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logicrook | 10 years ago
>This is what makes the cult of science dangerous, not the word "bitches".
Nobody said that, so there's no need to burn your strawman there.
Science is all about the method and proper use of critical thinking, so you could assume it is a direct contradiction to have a vapid attitude of shitty reposts of forced-meme-tier macros that are often inaccurate, without trying to think about it an instant because it's nice virtue signaling (IFL in a nutshell). But you're right, he could write it explicitly.
There's a nice writeup of this problem on the language log [0], arguing that science is basically filling the role of biblical parables.
>Woo-pushers have appropriated the vocabulary of science indistinguishable to a layperson.
They are not responsible for that, and honestly, nobody is. Recently, I read the description of some machine learning algorithm that was filled with buzzwords and dubious physics analogies to a point that I thought it was a clever Sokal, but after some reading all of it was genuine. That's just how jargon works, you assume that the one who using it understands what he is saying, as long as he's using it seemingly properly, but you can't know unless you have a sufficiently good grasp of the semantics.
[0]http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003847.h...
eli_gottlieb|10 years ago
I don't think machine learning was a good place to pick an example from. A lot of so-called explanations of ML algorithms basically are Sokal hoaxes, and the fact is that the writer doesn't understand what the algorithm does and how.