iWorshipFAANGS
You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne
However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses.
However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.
I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers.
Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.
But actually, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding what your point is, could you help me? I mentioned a specific line that Paul Graham wrote, then said it was "dumb" for the reasons I outlined. Then, in defense of Paul Graham, you posted links to tweets to snippets of research absolutely without any context at all. How would I know whether that research is good or not? I have no training in any of those fields.
I'm really confused about how what you posted defended Paul. Did you want me to see that someone wrote the words "decolonizing" and "math" together and subsequently think that it is stupid, after all, to write the words "hegemonic" and "whiteness" in the same paper?
1.
I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur.
I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-).
I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about.
2.
I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains.
But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1].
How would a child practice real estate anyway? There are no astronaut prodigies either, as far as I know.
First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."
I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons.
First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia. -hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. -dialetics. Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points." Term dates back to Aristotle. -Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating power." Critical term in International relations. -Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick.
So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery.
I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say.
PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness."
His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's also done, if one can believe, in earnest.
Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.