10:13am June 18, 2014

maarnayeri-i-really-deplore-this-toxic-and

maarnayeri:

I really deplore this toxic and regressive culture that promotes the idea of knowledge being invalid if isn’t wrapped in academic jargon. The amount of brilliance I’ve encountered and enrichment I’ve gained from immigrants and those systematically deprived access to elite…

Background- I am an autistic, who is more or less obsessed with logic. It is my be all and end all. What you seem to be referencing in the last post (when people juggle words around) is logic- I think. If so, I don’t see anything wrong with finding out the illogical premises of someone’s argument and using it to inform your counter argument.

I don’t think the flaw in the echo chamber reasoning of tumblr is necessarily in ‘academic’ thought and expression (though I take the point about jargon). The flaw as I see it is that the counter arguments are just as illogical as the original arguments.

Take this hypothetical; I will detail below a common logic exercise, but amend it with what I think tumblr’s reactions would be.

Person A; All Swans are black, I have seen a black swan, so I now maintain that all swans are black.

Person B; Omigod you can’t just /say/ all swans are black- that is so offensive to other swans.

Person C; Other swans? you shouldn’t segregate swans like that. THEY ALL ARE THE SAME REGARDLESS OF COLOUR

Person D; How dare you say that swans don’t have their own identities?

This continues on, until Person A is viewed as a hated person due to their obvious idiocy concerning swans. But, here’s the thing- Person A did make an error, they presumed the state of all swans after only seeing one. This error was recognised by Person B, but treated with the rage you mentioned in your post, which makes it ad hominem (attack on the person) as they are not assigning the blame to the faulty logic. They are assigning the blame to the person.

That means that it opens the door for all arguments following this point to be as riddled with fallacies as they please. Because a logical error has already been committed.

I agree that academic language can make things inaccessible, and I am saying this as someone not university educated. But, I think that the greater problem is in the paradigm of insult before calculated response. I think the problem is not in the academia- I think it is in the rage.

What I’m referencing definitely is not logic. It’s more like academic glamour: It looks convincing but it doesn’t mean anything about whether the person is right or not. It’s like a way of throwing lots of fancy words and ideas around.

Personally, I’m really leery of conversations where everything is thought of as “argument” or “counterargument” and the like, because I can’t navigate them, at all. I’m not interested in getting on a debate team, I’m interested in sharing ideas and figuring out where things lead. Adversarial conversations, even ones where the people themselves aren’t adversaries, don’t work for me very well.

The problem with all these things being academic is the fact that both the jargon and the manners of thinking promoted in academia are very specific, and very hard for some people to pick up. This makes the conversations impenetrable to a lot of people who’d otherwise benefit.

The problems you describe are problems too. But so is the academic stuff.

(I’m also autistic, but my variant of autism makes formal logic and debate very, very difficult for me. I would not like to see it replace all this, at least not universally.)

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