It’s probably pointless, but I’ll ask anyway: If you wish to respond usefully to this, please don’t just select a portion of what I write here and prop it up as a strawman to maul with your doubtless brilliant, blistering attacks, okay? Respond in reasonable detail to the whole message after taking the time to carefully read and comprehend it fully first. Thank you.
I doubt the frothing hatred for me has diminished much, so this may well just be more fuel for your torches, but it has finally occurred to me the main reasons why my OP engendered such an unjustly vicious pile-on: I forgot that, because this is such a highly populated board, there will inevitably be an extremely wide range of both willingness of the readers to think my points through as well as a wide range of sufficient capacity to do so. Especially if a given poster (such as myself) doesn’t hand-hold and spoon feed the whole thing to each uncritically-thinking critic.
Did you see my early responses asking for my critics to explain to me why they thought I was so off-base? That was all entirely genuine. I was truly quite puzzled! I couldn’t make sense of such hateful insults and abuse, given the full context. (Though I started to get a hint of what was going on when after I politely asked one critic to explain his hateful attack, he replied by noting: “I don’t owe you an explanation!”, as if I’d demanded one instead of simply asked for one. That told me quite clearly that I wasn’t dealing with a rational criticism but rather just knee-jerk vitriol).
I had also lost track of the fact that the Pit is visited mostly by people whose primarily goal is to have fun pitting back at the pitters. That was a very big mistake on my part. Some people are there merely to defend their own partisans or to stick up for what they see as their type of folk (say, for example, simple folk) against other type of folk (such as, for example, “smarty-pants elites”). Tribal warfare, as usual…
My biggest error lay in choosing not to waste storage space by including more and much larger sections of the history of the debate between myself and orcenio and just putting in links, instead. That was quite stupid of me. I didn’t think I needed to spoon feed the Pit readers the history of the debate and why I posted that Pit OP in the first place. But I assumed far too much concerning the cognitive and interest levels of the average Pit denizen. Very dumb on my part to have forgotten that the Pit is about pure derision rather than “GD that permits insults”.
But even though I now recall that this is not really “GD that permits insults”, I need to try that approach again here anyway because this is where I’m getting reamed. So let me lay it all out now, in chronological order: Why I was annoyed and why I submitted this thread’s OP.
The short version (believe it or not):
(1): We were having a mostly adult discussion regarding the scientific merits of the young science of evolutionary psychology in GD. A few hopelessly uninformed and naïve children were kicking the backs of our seats, but there was a useful core discussion taking place.
(2): A particularly stupid yet simultaneously arrogant little tyke named orcenio popped in, declared he had not the tiniest little clue as to the subject matter but nevertheless imagined that we were even stupider than he was, and so he puffed up his cute little baby’s chest and “informed” us that if a scientific endeavor didn’t follow his rather slow 5’th grader’s EE-ZEE cookbook of “THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD” – which he was far too stupid to even relate adequately in the first place (witness his continued infantile references to “proof” and “direct” observation, as if people who used scanning tunneling microscopes or even just eyeglasses were metaphysicists) – it just wasn’t “science”.
(3): I didn’t have time for a lengthier reply there, so I issued a short remark that working science was a far more complex and sophisticated business than the 5’th grade “SCIENTIFIC METHOD” and that the 5’th grade view being put forward resulted from a dogmatic and infantile belief that science = “THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD” that comes from truly terrible primary and secondary school dumbed-down-for-Texas textbooks and that science simply isn’t so juvenile.
(4): Some weeks later, when I finally had a bit of time to spend here, I saw that orcenio has mocked, taunted, and personally insulted me because he considers me so stupid that I could only have been a dumb ol’ “philosophy major” (clearly not realizing that was a compliment rather than the devastating insult he thought it to be).
(5): I was slightly disappointed that the GD mods let his mockery and personal insults go by without even a single comment, so I replied to orcenio as he did to me: with mockery and insults at his infantile pedagogy. At the end of that post, I noted to any mods that I was well aware that I broke the rules and that the GD mods didn’t need to tell me that. I knew it perfectly well. I didn’t imagine for even a millisecond that that would excuse my behavior or mitigate my rule-breaking even the tiniest bit; in fact, I felt my acknowledgment made it a bit worse in that I admitted I knew the rules but broke them anyway. Yet a GD mod lectured me several times very condescendingly that the only reason I could possibly have for adding that note was to evade responsibility! Sheesh! It’s like I’m writing or thinking in some highly abstract and incomprehensible language that people just can’t follow.
