Great ideas gone badly astray
Sep. 28th, 2009 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteStill working my way through the Heath/O'Hair handbook on risk and crisis communication. Endlessly fascinating, but also occasionally very frustrating. Which leads us to tonight's post:
Imagine, if you will, a grad student in the humanities ca. 1960, out drinking with a bunch of her buds in the science department after a long, hard day laboring in the trenches. The beer is flowing, the science guys are running off at the mouth about the day's lab results, and the grad student sits bolt upright: "Hey, I just had a brilliant idea! What if reality was relative... not in the Einstein sense, but more in the sense that we all agree on the facts, but we interpret them in different ways... we all have our biases, our blind spots, and things our culture has taught us to take for granted without questioning. But we should be questioning them, shouldn't we, because they can stop us from advancing in new and unexpected ways?"
The drinkers all agree that this is an interesting idea—no, let's be honest, since we're all drunk; it's a revolutionary idea. Toasts are made and everyone agrees that our young genius should discuss this with her thesis supervisor as soon as she's sober again. She does, and is shot down in flames—it's a male professor after all, and he's just had a 30-year career overshadowed in an instant by this presumptuous youngster. In despair, she drops out of grad school and goes off to a lucrative career in some other field. The professor, however, immediately writes a paper on this subject and launches the whole postmodernism movement.
Fast forward 30-some years, and we see what happens when a great idea gets perverted by academics with an axe to grind and more axe-grinding neurons than the type that are capable of thinking clearly. Thus it is that we find Katherine Hayles (1992) perpetrating the following in Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies:
My comment thus far: This last bit was written by someone who apparently never met a post-adolescent man. Not one. Really. Not one. Maybe she knows someone who knows a man, but if so, she doesn't talk to her that often. She continues:
Okay, I'll grant you that scientists are no better than the rest of us at recognizing how our preconceptions bias our thoughts. I've been working with them for close onto 30 years, so I have not a shadow of doubt about this. But really, the problem Hayles is discussing has absolutely nothing to do with the phallic fixation of men. (I'm reminded of the anecdote, possibly about Richard Feynman, who responded to the notion that rockets are nothing more than exaggerated phallic symbols, with the observation that they simply don't fly very well when they're shaped like vaginas. If you know the actual quote, please do send along details!)
The problem here is simple and entirely non-gendered: fluid mechanics happens to be a beastly complicated form of mathematics. I mean "really hairy, nasty big fangs, scary, smelly, don't let your sons or daughters study it" beastly. The "laminated planes" notion results from an acknowledged simplification required to adapt the problem to the primitive computers available at the time, which could not handle the complexity of the mathematics in any reasonable amount of time. That's not even dragging in the whole notion of chaos mathematics, which makes the simulation problem even worse. Even today, the mathematics remain uniquely thorny, as anyone who actually read up on the subject could tell you. Apparently Hayles couldn't be bothered reading up on the subject, since that might have been inconvenient for her thesis. Or possibly the next Nobel prize in physics will come when Hayles shows us poor men how simple it is to model fluid dynamics, if only we could think past our rigid organs.
[A small caveat added after making the original post: Didn't read the original article—just read the quote in the Heath/O'Hair handbook. So there's a risk I'm quoting Hayles out of context.]
The hollow thumping noise you're hearing is that retired grad student, some 40 years later, banging her head on the wall and wishing she'd stayed home that night instead of going out drinking with her buds.
Lost in this nonsense are several really important points, such as the facts that:
science has indeed been a relentlessly male-chauvinist pursuit until fairly recently (and the situation is still nowhere near perfect even now)
any mathematician who got too hung up on "laminated planes" would indeed find it nearly impossible to come up with a better way of simulating fluid mechanics
thinking outside the box (you should pardon the unfortunate choice of words) by challenging the orthodox approach is what leads to breakthroughs in science
I have a serious mad on about postmodernists, cultural theorists, and social constructionists. They're onto something really interesting and really important. If only they'd use these ideas to improve our understanding instead of giving scientists and people like me apoplexy.
