my sis @notateapot is doing a thing where she talks about rationalism and feminism
nat is mostly pretty on point here but i think there’s a big thing that she’s never gonna tell you so imma have to do it
rationalists and academic feminists have one really big thing in common that makes them natural enemies
they’re both giant fucking nerds who don’t get invited to any of the cool parties
(hello hi me too please invite me to better parties)
this means that they mostly end up hanging out with the other weird nerds who share their weird nerd interests
so after a while they develop their own little nerd in-jokes and invent their own little nerd-speak
this makes talking to them really fucking difficult
you have a conversation and you think you’re talking english and then all of a sudden they say “yes but what about Pascal’s mugging?” or “alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction” or “may the fourth be with you” and suddenly everyone around you is laughing and shouting “ni! ni!” at the top of their lungs and you have no fucking idea what’s going on
because it turns out that you might have been talking english but they were hearing nerd-speak and vice versa
and it gets even worse when you take two nerds from different academic fandoms and put them in a room together because they’ve got different things that they’ve trod to death and they don’t even remember that they’re speaking in the local dialect of nerd
and now you’ve got a room full of people shouting about whether Han Solo would have made a better captain of the enterprise than Kirk or whether objective reality is a socially constructed paradigm
it’s really annoying
Honestly, do you think you could at least try to take things seriously rather than just heaping scorn on everyone who attempts to better their understanding of the world?
Unfortunately, buried in my sibling’s borderline incoherent ramblings is the core of a valid point.
In “The Limits of Organization”, Kenneth Arrow outlines a thesis that one of the economic factors that drives the formation of organisations is the efficient acquisition and transmission of information.
To paraphrase: Although the price system is, in a technical sense, efficient, a key problem that people have when using it is that of dealing with uncertainty. Although there are various ways (for example, complex financial derivatives or insurance policies) that uncertainty can be incorporated into the price system, but these can in and of themselves create a number of problems in and of themselves through creating perverse incentives.
The role of the organisation in this context is then to manage uncertainty by creating a group entity that is able to deal with information in a way that improves on what the market will allow, by creating a higher trust environment with its own internal information channels and its own internal coding of various concepts to allow this information to be transmitted more efficiently - for example, a technical jargon serves this purpose by reducing complex concepts to single words. As long as two speakers have mutually complex jargon, entire long discussions and debates can be altogether elided. We can discuss “asset management” or, indeed, “alienation”, without having to first find common ground for what the concept we are talking about is and deciding whether it exists.
Although in the context of academia in particular and knowledge construction in general there is no marketplace per se, the “marketplace of ideas” holds a similar role, and creates similar pressures for individual subdisciplines to enable a more efficient communication of concepts about their particular area of focus.
All of this comes with a high up-front investment of effort: The reason organisation formation rather than incorporates the market is because for individual transactions the cost of acquiring the jargon is simply not worth the effort. It is only the cumulative effect over many discussions and many explorations of the possible space that that investment begins to pay off.
This acts as a significant barrier to entry: If all of the communication happens in this coded language, any attempt to acquire the knowledge that they have developed requires a similar investment, and the language becomes not just a tool for efficient understanding but also an effective barrier to entry. This is how academic disciplines become “inaccessible” to the layperson.
The problem then becomes worse when two non-intersecting disciplines interact, because in order to successfully communicate between the two this barrier must be cleared in both directions.
Thus any attempt at bridging these non-overlapping intellectual worlds must require a significant effort of translation, and possibly the formation of a common creole (a language hybridising the two) or pidgin (a simplified language drawing on aspects of each language, often for the purposes of trade) if any common ground is to be found.
see? nerd speak
You literally post epistemology jokes on your blog.
epistemology is fucking hilarious
…
I give up. There’s no talking to you when you’re like this.
mebbe that’s because we need to come up with a good creole so we can form a common syncretic framework in which the paradigms of boring nerd-speak and funny shit can socially construct a good shitpost
thetasteoffire