(6): Ignorant little hillbilly-pedant orcenio piles on yet more personal insults and mockery, but, again, nothing from the GD mods until very many hours after I complain.
(7): I wanted to thrash the stupid little twit for his new condescending insults and mockery, but I knew I couldn’t do it in GD. So I did it in The Pit, instead. I employed faux-sophisticate (poseur) pseudo-French language deliberately as part of my sarcastic reply to orcenio to contrast his ridiculously elevated view of himself as a “brilliant, witty intellectual” with my view of him, which is of an ignorant hillbilly too stupid to know how stupid he actually is.
(8): Clueless, hateful spittle comes shooting immediately from attackers far too quickly for them to have carefully read and comprehended the complex nature of the beef I had with orcenio. It was premature, childish, knee-jerk emotional self-defense of one of their own (a fellow dummy) versus someone who had seemingly used – to their black and white, one-dimensional, never woke-up yesterday eyes – pretentiously sophisticated language (as opposed to faux-sophisticated poseur pseudo-French language) to chide an “average Joe” like themselves, and they weren’t going to stand for it! They were going to make what they viewed as an “elitist” pay for his arrogant snootiness, dammit! (not realizing to the tiniest degree that the “snootiness” I employed was sarcasm, the supercilious simpletons!)
(9): Here we are now.
Filling in some details missing from “the short version”:
In the OP of the evolutionary psychology thread, the OP was vexed about why evolutionary psychology was so routinely insulted and debased by some people who considered EP to not be scientific. In this, he/she was entirely correct: Most people – largely made up of very ignorant people from po-mo constructivists to cretinous high-school yahoos like orcenio – are so blinded by the ignorant K-6 textbook definition of “THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD” that they hold that anything that does not conform to that infantile “METHOD” simply cannot be considered science at all.
This kind of simultaneously extremely arrogant -and- stupidly ignorant attitude is seriously damaging this country (the U.S., and others in the West to a lesser extent). That kind of attitude and thinking represents some of the worst symptoms of the rapid decline in respect for careful, informed thinking and the rapid rise in respect for “the average Joe” (e.g., The Plumber) who is only comfortable with other folks who are either also poorly informed and gullible or who pretend to be to “fit in”. That’s the kind of thing I was getting at with the “move over Dorothy Parker and make way for Larry the Cable Guy” references. It’s the kind of thing we saw in the 2000 presidential election when the “average Joe” preferred George W. Bush, another “average Joe” they wanted to “have a beer with”, rather than that “smarty pants liar know-it-all” Al Gore. Or, recently in Massachusetts, people much preferred the guy whose ads and speeches emphasized the fact that he drove a truck over the woman who didn’t know which team Curt Schilling rooted for.
Sheesh!
But that’s exactly the frighteningly low and rapidly descending level of intellectuality we were so vividly and accurately warned we’d keep seeing more of back in 1963 by Richard Hofstadter in his incredibly important but mocked anyway classic: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. That cry of “look the fuck out for ever-growing love and admiration of stupidity, Americans!” has been taken up again more recently in books like The Age of American Unreason, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, and others.
Consider how far America has fallen since the U.S. presidential election of 1800 between the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (John Adams) and the president of the American Philosophical Society (Thomas Jefferson), and despair.
So, returning to my chronology, the EP thread included some genuinely thoughtful criticism of EP from posters like Darwin’s Finch, Malthus, myself and others, along with some genuinely thoughtful defenses of EP as legitimate science by that thread’s original poster, Der Tris, myself, and others. And the fact that I contributed posts on what people like the counter-pitters here and stupid pseudo-pedant orcenio would consider “both sides” is just what we should expect in a discussion of such a young science: Neither total attack nor total defense. It’s called “nuance”, but far too few Americans seem to appreciate that approach. Things are either black or they’re white; “THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD” or “not a science at all”.
Orcenio was a supremely arrogant and simultaneously very stupid and childish cretinous yahoo bragging about his 5’th grade “expertise” IN SCIENCE and assuming he was so much more evolved and sophisticated than stupid ol’ Der Tris and ambushed, etc. So he deigned to “teach” us his 5’th grade textbook’s SCIENTIFIC METHOD in order to argue that evolutionary psychology wasn’t SCIENCE because it didn’t follow his arrogantly infantile SCIENTIFIC METHOD, Q.E.D. (though I strongly doubt he has any idea what those initials refer to, nor why it and words like “proof” and “prove” are so out of place in the scientific domain).
You gotta admit, orcenio’s “advanced” lessons in THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD was quite hilarious in it’s vapidity! Boy howdy, was it dumb! He clearly hadn’t even reached an average 5’th grader’s understanding, as demonstrated by the fact that he didn’t even get that infantile version correct!
