Transgressing the Boundaries

[Magic Poriferan]

1. Because all the books say so.

I am now having doubts that you are being sincere.

2. It means generally men will be more interested in math than women. Not that men are "better".

I don't think that's true either, and I think it would follow from the claim that men would be better at math as it currently is.

3. Well, thats what we need to figure out.

You have to start somewhere, even somewhere extremely speculative.
--

So you defend 2+4=6 because of "internal consistency".

But isn't the view you summarized above (that if there are no objective truths the job of science is to help mankind achieve our goals) internally consistent too? Why not defend that also? It definitely has a certain "utility", don't you think.

No, it's not internally consistent in the sense that I meant. I'm not going to explain what I meant, because it would be easier for you to just read the wikipedia article.

 

[Amalie Muller]

I am now having doubts that you are being sincere.



I don't think that's true either, and I think it would follow from the claim that men would be better at math as it currently is.



You have to start somewhere, even somewhere extremely speculative.
--



No, it's not internally consistent in the sense that I meant. I'm not going to explain what I meant, because it would be easier for you to just read the wikipedia article.

I'm an ENTP -- we're always sincere.

What makes you think men AREN'T generally better at math?

 

[á´…eparted]

I'm an ENTP -- we're always sincere.

In my experience I have found quite the opposite to be true. It's also quite rare for them to be forthright with their intentions (usually in the form of playing devils advocate without stating that's what their doing). They're often referred to as jokesters for a reason. I also equate sincere with clear, and they often aren't.

 

[Amalie Muller]

In my experience I have found quite the opposite to be true. It's also quite rare for them to be forthright with their intentions (usually in the form of playing devils advocate without stating that's what their doing). They're often referred to as jokesters for a reason. I also equate sincere with clear, and they often aren't.

:O

I can't think where you've got this twisted view of ENTPs from, ENFJ.

In fact, I find it very offensive, and plan to report you to my local police station in the morning.

To make this clear... I. Have. Never. Made. A. Joke. In. My. Life!! And I look down on people who do. I expect you to do the same. *Fe high five*

 

[INTJMom]

If anyone is interested in a summary, allow me to attempt providing one.
__________
Objective reality does not exist, there is only perception. Thus, the aim of science should not be to be true, but to be strategically useful for the good of man. Scientists, traditionally, have adhered to a standard of truth, and thus have held back science from liberation and the service of its true use. Because nothing is objectively true and everything is perceived, so called objective truth is only established through social authority. As such, so long as science is entrusted to an elite class like scientists, it will continue to be confined to the fallacy of objective truth. As such, the only way to liberate science is to take it from scientists and allow it to become an entirely public thing, professed and judged by anyone and everyone, no longer held to one authority's fictitious idea of the truth.
______________________

Thank you.

I find this idea both insane and dangerous.

I totally agree.

 

[wildcat]

Disclaimer:For those of you informed enough to understand where I am coming from regarding this topic, I ask that you let things be. Or, at least provide facts to further the discussion.

I am not out to embarrass anyone. I don't approve of how the author originally did things. Still, there is a certain emotional response based on the structure how this was done in the past that I want to explore explicitly. I do understand his motivations.

Perhaps, it will expose my own arrogance. I am exploring new strategies regarding how to deal with things I find ridiculous.
------------------------------------

The article I want to discuss is a little bit of philosophy regarding how modern physics is upsetting the social order imposed by older physics:
Transgressing the Boundaries:Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

It starts off....

What? What does feminism have to do with objectivity? This seems ridiculous to me. Science cannot assert a priviledged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic naratives? What?

I know that I only put in bold a section of this, as things I find explicitly ridiculous, but a lot of it reads like it says nothing, or more like nothing that can be made sense of. The whole piece is littered with non-statements and nonsense from my perspective.

There are so many excerpts that I find ridiculous. Here is a little ridiculousness on relativity(in bold):

Again, what? This was written in 1995, long after Einstein and Minkowski did their work, do people really believe that "traditionally" trained mathematicians have trouble because of the "nonlinearity"? What?

The article just goes on and on in this form in this form of ridiculousness. But I am willing to see the light if people are willing to explain things to me.

I made another thread on what I should do in the face of ridiculous statements. This particular article represents a whole litany of ridiculous statements. So if you need an example that will likely not touch on something you hold dear, this article is great.

I know many of the facts behind how and why this was published, but I will hold off on bringing them into the discussion, till the merits of the actual article are being discussed.

