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?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I've read some D(&G) stuff before.
"Infinite" is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they're not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They're right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: "flows" mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they're talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it's actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze's stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he's made in the past. It's like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it's almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It's difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it's interpreted there's a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.