A month or so ago I stumbled across this. It's a blog piece by one Robert Lanza M.D., a legitimate, respected biologist who has made important contributions to tissue engineering, cloning and stem cell research. In his spare time, he is a crackpot.
I know I shouldn't give any of my time to an online pop-psychology magazine which has "Find a Therapist" as the second option on its navigation bar, but the piece in question could have been *designed* to antagonise a LessWrong reader: horrible misapplication of quantum physics, worshipful treatment of the mysterious, making a big deal over easily dissolvable questions, bold and unsubstantiated claims about physics and consciousness... the list goes on. I'm generally past the point in my life where ranting at people who are wrong on the internet holds any appeal, but this particular item got my goat to the point where I had to go and get my goat back.
If reading LW all these years has done anything, it's trained me to take apart that post without even thinking, so (and I'm not proud of this), I wrote a short seven-point response in the comments lucidly explaining its most obvious problems, and signed it Summer Glau. It got removed, and I learned a valuable lesson about productively channeling my anger.
But this started me thinking about how certain things (either subjects or people) antagonise what I now think of as my LessWrong Parts, or more generally cause me distress on an epistemic level, and what my subjective experience of that distress is like so I can recognise and deal with it in future.
I've seen a few other people make comments describing this kind of distress, (this description of "being forced to use your nicely sharpened tools on a task that would destroy them" seems particularly accurate). Common culprits seem to be critical theory, postmodernism and bad philosophy. I've also noticed some people distress me in this fashion, in a way I'm still struggling to characterise.
Who else has this experience? Do you have any choice examples? What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts?
I have a lit-crit friend who I have known for a better part of a decade. We have an ongoing struggle to understand each other, and as part of this we will occasionally trade ideas the other finds incomprehensible. As part of this cultural exchange process, she decided to send me something about one of my subjects (econ) in 'her language', and linked me to this.
Needless to say, this was like a cannonball to my LessWrong Parts.
As much as I do find this sort of stuff distressing, I also find it useful for helping me explain precisely why I'm so confident in dismissing it as informationally bankrupt. The general retort from the literary type is that these sorts of texts contain lots of specialist language and ideas, and just as you wouldn't expect a lay-person to understand a maths or physics paper off the bat, you shouldn't expect to understand something like the above.
To which I respond "my arse". Papers in disciplines I consider to be respectable, but lack any deeper knowledge of, have a recognisable argument structure, even if I don't necessarily understand the arguments. Also, any epistemology worth having should demand claims be provided with means of substantiating them, or at the very least show why the status of the claim matters. Anything not meeting this criteria falls into Not-Even-Wrong territory.
(Also on a more speculative basis, if you're explaining a Very Hard Maths Principle to someone, your language may become more arcane depending on your audience, but the overall structure of the argument should be made in such a way that's easy for a brain to process, as both a pragmatic design principle and a courtesy to the reader; the above piece, which is amongst the more lucid critical theory stuff I've come across, seems wilfully hard for a brain to process. If someone can get onto a Ph.D. program and still have such abysmal communication skills, they can't be communicating anything that important.)
I should probably mention that I'm never sure whether my friend is trolling me or not.
Oh, Deleuze. D+G are interesting and thought-provoking but all but impenetrable. Imagine a textbook written in the style of an experimental novel. Surprise! That's actually your textbook. As with Derrida, I suggest you start with others' synopses, not the originals. Alternately, if you don't have any actual reason to read it (such as actually having a use for something that could reasonably be termed "critical theory"), just throwing them against the wall will likely save a lot of time.