Comment by Meraki on Postmodernism for rationalists · 2018-02-28T15:36:06.536Z · LW · GW

I still don't see how there is any benefit to be gained from speaking in a way that most people cannot even understand what you're saying let alone "understand the truth of it", as you put it. It seems trivially obvious that, if talking about something contentious or for which you are drawing a lot of criticism, doing both is pretty much always superior.

In your mathematician-postmodernist analogy, were the mathematician to face entire populations of otherwise intelligent, interested people claiming that he is saying nothing meaningful, it would be a relatively trivial matter to sit down for a few hours and break down his claims, filling in the blanks with "true enough" connections and sketching out what he's trying to communicate in layman's terms. Doing so would make his, and everyone else's lives, better; if you cannot truly explain something then you can make it clear that at least there is something being explained here.

It's therefore odd that pomo thinkers as a whole seem to have no desire to do so, and that people who try to do so take only a single step of simplification to go from totally unintelligible to trivially obvious (in contrast to mathematicians, who have a whole series of building blocks, abstractions and prior results to show the way through their proofs).

Maybe the ideas behind and insights of postmodern thinking really are irreducible in any meaningful way. But if so, it's the only discipline I can think of to have such a barrier to discourse, and were I (or any well-meaning person) working in such an embattled field, I would surely take great pains to make that clear from the outset whenever talking about it to a lay audience. I would also be very careful to use a jargon that does not seem specifically designed to look like deliberately misleading, obfuscatory abuses of preexisting vocabulary...

Perhaps there is a "here's a provocative puzzle; thinking about it will help you learn" teaching style going on, but if so, it doesn't appear to be working very well, and it would be nice to see some other strategies being tried, if there is anything meaningful to be learnt here at all.