A moral stand.

1) A rational or emotional thing?

2) Neither-
3) Both?

 

[Coriolis]

What? What does feminism have to do with objectivity? This seems ridiculous to me. Science cannot assert a priviledged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic naratives? What?

I know that I only put in bold a section of this, as things I find explicitly ridiculous, but a lot of it reads like it says nothing, or more like nothing that can be made sense of. The whole piece is littered with non-statements and nonsense from my perspective.

I can see how objectivity relates to feminism, but no thanks to this article. I find it pretentious, difficult to read, to some degree even comparing apples and oranges beyond remarking that they are simply both found in the produce section of the store. To be sure, scientists reject social and cultural disciplines at our peril, but not for the reasons stated here. Their relevance is in guiding the purpose and orientation of research, not its methods and outcomes.

The schools need to encourage that more too. It's like when people cry that more video game developers aren't female.. they aren't female because they don't want to be video game developers. The ones who do? Are. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing it now a days.

That is not so, with notable exceptions. The primary barriers nowadays seem to be socioeconomic rather than overt racism or sexism, but stereotypes and cultural/social pressures persist in many areas. As you write here, schools (and everyon else) need to encourage interest in STEM and other atypical fields and careers, for both boys and girls.

I might be inclined to agree with this if we were specifically talking about the field of biology in regards to humans, as I think to some extent there have been actions amongst biologists (mainly evolutionary psychologists) that attempt to basically preserve stereotypical understandings of gender in often dubious ways. But instead the author references physics. I wish there were an elaboration on this. I cannot fathom what role feminism has to play in the subject of theoretical physics, because I cannot think of a single way that theoretical physics advanced the domination of men over women.

As a female physicist, I agree entirely.

I think there is a case to be made that the history of science has had many times shown gender bias among the people doing it. But this has mainly taken the form of women not getting credit for being as good at science or as big a contributor to science as they actually were. There is nothing inherently male about the process of science itself.

There is nothing inherently male about the process of science; if anything, it is inherently human. The association of scientific processes with men is entirely man-made, partly because most recognized scientists have been men, and because we have come to associate the structure, precision, and objectivity of scientific inquiry with masculinity. (Why might that be?) The result is that women who pursue an interest in science have sometimes been regarded as masculine, or trying to be like men, in much the same way that financially and socially successful blacks are sometimes accused of trying to be white. This is where objectivity meets feminism and other forms of empowerment/inclusion.

 

[Mole]

Transgression and Taboo

Transgressing the boundaries is all very well but first we need to know what the boundaries are.

And as we perceive by making distinctions, the boundaries are distinctions.

So how do we know we are crossing a boundary, a distinction? The very word transgression gives us the clue. So when we are crossing a boundary, we are breaking a taboo, we are trangressing.

So consider: we perceive by making distinctions, and the more distinctions the more we see, and the more distinctions we make, the more taboos we can break.

Interestingly modern art has made its project the breaking of taboos, one after the other, until we almost take it for granted.

 

[SpankyMcFly]

Reminds me of Lucy Irigaray, who said:

"Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster." Irigaray, Luce. Parler n’est jamais neutre. Éditions de Minuit. 1987. p.110.

"...fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics."

Luce Irigaray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Oh, and Sandra Harding, who said:

"...Newton's Principia Mathematica as a "rape manual" in her 1986 book "The Science Question in Feminism".

Sandra Harding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

FTR I disagree with both.

 

[Ivy]

What? What does feminism have to do with objectivity? This seems ridiculous to me. Science cannot assert a priviledged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic naratives? What?

Forgive me for what will follow this, for my academic muscles are very, very rusty. I haven't really thought about this stuff much since college. But I think what this is saying is that feminist/post-structuralist (for the two are often intertwined) thought introduced the idea that objectivity is an illusion and an impossibility because people contain too many variables to practice true objectivity. "Science cannot assert a privileged epistemological status" means that science isn't immune from this- it is necessarily tainted by subjectivity by virtue of being practiced by people.

 

[Nocapszy]

The whole piece is littered with non-statements and nonsense from my perspective.

i agree with you. and thusly our consensus makes it a social truth, and therefore equals objective reality.

what the dumb idiot writing the article is trying to speak of are in fact crimes of fallacy committed by the world public.
but he approaches the topic without really acknowledging his own assertion, and doesn't know how to write english

a lot of readers might think this is over their head because he uses a lot of 13+ word sentences [which cover 3 word concepts] and long words. be not fooled, friends. in fact this is plainly diarrhea of the mouth, at its worst

ygolo i don't understand why any energy is being spent on such an intellectually desolate article.

