the function of at least a significant portion of psychiatric medication.
Psychology has made significant strides in response to criticism from the post-modernists. The post-modern criticism of mental health treatment is much less biting than it once was.
Still, for halo effect reasons, we should be careful.
The larger point is that Eliezer's reference to post-modernism is simply a Boo Light and deserves to be called out as such.
Your link does not support your claim that post-modernists had an effect.
Fubarobfusco may have a point about boo lights, but this large thread you have spawned distracts from it and thus undercuts him. In the long run, praising postmodernists may be a good approach to diffusing boo lights, but if you want to do that, make a separate post. In the short term, doing so distracts from the point. Whether postmodernists said useful things is not relevant to whether they said what Eliezer attributes to them and is not relevant to how the audience reacts to that attribution.
Systematic execution of the old guard doesn't count as scientific progress? Hmm, or does it?
Someone is trying to set up a strawman. Kuhn didn't advocate violent overthrow of the scientific establishment - he simply noted that generational change was an under-appreciated part of the change of scientific orthodoxy.
Someone is just trying to make a joke.
The prose wasn't quite as good as the joke's intent, so part of the effect was lost. Still, it made me smile, FWIW :P