Imagine, if you will, a grad student in the humanities ca. 1960, out drinking with a bunch of her buds in the science department after a long, hard day laboring in the trenches. The beer is flowing, the science guys are running off at the mouth about the day's lab results, and the grad student sits bolt upright: "Hey, I just had a brilliant idea! What if reality was relative... not in the Einstein sense, but more in the sense that we all agree on the facts, but we interpret them in different ways... we all have our biases, our blind spots, and things our culture has taught us to take for granted without questioning. But we should be questioning them, shouldn't we, because they can stop us from advancing in new and unexpected ways?"
The drinkers all agree that this is an interesting idea—no, let's be honest, since we're all drunk; it's a revolutionary idea. Toasts are made and everyone agrees that our young genius should discuss this with her thesis supervisor as soon as she's sober again. She does, and is shot down in flames—it's a male professor after all, and he's just had a 30-year career overshadowed in an instant by this presumptuous youngster. In despair, she drops out of grad school and goes off to a lucrative career in some other field. The professor, however, immediately writes a paper on this subject and launches the whole postmodernism movement.
Fast forward 30-some years, and we see what happens when a great idea gets perverted by academics with an axe to grind and more axe-grinding neurons than the type that are capable of thinking clearly. Thus it is that we find Katherine Hayles (1992) perpetrating the following in Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies:
"The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all [can be attributed] to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. Although men, too, flow on occasion—when semen is emitted, for example—this aspect of their sexuality is not emphasized."
My comment thus far: This last bit was written by someone who apparently never met a post-adolescent man. Not one. Really. Not one. Maybe she knows someone who knows a man, but if so, she doesn't talk to her that often. She continues:
It is the rigidity of the male organ that counts, not its complicity in fluid flow. These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics, whch conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms. In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids have been erased from science, existing only as not-solids. From this perspective, it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
Okay, I'll grant you that scientists are no better than the rest of us at recognizing how our preconceptions bias our thoughts. I've been working with them for close onto 30 years, so I have not a shadow of doubt about this. But really, the problem Hayles is discussing has absolutely nothing to do with the phallic fixation of men. (I'm reminded of the anecdote, possibly about Richard Feynman, who responded to the notion that rockets are nothing more than exaggerated phallic symbols, with the observation that they simply don't fly very well when they're shaped like vaginas. If you know the actual quote, please do send along details!)
The problem here is simple and entirely non-gendered: fluid mechanics happens to be a beastly complicated form of mathematics. I mean "really hairy, nasty big fangs, scary, smelly, don't let your sons or daughters study it" beastly. The "laminated planes" notion results from an acknowledged simplification required to adapt the problem to the primitive computers available at the time, which could not handle the complexity of the mathematics in any reasonable amount of time. That's not even dragging in the whole notion of chaos mathematics, which makes the simulation problem even worse. Even today, the mathematics remain uniquely thorny, as anyone who actually read up on the subject could tell you. Apparently Hayles couldn't be bothered reading up on the subject, since that might have been inconvenient for her thesis. Or possibly the next Nobel prize in physics will come when Hayles shows us poor men how simple it is to model fluid dynamics, if only we could think past our rigid organs.
[A small caveat added after making the original post: Didn't read the original article—just read the quote in the Heath/O'Hair handbook. So there's a risk I'm quoting Hayles out of context.]
The hollow thumping noise you're hearing is that retired grad student, some 40 years later, banging her head on the wall and wishing she'd stayed home that night instead of going out drinking with her buds.
Lost in this nonsense are several really important points, such as the facts that:
I have a serious mad on about postmodernists, cultural theorists, and social constructionists. They're onto something really interesting and really important. If only they'd use these ideas to improve our understanding instead of giving scientists and people like me apoplexy.
You may have seen this one....
Date: 2009-09-29 01:33 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB_htqDCP-s
It's a beat poem titled Storm. And it is dead-on hilarious.
Oh, and I know someone exactly as Minchin describes. "Storm" is no exaggeration.
Jim Royal
Re: You may have seen this one....
Date: 2009-09-29 06:20 pm (UTC)