Long, but interesting. Why it is perfectly safe to not take them seriously.
Unfortunately, this BS lies at the foundation of much of academia.
Long, but interesting. Why it is perfectly safe to not take them seriously.
Unfortunately, this BS lies at the foundation of much of academia.
In a better world Noam Chomsky would be considered a bullshitter who is bold enough to write in simple English, and his father would be remembered as an important scholar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chomsky
My theory is that human adults retain a bit of programming left over from childhood. As children, we constantly hear adults using complex sentences that we can’t yet parse, full of words we’ve heard but don’t quite understand. But instead of assuming the adults are babbling nonsense, we must think “smart adults are talking and it’s way over my head. They are really smart and one day I’ll understand what they’re saying.”
And somehow Postmodernists discovered that the childhood mental circuit can be triggered in adults by using complex sentences that can’t be easily parsed, full of vaguely defined words, so that the listeners can’t figure out what’s meant. And all the listeners conclude “The speaker must be really smart. One day I’ll understand what they’re saying.”
It was a simple hack to achieve academic success in fields where nothing actually had to work (unlike STEM), and merit and status was the result of opinion. So people using the scam shot to the top of academia, and the ranks filled with people who were in on it, though perhaps some didn’t really understand the scam and how it worked.
Academia: Here I Come!
Speaking of Europe, or at least the UK, stories like this make me think it’s time for the US to put a ban on travel there. Perhaps it would be the bitch slap the need to wake up.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posing-gun-linkedin-194911079.html