MrMind comments on Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild" - Less Wrong
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I'll admit that to an outsider who is not interested in HPMOR, the piece above looks even less intelligible than the famous Sokal paper.
Can someone who is acquainted with the fanfic tell me if this has some sense to them? Or is Newsome trying to create some literature so involved that looks like noise to everybody but him?
The comment by Kawoomba on the original post (backup here) provided an interesting interpretation of what Will Newsome tried to communicate.
The mention of the Sokal paper reminds me that Derrida (who is frequently associated with the po-mo authors parodied by Sokal, although IIRC he was not targeted directly) was basically a troll, making fun of conventional academic philosophy in a similar way than Will makes fun of conventional LW thought. I wonder if Will has read Derrida…?
Yes, actually, Derrida was initially targeted by Sokal. His response in Le Monde is worth reading:
(If I may be uncharitable for a moment, this bears more than a little resemblance to some but not all contemporary criticism of MIRI/LW using quotes from <= 2009.)
As you can read later, the Sokal group dialed back their criticism of Derrida, to the point of pretending they had never said anything in the first place.
(I know this situation quite well, as you might imagine. The remark was later published in a certain book with an interesting title.)