 

[Mole]

Disgust and Taboo

We feel disgust when we transgress the boundaries. We feel disgust when we break a taboo.

We think of taboos as ancient and no longer current, but we are surrounded by taboos. Just that we don't call them taboos anymore.

Also the word taboo is pejorative and needs to be rescued, needs to be rehabilitated, for use in the etribal world we are moving into.

We still feel disgust quite often during the day. So when we feel disgust, we need to ask, what taboo has been broken.

A good place to start is Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud. Just click on http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Sigmund_Freud_Totem_and_Taboo.pdf

 

[Coriolis]

We feel disgust when we transgress the boundaries. We feel disgust when we break a taboo.

Speak for yourself. When I transgress boundaries I feel relief, accomplishment, confidence, even excitement. Most boundaries are worth no more than those lines in coloring books. Just give me some paper and the box of crayons already.

 

[Mole]

Speak for yourself. When I transgress boundaries I feel relief, accomplishment, confidence, even excitement. Most boundaries are worth no more than those lines in coloring books. Just give me some paper and the box of crayons already.

I admire your brio. And I admire your thoroughly modern attitude. And naturally you rise above ancient taboos.

And this is because taboo is part of spoken culture, and you have left spoken culture behind and moved onto literate culture that prides itself on not being held back by ancient taboos.

But just look, you are a literate individual who is now the content of the electric medium of Typology Central.

The literate individual is now the content of the etribe of Typology Central. And this is you Coriolis, a thoroughly modern Milly, just as the modern world is coming to an end in the electronic media of Typology Central.

It's simple: the medium is the message.

 

[Little_Sticks]

The problem with setting a foundation of truth to deduce other truths from is that it only works well when there is some form of linearity to follow. This allows for calculations and the ability to verify experiments and deduce processes with accuracy and precision. But this doesn't work in following what happens instantaneously, such as with relativity and much of the quantum world, where things are changing more than they are happening. And the result is an attempt to frame an understanding of these changes rather than explain what will happen. Absolute Truth and Relative Truth then are both real and do not need to be represented as if only one is true. Science needs both.

 

[Mole]

The problem with setting a foundation of truth to deduce other truths from is that it only works well when there is some form of linearity to follow. This allows for calculations and the ability to verify experiments and deduce processes with accuracy and precision. But this doesn't work in following what happens instantaneously, such as with relativity and much of the quantum world, where things are changing more than they are happening. And the result is an attempt to frame an understanding of these changes rather than explain what will happen. Absolute Truth and Relative Truth then are both real and do not need to be represented as if only one is true. Science needs both.

Persons tell the truth, absolute or relative, truth or lies. The natural world is independent of truth or lies, the natural world is simply a matter of fact. Science seeks to discover the facts of the natural world.

 

[ygolo]

A moral stand.

1) A rational or emotional thing?

2) Neither-
3) Both?

3

Forgive me for what will follow this, for my academic muscles are very, very rusty. I haven't really thought about this stuff much since college. But I think what this is saying is that feminist/post-structuralist (for the two are often intertwined) thought introduced the idea that objectivity is an illusion and an impossibility because people contain too many variables to practice true objectivity. "Science cannot assert a privileged epistemological status" means that science isn't immune from this- it is necessarily tainted by subjectivity by virtue of being practiced by people.

Well, okay. I guess that is a whole other debate. For starters, what from what perspective is something an "illusion" if there is no objective truth?

I realize there may have been some historical connections between feminism and post structuralism, but so there are between chemistry and alchemy, astoronomy and astrology, and even science and religion Why does the historical intertwining necessitate the present day intertwining of basic tenets?

Also, even if the claims themselves are something that can be supported, he certainly didn't manage to do it in the article.

The problem with setting a foundation of truth to deduce other truths from is that it only works well when there is some form of linearity to follow. This allows for calculations and the ability to verify experiments and deduce processes with accuracy and precision. But this doesn't work in following what happens instantaneously, such as with relativity and much of the quantum world, where things are changing more than they are happening. And the result is an attempt to frame an understanding of these changes rather than explain what will happen. Absolute Truth and Relative Truth then are both real and do not need to be represented as if only one is true. Science needs both.

