eridu comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 12:47:17AM *  5 points [-]

To over-extend your metaphor, dubstep is electronic music with a breakbeat and certain BPM. Bassnectar described it in an inverview once as hip-hop beats at half time in breakbeat BPMs.

It's really easy to tell the difference between dubstep and house, because dubstep has a broken kick..kickSNARE beat, while house has a 4/4 kick.kick.kick.kick beat.

(Interestingly, the dubstep you seem to describe is what people who listened to earlier dubstep commonly call "brostep," and was inspired by one Rusko song ("Cockney Thug," if I remember correctly).)

The point I mean to make by this is that most concepts do have system 2 algorithms that identify them, even if most people on LW would disagree with the social groups that advance those concepts.

I have many friends and comrades that are liberal arts students, and most of the time, if they said something like "post-utopian" or "colonial alienation" they'd have a coherent system-2 algorithm for identifying which authors or texts are more or less post-utopian.

Really, I agree that this is a bad example, because there are two things going on: the students have to guess the teacher's password (which is the same as if you had Skirllex teaching MUSC 202: Dubstep Identification, and only accepted "songs with that heavy wobble bass shit" as "real dubstep, bro"), and there's an alleged unspoken conspiracy of academics to have a meaningless classifier (which is maybe the same as subgenres of hard noise music, where there truly is no difference between typical songs in each subgenre, and only artist self-identification or consensus among raters can be used as a grouping strategy).

As others have said better than me, the Sokal affair seems to be better evidence of how easy it is to publish a bad paper than it is evidence that postmodernism is a flawed field.