Talk:Higher Superstition

(Old article)

The tone of this work is fairly well written although it lacks in a few areas. First is the authors overuse of arcane English words. This is perhaps because of the enormous intellectual verbiage in the literature they are attacking and perhaps a desire to impress us that they are not unintelligent. It makes the work less readable and no more forceful. Second, is the odd use of end-notes by page number rather than chapter which detracts from it. Third is the general failure to account for the status quo pro-science positions with much evidence. Largely we are to take their sweeping statements along the lines of "Most scientists agree that..." or "No biologists we know of..." and so on. Lastly, and this is a small point, they make small attacks on things like rap music and graffiti art. Postmodern's ability to embrace everyone and everything, especially pop culture, is one of the things that makes it a potent force. To champion modernism, classical art, literature and music are not necessary to show that postmodernism is making a huge gaffe in discounting scientific "knowing".

What's that? This isn't a book review...

yes, this passage dosn't seem relevant, nor impartial.

This article is extremely biased in its praise for the book, and its lack of space for responses from those criticised, and it's lack of space for critics of the book itself. See my edit of the science wars example for a brief example, and the chapter by Stolzenberg in the book after the science science wars for a full exposition.

I removed all of the anon's additions for the mostpart. They were not useful, highly POV, and contained long sections on things which were not even in the book. Hopefully somebody can cobble together a more neutral article on the book, one which presents the arguments made by the authors, the criticisms of the book by others, the effect the book had when published (if any), etc. --Fastfission 17:12, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I removed a lot of content

A thoughtful editor asked me on my talk page whether or not some of the anon text could be saved or at least the descriptions of the content turned into a NPOV form. This is a valid question, but here's what I responded with:

I didn't see anything redeeming or reliable in the text I removed. The problem I had with trying to make NPOV the text that remained was that in looking it over I really didn't trust the person who wrote it to understand the book well enough to report it accurately, or to understand where the fault lines are in the science wars debate. That is, if I took the position that the person who added the little "review" was correct in describing the book, I'd feel bad posting the "other side" of the issue, because from the looks of it the book is a big straw man (none of the so-called "postmodernists" argue that "everyone's position is a story or narrative and every story or narrative is equally true and valid"; as one such "postmodernist" I know put it, all things are constructions, but, as the Three Little Pigs shows, not all constructions are as hardy as others!). However I doubt the book was really as poorly argued as this fellow has described it, and I wouldn't want to obscure that. So I figured the best approach was just to blank out that content for now and hope that somebody who has read the book with a bit more knowledge of the overriding debates would feel compelled to fill it out a bit more.

If somebody out there has read the book and would be willing to try and take a crack at this, I'd be very appreciative. But basically, the arguments that the anon thought were so very clever were really quite poor and for as much as I doubt these fellows have understood the social constructionists, I doubt they're really so far off the mark as the anon editor thinks (however benevolently he thinks that about them). The arguments put forward against the "postmodernist" position are the sort of thing that a high school philosophy student would think is compelling, not how most academics really discuss this sort of thing, and the note by the anon that the authors use "arcane English words" makes me further think they were not really the most qualified person to give a reliable presentation of the arguments of this book. I hope that makes sense. --Fastfission 00:58, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to ramble aimlessly a bit here. Sorry.

The arguments put forward against the "postmodernist" position are the sort of thing that a high school philosophy student would think is compelling, not how most academics really discuss this sort of thing

First of all, I am a high schooler, just to get that out of the way. Second, is Wikipedia written for academics who "really discuss this sort of thing" or for people who have at least a high school education? Point being, I think that "dumbing down" to something that "a high school student would find compelling", especially in this field, is necessary. I do not mean to say that what the academics say should be changed beyond recognition; it should merely be made into something that a "high school philosophy student would find compelling", or even just a high schooler, because Wikipedia aims for people with a sort of general education competency (which, IMNSHO, means "completed high school"). $0.02 --Orborde 03:08, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Ah, well I have nothing against high school students in particular, it was just an expression -- a poorly chosen one which reflects my own institutional situation. I apologise.

What I really meant was, the book is addressing a philosophical argument, but the person who wrote up the "review" clearly did not understand the argument very well. So I'm suspicious that their content relating to it is at all fair. The irony is, the review is very fawning over the book, but if you stripped it down to what they reviewer thought the book was saying, I'd think it was being unfair to the book itself, because it makes the authors sound like they are arguing a very irrelevant point and don't understand the debates they are involved with. I find it unlikely that the book is as bad as our "reviewer" makes it out to be, even though our "reviewer" meant the description as positive.