We don't set a foundation to build upon, we take hammer and chisel and chip away. What remains was always there to begin with, it's just given form.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

2. It means generally men will be more interested in math than women. Not that men are "better".

But isn't the view you summarized above (that if there are no objective truths the job of science is to help mankind achieve our goals) internally consistent too? Why not defend that also? It definitely has a certain "utility", don't you think.

Are you arguing that internal consistency is sexist? Because that seems pretty sexist. If a man said that internal consistency and women, (or women and math) were like oil and water, I would think he's pretty sexist. I think this is just people complaining about the fact that they had to study math in grade school and get bad grades in it which made them feel bad "even though they are never going to use it in life".

Is it really that hard to see how complaining that math is sexist plays into the hands of sexists? I swear to god, this kind of stuff is why we're usually losing the culture war.

Last time I checked, this person is a woman. I don't have a clue what the hell she got that medal for, but I know it had something to do with math far beyond anything I've ever studied.

What makes you think men AREN'T generally better at math?

Let's assume this is true for a moment, and let's assume that this is because there is something called a "math gene" that only a few women have. Why should they be excluded from math because of that? Wouldn't it be better for them if their abilities were encouraged? What "feminist" goal would it serve to instead encourage them to go after other pursuits more associated with women? ( I get that some people are going to say that I have no right to say what is and isn't feminist because I'm not a woman, blah blah, but I'm pretty sure it's not feminist, because it would be pretty damn sexist if a man argued the same thing. What good would it do? And how would that liberate women? Or, if this is not what an implied course of action would be, what are the implications of "math being sexist", is there a feminist math, and what would it look like? (For some reason I assume something involving either all word problems revolving around baking, which seems super-progressive).

Unless you're playing devil's advocate, in which case, I retract my irritable tone.

 

[Coriolis]

We could take this into account, and make mathematics less reliant on logic. Perhaps we could build a new system of mathematics, that is based on emotional evaluations as well as logic.

Why should 2+4=6 if we don't want it to? No reason at all, other than social dogma.

Actually, it's because if you have 2 dollars and I give you 4 more, you now have 6; no more, no less. I would love to be able to make my 2+4 dollars equal 6000 instead, but reality just doesn't work that way. Mathematics based on emotional evaluations is no longer mathematics, but some other "discipline", perhaps numerology. Whatever its merits, it should not be called by the name of something that it is not.

Absolute Truth and Relative Truth then are both real and do not need to be represented as if only one is true. Science needs both.

Absolute and relative truth are both real and humans need both. Science relates to the first, and spirituality to the second. They are not so much intertwined as parallel paths: two different ways of looking at the same thing, namely creation.

Let's assume this is true for a moment, and let's assume that this is because there is something called a "math gene" that only a few women have. Why should they be excluded from math because of that? Wouldn't it be better for them if their abilities were encouraged? What "feminist" goal would it serve to instead encourage them to go after other pursuits more associated with women? ( I get that some people are going to say that I have no right to say what is and isn't feminist because I'm not a woman, blah blah, but I'm pretty sure it's not feminist, because it would be pretty damn sexist if a man argued the same thing. What good would it do? And how would that liberate women? Or, if this is not what an implied course of action would be, what are the implications of "math being sexist", is there a feminist math, and what would it look like? (For some reason I assume something involving either all word problems revolving around baking, which seems super-progressive).

Put another way, statistics are meant to be descriptive, not normative. The bottom line is to treat every individual based on the reality of who they are, not some generalization, however wel-supported, about some group they belong to. Either a given individual fits that generalization, or he/she does not. Here again is where objectivity comes into play.

 

[Little_Sticks]

We don't set a foundation to build upon, we take hammer and chisel and chip away. What remains was always there to begin with, it's just given form.

Yes, but problems come when chiseling away causes the foundation to change. The problem becomes non-linear. Then you can't chisel away and expect to find something that was always there to begin with. But instead you can frame an understanding of these changes by using relative foundations and throw out the idea of an absolute one.

Persons tell the truth, absolute or relative, truth or lies. The natural world is independent of truth or lies, the natural world is simply a matter of fact. Science seeks to discover the facts of the natural world.

But is that what science believes or what you believe? Honest question, first thing that came to mind after reading that.

Absolute and relative truth are both real and humans need both. Science relates to the first, and spirituality to the second. They are not so much intertwined as parallel paths: two different ways of looking at the same thing, namely creation.

Okay, but this doesn't really address the distinction I made.