You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
3

[–] ShitArchon 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago 

the fucking lazy, space-padding style of writing that all these blogs and shitty magazines are using. It's like fat for text. Why in the fucking hell are you posting a picture with text that says the same goddamn thing that you just said in the previous paragraph or picture?

Especially postmodernists who use word bloat. If a writer uses postmodernist terminology like "discourse," they're smokescreening to pretend to be smart. High-information-density writing doesn't have

When taking the AP World History exam, we were explicitly instructed to avoid smokescreening, where word-vomit is used to cover for when you don't know what you're talking about. We were told the graders give high scores to bullet points with facts and low scores to gramatically correct smokescreens.

Guess how the top-rated commenter responded in an AskHistorians thread asking "when did modern liberalism separate from classical liberalism?" Long fucking paragraphs of smokescreening to say something that only takes one sentence: "classical liberalism and left-liberalism had common roots." At no point did the reply mention names, dates or events. An AP World History grader would have had that mothefucker's ass for breakfast.

And the /r/AskHistorians commentariat are people who supposedly have degrees. Useless bullshit degrees paired with lazy thinking that wouldn't fly in a programming or discrete math class.

0
1

[–] whoahson 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I remember trying to do that, and being ripped apart for it in school. Possibly the best lesson I ever learned.

0
0

[–] ShitArchon ago 

Goes to demonstrate how worthless are the degrees of people who never had that experience.

0
1

[–] caesah 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Academia has gone that direction. The people who have led to the replication crisis love paragraphs of garbage.

0
0

[–] ShitArchon ago 

There's lots of bullshit in evopsych speculation, but (as Steven Pinker pointed out in a tweet) at least evopsych has some standard for plausibility. The social science findings that lack replicabilty don't do that.