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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Guarding Against the Postmodernist Failure Mode - Less Wrong
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My understanding is that postmodernists face career incentives to keep the bullshit flowing. (To change my mind on this, find me an online community of enthusiastic amateur postmodernists who aren't trying to make it in academia or anything.)
Critics. Art, literary, music. Postmodernism is largely art criticism purporting to take everything as a text.
That's the most succinct explanation of post modernism I've seen.
This is why anyone who knows anything about postmodernism looks at science fans' straw postmodernism and goes "wtf". It turns out a set of paintbrushes doesn't make a good hammer, well gosh.
...could you clarify what you mean by "science fans' straw postmodernism"?
I think "straw postmodernism" would generally imply that the science fans in question had invented the idea specifically to make fun of postmodernism (as a strawman). From the context however I get the impression that the science fans in question are themselves postmodernists and that you used the term "straw" to mean something like "not what postmodernism was intended to be".
(also to the earlier post, come to think of it: are there online communities of enthusiastic amateur art critics who aren't trying to make it in any career? I honestly don't know myself, there could easily be.)
I honestly don't understand Postmodernism well enough to know if this is it (and not sure if it's even understandable enough for that), but I've encountered ideas that sound similar to what I've heard of post-modernism from undergraduate students in my college's philosophy club.
Specifically there are several people with a tendency to say things along the lines of "but how do we really know what's real or what's not", "can we really trust our senses", etc. with regards to every single discussion that comes up, making it essentially impossible to come to any actual conclusions in any discussion. Although one of them did actually accept the idea of discussing what the world would be like if our senses were reasonably accurate, but not without pointing out what a huge assumption that was. (now, actually, I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about what facts and truth are occasionally, but being able to just say "X is true" when you have 99.9999% confidence of it is a fairly useful shorthand.)
(another thing which I'm not sure is the same or not was one of the people in the club who said something about someone believing "things that are true for him", although I didn't discuss that enough to get any real understanding on what they meant by that. Nor do I actually remember the question that led to that or the discussion following it, I think the topic diverged. In fact I think it diverged into me asking if their attitude was postmodernism and them not having any better an understanding of postmodernism than I did.)
Is that similar to post-modernist ideas? Because I honestly have no idea if it is or not, and would be interested in any insights from someone who knows what post-modernism is.
It could be argued that the neoreactionaries are an example. (Moldbug especially.)
You can criticise neoreactionaires on many fronts but they aren't postmodernists.
In style or substance...and which is more important...to them?
Postmodernism is a certain philosophy developed in the second part of the 20th century. I don't see how neoreactionaries subscribe to that philosophy either in style or substance.
Style=obscurationism.
If I put obscurationism in Google, it indicates that it has a history that's a lot older than postmodernism.
So?
It's not something specific to postmodernism, so it's not useful for deciding whether neoreactionism has something to do with postmodernism.
I can criticise neoreationaries for being as obscurantist as postmodernism.
https://twitter.com/karmakaiser/status/427233616993599488
https://twitter.com/karmakaiser/status/427233789014597632
He's right: cladistics is genealogy. One of the most important conceptual tools of neoreaction is basically that thing Foucault did.
I have to admit that I don't have a good grasp on Foucault but is cladistics/genealogy that much different from what Marx did earlier when he wanted to analyse history?
Yes.
edit: more on the contrast