Interesting.
50 years of anti-intellectualism and putting education behind a paywall will do that.
Yeah this. People aren't stupid. In fact I would wager that people are smarter now than they have ever been.
The problem is that it's harder to exploit an educated population so the capitalist interests are to keep people educated enough to do work but not enough to question the capitalist motive.
Anti intellectualism isn't an accident or a part of the human condition. It's a purposeful effort by the folks with the money to ensure they get to keep the money. And if anyone thinks otherwise, who is funding anti intellectualism? It's big corporations and big capitalists across the board. They push for their agendas in textbooks and in schools. They buy media companies. They pay off researchers. They defund public education sources like schools and libraries in favor of private options they can control. This isn't a conspiracy it's literally happening and it's plain to see.
Agreed completely.
People aren't stupid, though they may be made ignorant and have various psychological reasons for supporting the regime.
That first letter is some serious
:The teaching of natural sciences has lost its former rigour in favour of social science claims that are blatant nonsense, such as the argument that scientific knowledge is not based on observation, hypothesis generation and rigorous testing by the world scientific community, but is “constructed” within the framework of the political and social convictions of scientists.
Of course, engage in humanities punching instead of any internal critique of the sciences. Because distrust in sciences is totally coming from a handful of dusty post-modernist philosophical academics and not hordes of reactionary forces.
Those societies that have lagged behind are those that tried to subordinate science to social convictions, including religions and such political dogmas as Marxism, nazism, fascism and similar movements that forbid free, critical thinking.
Ah there it is, blame the scary leftists, natural enemies of materialism.
To be honest, I do think that post-modernism is reactionary.
It's one and the same with the reactionary trends in society.
It’s a halfway thing; reactionaries love post-modernism, implicitly, when it comes to epistemological relativism but hate it when it comes to moral relativism. So I don’t think post-modernism set out to be reactionary but it ended up with an unintended consequence of being useful for reactionaries as they can turn the logic back around on itself. Go too far down the rabbit hole, post-modernism ends up being a ouroboros eating its own tail.
Judging by its origins, it seems that it was reactionary from the get-go. The academic journals during the 70s and 80s picked up on it pronto.
I want to hit these people with a soggy toilet brush.
The deteriorating material conditions are a threat to scientific progress. Capitalists gutting public education and spreading lies are a threat to scientific progress. Nerds pontificating about the "stupid" masses are doing nothing but spreading capitalist lies. Jesus fuck do I hate STEM-lords.
Also
Those who teach such ideas seem not to be aware that the world community of scientists would soon discard any hypothesis that conflicts with observation.
Is complete nonsense some physicist are still jerking off to string theory despite (from my understanding) there being little evidence for it. Or in my own field we use the neutral theory of evolution and ecology for modeling, they conflict with our observations -and that's a good thing they make for good null hypotheses in models.
Those who teach such ideas seem not to be aware that the world community of scientists would soon discard any hypothesis that conflicts with observation. That is why science has made such rapid progress since Galileo ignited the scientific revolution in the 17th century. Those societies that have lagged behind are those that tried to subordinate science to social convictions, including religions and such political dogmas as Marxism, nazism, fascism and similar movements that forbid free, critical thinking. We must go back to the optimism of the Enlightenment and teach the coming generations that whatever humanity knows has become known because of science. Everything else is wishful thinking, and may be so dangerous that it might spell the end of our civilisation.
Sabine is that you? There is so much wrong with this shit, it is so funny how this resembles the exact same shit from Sabine lol.
"Scientist man" thinks fucking 18th century capitalist UK was a bastion of free speech and critical thinking because it just happened to coincide with massive boost in material conditions from the industrial revolution and specialy the brutal consequences of colonialism.
Of course incredily enlightened scientist man also thinks capitalism along with the liberal "democratic" order is well known to be completely lacking of ideological or political dogmas and exactly because of this we had progress!
Its just also extremely racist implicitly, it begs the question didn't Africa or Asia get these same advancements? Perhaps because they were simply backwards and not as enlightened as we were?
This writer can take his optimism of the "Enlightenment" and go absolutely fuck himself with it. All the benefits we got from things like the French revolution are definitely not to be taken for granted, but given this dipshit is talking about "fascism" along with "the enlightenment" I'm not even sure what is the historical perspective here other than [insert thing I know which is bad here].
Even being so charitable it still makes him look like the same idiot he is supposedly argueing against, in fact a perfect example of the modern version of it. Anyway also just noticing this person is supposedly from "Istanbul Technical University", like damn talk about white man worship lol.
