How to make powerful hallucinogens from ordinary household chemicals.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, Google+. The only thing you had to do to win was not be Facebook. You're making them look good. At least joining Facebook doesn't risk your email.

I am on holiday. Freda is as well, so things are somewhat less relaxing than they would be otherwise. The kitten mostly doesn't shit places it shouldn't.

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful ... Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police." (PDF.) "I am not an anarchist, but I find I quite like the ones I've met. Am I in danger of holding potentially illegal political views? Please advise."

(My actual problem with anarchism is that I'm the sort of arsehole who eventually takes power just at sheer frustration with their faff. Of the wide variety of strains of ideologically sound thinkers I've interacted with, no-one does faff like anarchists. No-one.)

I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 in Classic theme, with autohiding panels (this is a netbook). I have to "killall gnome-panel" frequently so the top menu will unhide. It's getting bloody annoying. Anyone else getting this?

(I have tested Debian on this Mini 9 and gotten the wifi to work, and proprietary multimedia formats are less faff in Debian than Ubuntu. Ubuntu has useful things like the PPAs, though, which I run a lot of stuff out of. We'll see how much 11.10 embraces the suck.)

My current intellectual faff goes by the tag "Bayesian postmodernism." Though the name is thorougly explanatory, I'm giving away nothing because anyone who understands one won't understand (if they've heard of) the other, attempting to explain the first to the second may be pedagogically impossible and attempting to explain the second in terms of the first is leaving me feeling like I don't understand anything. Also, I'm taking it on faith that Derrida is in fact rigorous, and not just being deliberately annoying in a stereotypically French manner. I have about a page of notes and a head full of vague images. It's a quintessential Official Slacker Handbook-level project: something to obsess over and produce very little tangible concerning. It's like being in my twenties again.

Ahh, suburban highlife. Dashing out to rescue the washing from the neighbour's barbecue. Love people. I thought smoky fuels were illegal in Greater London. Dammit.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

It was when I noticed that differance, insofar as Derrida actually admits there's a definition, looks very like how a Bayesian update would feel from the inside.

Also, postmodernism says "nothing is certain" and Bayesian epistemology says "and this is precisely how uncertain."

Basically, I've either struck gold or I've struck crack. This may be what being a crank feels like from the inside. Which has entertainment value in itself.

Pedagogical barrier: Bayes involves mathematics. Postmodernists are frequently innumerate to actually dyscalculic.

[(Anonymous)]

Though to be fair, postmodernism involves ambiguity. The largest flaw with the Bayesian crowd as I've encountered them is that they're horrible about ambiguity, and largely like Bayesian inference because it lets them replace ambiguity and spots where they have to say "Actually, this is very complicated and there's not a clear answer" with numbers.

You should really tackle some Derrida for yourself though. Or go for someone that the Sokal crowd really hates. Sokal, after all, spared Derrida the worst of his wrath. Try Irigaray or Lacan or someone that really gets the Sokalites frothing, usually because they don't understand how "metaphors" work.

-Phil Sandifer

[reddragdiva]

Yeah. Getting them to admit the complicated bit is still there, and it's called knowing what the hell your prior probability actually is - and it's more complicated than that, because it's a distribution, not just a number - can be like pulling teeth.

(I have a couple of nice texts on the subject here, intended for second-year statistics courses. Really, most people's heads will explode on this stuff. So to explain it to aestheticians, I have to explain it without alluding to calculus. These books explain it as: the hard part in the frequentist approach is picking which cookbook method to use; the hard part in the Bayesian approach, from which the entire frequentist cookbook is mathematically derivable, is knowing what the hell your prior actually is. This is why statisticians get the dumptrucks full of money.)

I like the Bayes stuff because when I started to get the idea about it, I thought "um, wow, this is how me learning new things in my favoured aesthetic fields actually works. I think." I could be wrong, but it seems to.

It helps and hinders that Bayes is one thing but postmodernism just isn't.

I'm reading translations of the Derrida and explanatory guides that aren't much better. I'm trying to remember what I thought I knew before.

(Oh, and I discovered the Freudian thing in postmodern analysis was Guattari's fault. It may just be used as a trope now, but he actually thought it.)

[And goddamn Deleuze and Guattari are a mix of gold and crack.]

I still think I'm hot on the trail of something! Like I said: I've struck gold or I've struck crack. Possibly both. It should keep me nicely out of trouble, in any case.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, definitely both. You don't go postmodernism without some healthy crack.

Deleuze and Guattari are really interesting. I've found very little in either of their work that isn't useful, and nothing that isn't interesting, but my God do they miss on "right" sometimes.

And which Freudian thing in postmodern analysis do you mean?

And yes, you've hit at my other bemusement with the Bayesian crowd, which is that they seem to take on faith that the unknown unknowns, so to speak, are going to be more or less manageable. Whereas I take one of the basic lessons of postmodernism to be "be very, very wary of your unknown unknowns, and consider the possibility of unknown knowns."

[reddragdiva]

Analysis from a Freudian perspective.

Yeah, awesomeness by analysis is going to help with your personal black swans, but (again) it's not going to evade the actual hard bit.

[strangedave]

The Freudian thing in postmodern analysis is one of the things that makes me avoid serious postmodern theory. As soon as some Freudian stuff (Lacan or whatever) sneaks in, I become sure it has drifted into nonsense.

My single favourite moment from academic philosophy was when a student had been asked to give a tute presentation on Lacan, gave a concise summary of his theories of art criticism, and the entire tute broke into spontaneous laughter.

[neonchameleon]

My understanding of post-modernism is ropey, but as I understand it there's a fundamental inoompatability between Bayesian Statistics and Post-modernism. Chiefly that in order to use Bayes theorem you need to start with the premise of a coherent underlying reality even if it's one you can't necessarily reach. Therefore you iterate and zero in on the points you can reach and update your models accordingly. Post-modernism on the other hand would in many cases (there are many things that fit under the heading of post-modernism) call this a priveleged viewpoint and reject even the hard synthesis of understandings that Bayesian approaches would come up with.

Or to put things another way, Postmodernism is about embracing ambiguity, the unknown, and multiple viewpoints, Bayesian Statistics are about resolving them.

[reddragdiva]

Postmodernism is several different things of the same name. And it's not just the approaches, it's the resulting texts (and the two are generally conflated). Thus, finding terrible postmodernism is about as hard as finding terrible punk rock, for much the same reasons.

It is quite possible I'm just entirely full of shit. However, even in this case, it's quite likely I can get away with it just by brazening it out.

[strangedave]

Yes, more or less where I thought you were heading with this.

Should it work out, there is at least an entire academic career there. And nothing would drive postmodernists more insane than dismissing all attacks on your theory by criticising their grasp of the mathematics.

[reddragdiva]

"Should it work out, there is at least an entire academic career there" is another key indicator of an impossible slacker flight of fancy.

But the prospect of making a lot of annoying people cry is, I must admit, a powerfully attractive factor.