But when I calmly observed that working science was vastly more abstract and abstruse and tentative and looser and more flexible and mature than such a sophomoric view, he stupidly mocked and insulted me as if I was the stupid one!
That irked me, so my next reply (which came weeks later because I had been far too busy until then) adopted a style that quite appropriately portrayed him as an ignorant hillbilly child who needed a least a little more education on the philosophy of science and how science isn’t about following a sacrosanct kitchen recipe known as THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD but an extremely diverse, wildly divergent, and essentially artistic intellectual endeavor requiring high levels of creative imagination and synthesis.
In that mod-warning-deserving reply to little boy orcenio, I cited my own definition of science, to wit:
The most important aspects of that definition are (in order of their appearance):
(1): Science isn’t a pre-defined central cookbook of approved, official practices known as THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. It can be any set of heuristic approaches, methods, and techniques, as long as they are…
(2): … empirical in the epistemological sense (as opposed to the crude “trial and error”-related meaning of that word)…
(3): … are implemented such that they strive to limit self-deception as much as the subject area and circumstances allows (i.e., double-blind experiments are superior to less stringent experimental protocols because they are better at limiting self-deception), but…
(4): … science cannot possibly lead to some kind of metaphysical, capital-T “Truth”; it can only allow us to reduce the errors in our knowledge of the world; although it can thus bring us arbitrarily close to truth (though we can obviously never know we Know it). Science as I’ve described it is by far the best universe-investigating system humanity has ever devised and developed, but the extreme logical-positivistic sub-components of the views espoused by the Vienna Circle that held that science could lead to capital-T “Truth” have long since been completely refuted and confounded (by those stupid ol’ orcenio-hated philosophers of science).
But did you see how orcenio replied to my definition? Hilarious! To me, there are few people more deeply annoying and dangerous than completely wrong self-imagined pedantic “experts”. At least real pedants are typically correct!
However, orcenio’s hilarious hillbilly infantility provided a good opportunity to address the somewhat more cautious – but still regrettably severely under-informed – posters who denied that evolutionary psychology could possibly be scientific, such as DanBlather, Chum, Nametag and BigT (none of which belong in the group of far more thoughtful EP critics such as Darwin’s Finch and others). That’s the thing about message boards: A poster who doesn’t understand that she or he is writing for a larger audience than just the poster they’re responding to doesn’t grasp the real reason message board posts are more productive than private email and the like.
So I referenced the extremely valuable work of Alistair B. Fraser and William J. Beaty (I can’t figure out what’s going on with his sites’ extremely poor availability; they seem to be up for a few minutes every few days and that’s all). They and several others have expressed great alarm for years at the childish errors, misconceptions, and extreme dumbing-down of primary and secondary school science textbooks due to the fact that one of the most ignorant and science-hating state education boards – that of Texas – effectively forces textbook publishers to continually reduce the level of sophistication, intelligence, and accuracy in their books, year after year. That’s precisely what’s at the root of orcenio’s and others’ babyish scientific illiteracy, resulting in that too-stupid-to-breathe-regularly vapidity about THE HOLY SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
So when orcenio personally attacked and mocked me again, demonstrating that he was even more arrogantly cocksure in his hillbilly ignorance, I knew I couldn’t school him as sharply as I felt he deserved in GD (having been justly, if redundantly, warned against doing so). So I did so in The BBQ Pit.
In my OP here, I employed faux-sophisticate poseur pseudo-French language deliberately as part of my sarcastic reply in order to better contrast his ridiculously elevated view of himself as a “supremely gifted intellectual” with my view of him, which is of an ignorant hillbilly who is far too stupid to know how stupid he actually is.
I wrote above about the nature of message boards. One drawback is that however much you’d like to discuss a topic with informed and thoughtful fellow participants, there’s no keeping idiots out of there. As orcenio so clearly demonstrated.
In any event, long before anyone could possibly have read through and fully comprehended the full history of the nature and specific content of the dispute in the EP thread generally, and the reason I was so irked by orcenio’s arrogance specifically, some fellow hillbillies who simply didn’t get the joke foolishly rushed to arrogant infant orcenio’s defense and spared no effort to gang-rape me repeatedly.
But, like male mallard ducks who see that a victim has already been raped by the other guys, I guess there’s no way for you folks to stop yourselves. Mindless instinct takes over, and satiation still hasn’t been achieved.
Don’t let me stop you…
One last thing: Your toothless, 61-times pregnant sister-momma slurps it from Army boots, orcenio!