I hate "idea guys" sometimes, smdh
Especially since they don't really produce ideas.
Don't Karl Popper and Kuhn kinda suck?
And Foucault as well?
I mean, Karl Popper was literally against Marxism.
Karl Popper's thought is very important, but has almost entirely been supplanted in Philosophy of Science; he laid a lot of the modern groundwork though.
Ironically, lots of modern scientists think they're Popperians, including the first bozo in the article you quote.
Kuhn and especially Feyerabend slap.
To your first point, I'd agree that we need to read and understand the ideas of all thinkers. It allows us to pick from them what resonate within us and synthesize new ideas. Marx and Engels were influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach is one example. Another would be Lakatos who can be said to have synthesized Popper and Kuhn, as well as Feyeraband, who recognised the flaws in Popper's writings.
And while it is true Popper was influential, it was most notably in the capitalist sphere. The Western Anglo-centric STEM-leaning education that fostered the idea of rationalism in students at a much younger age before teaching them the idea of historicism or dialectics, or not teaching them at all.
Critical rationalism is a framework that a_blanqi_state said, was supplanted by others. Popper's anti-historicism and open society is undoubtedly a rationalist and idealist idea. Denoting social science and historicism due to their "backwardness" is a view inherently put forth to denounce historical materialism. But I would say it falls short even outside of Marxism. For once, it relies on Popper's negativism (he didn't want to be labelled logical postivist, but one could argue it is the same type of approach to scientific knowledge, just inverse), exactly the kind of work Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyeraband and contemporaries pulled apart.
I also think not many have tried to reclaim Marxism from Popper's critiques because of its line of attack being mainly an analytic school of thought. Analytic on the basis that it aims to confront continental ideas, as well as Kuhn's view of science, with such and such are tautologies and therefore bad, that scepticism is a tool that should be put to immediate use at all angles of human empirical knowledge. It very easily spirals back to foundational questions on what the hell do we know and I can't justify anything to be real. He also attempts to undermine "totalitarianism" as it is, from the outside, rather than reason out of it, from the inside, and thus the language used by him is not univocal for Marxists who didn't study analytic philosophy.
Caveat
Now the analytic/continental division is for holistic comparison that depends on lineage, influence, and style of argument. On small scale scrutiny it breaks down.
At some level, circular reasoning means a level of dogmatism, for sure. But I'd argue the focus should be less on hardcore linear thinking but rather can you draw meaning, modality, and attempt to find a relationship between the human enterprise vs what nature is.
There are still antirealists, rationalists, positivists around. But ever since Quine's Two Dogmas, I don't think Popper can reason out of human tendencies for pragmatism. And I'd say it's more pragmatic that we busy ourselves now on the meaning and development of things, rather than putting things into boxes and shooting them down on the basis of rationalism. "Idealogies", the "isms" tend to win because they approach meaning, rather than reason.
There is also Engel's criticism of "metaphysics" (as opposed to dialectics). Popper's ideas put him in the former group, and his ideas were ultimately bourgeois ones, as critiqued by the latter camp.
Regardless, if you throw away historicism as Marxism promotes it, the replacement is an ascientific, ahistorical piecemeal engineering that somehow can work through all past, present and potential "evils", with zero violence and bloodshed, paying no attention to the history of human societies. Idk, I don't buy it.
Err, yeah, I won't stick with people that are decidedly anti-Marxist, thank you very much, especially those that influenced the anti-communist George Soros.
People read philosophers who suck so they can get what's valuable from them. I found Heidegger really resonated with me, even though he joined the Nazi party later in life. You should read philosophy as an archeologist, sifting the dust away to find the pottery beneath.
Oh wow
I skimmed through again and you're right.
My apologies. Perhaps I should delete...
This part I didn't like, I'll certainly say that much:
Those who teach such ideas seem not to be aware that the world community of scientists would soon discard any hypothesis that conflicts with observation. That is why science has made such rapid progress since Galileo ignited the scientific revolution in the 17th century. Those societies that have lagged behind are those that tried to subordinate science to social convictions, including religions and such political dogmas as Marxism, nazism, fascism and similar movements that forbid free, critical thinking. We must go back to the optimism of the Enlightenment and teach the coming generations that whatever humanity knows has become known because of science. Everything else is wishful thinking, and may be so dangerous that it might spell the end of our civilisation.
vous quois