Education has nothing to do with this, in the end, it is about exposure, which most people don't get through education anyway, and a lot of people get without any education at all (I have a good friend who stopped schooling at age 15 and is one of the most well-read men I know at age 81). When I say "high school philosophy" I really just mean the sorts of arguments that are along the lines of, "If truth is relative, then how do you know the statement 'truth is relative' is true!" which seem very brilliant at the time but are not actually engaging the argument (people who claim things like "truth is relative" rarely mean it in such a literal sense, rather they would say that truth is constructed through the overlapping of various social networks, authority structures, power and force lines, etc. etc. whatever, and they would of course include their own statements in this as well). There are a great many scholars who sometimes make such arguments as well, so it clearly isn't linked to education. They are the sort of arguments that everybody interested in philosophy originally thinks are compelling but the more you read of this stuff the more you realize that most of it cannot just be dismissed in that matter, that the arguments are far more nuanced and interesting than they are made out to be (if they were so simple, they'd never appeal to anybody).

This isn't about "dumbing down," it's about getting it right. If the authors of the book really think that "postmodernists" believe that every opinion except those of white males is true, then it would be extraordinarily simple to show that the authors are wrong, because absolutely none of the people involved in this philosophical debate make such arguments. It seems to me to be unlikely that this is what the authors actually put forward, at least in such an unqualified form. Articles on anything here can be written by anybody, so long as they either know something about it or are willing to learn a bit about it. I apologize for my own poorly chosen phrases. --Fastfission 05:01, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

With specific reference to the "truth is relative" bit: yes, I see what you're saying now. I guess it'd be a Good Thing if such statements were immediately followed by "But we don't mean that literally, you nitpicking monkey" around here. --Orborde 06:13, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

eehhhh

Just out of sheer curiosity... What does the book talk about? --euyyn 00:20, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Academic left's abuses of science. 142.150.205.233 04:07, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Maybe someone could talk about the content of the book in some encyclopedic article somewhere.... --euyyn 18:56, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Capital idea! As soon as someone reads it, we'll get right to it. <> Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 19:06, 6 July 2015 (UTC)

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Summary is Incomplete

I've recently started reading this book for research and I've noticed that the summary of the book does not include many of the more controversial statements in the book, including the denial of the human impact of climate change (starting in "Section Six: The Gates of Eden" from my epub copy):

"The current concern with the possibility of an enhanced and deleterious "greenhouse effect" is not just superstitious alarmism. It is only the public language and political style emerging with the concern that are dangerous."

"It is distinctly possible that human activities, intensified as population grows and fuel-hungry technology becomes ubiquitous, could change the set point. Natural geological and astronomical phenomena, operative now as in the past, have, certainly, done that--during successive ice ages, for example, and perhaps as a consequence of the cyclic repositioning of Earth relative to our star and the sun's to the center of the galaxy. Of course they will continue to do so in the future. There will be global warming and cooling, whether we are here or not. Volcanoes alone will see to it.18 The question--and we emphasize that it remains a question--of the effect upon this set point of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other "greenhouse" gases, byproducts of technology and agriculture, is of the highest importance. It deserves the most comprehensive and scrupulous investigation.

So does, however, the question of the climatic consequences, a quite different and even more difficult question, about which there remain deep disagreements among atmospheric scientists. The depth and seriousness of these disagreements is visible to every reader of such general professional journals as Nature and Science. The proposals of some (but certainly not all) atmospheric physicists that action to reduce greenhouse emissions should not be deferred pending the outcome of this investigation have to be weighed seriously. There is only one Earth, and nobody in his right mind wants to use it as a crash-test dummy. But recommendations have to be weighed. Such proposals do not justify panic; nor do they call for anything like an immediate restructuring of society, along lines sketched by somebody's derivative, post-Marxist, poststructuralist utopianism."

I included this in the summary for its importance. More research is needed right now but I hope to expand also on the reception section as well, since the book received many criticisms between its first and second releases that I think should be mentioned somewhere but I haven't tracked any of the sources that Gross and Levitt are responding to yet. For those interested, their responses are found in the section "Supplementary Notes to the 1998 Edition" of the second edition.

--67.149.10.152 (talk) 11:28, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

I wrote the summary mainly to include the topics discussed in the book, not what was said in detail about each topic...AnonMoos (talk) 16:38, 26 September 2021 (UTC)

Anyway, for good or bad, climate schange skepticism in 1994 was a different beast from climate change skepticism in 2021 (notice that 1994 was 27 years ago?). AnonMoos (talk) 16:58, 26 September 2021 (UTC)