Elsewhere

I really try to be nice and give an article by Sebastian Marshall a fair chance when it crops up on HN.

But every single time, I'm disappointed. There is little to no editing, no digestion process that I can detect that would turn what I find to be haphazard notes into an actual product of a writer. I see that he really, really cares about saying something - apparently, though, not so much about being understood. The content of these articles is at best something that somebody else somewhere has already said better and more succinct. At worst, it's meaningless drivel that could just as well be the work of the postmodernism generator[1].

After a while, the words blend together and I remain astonished how others find meaning in his writing. Maybe they need to supply it themselves?

Can anybody point me to something even moderately tangible that Sebastian Marshall has actually done?

And yes, I know he has published a book. A book that seems to be about how he's a guy who is crazy and does things. But I have yet to see what those things actually are, besides talking about doing things. The level at which you apparently can never actually learn what he does is maddening to me.

[1]http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

On a humorous note OP, you seem like exactly the kind of guy who would get a kick out of this postmodern essay generator that a STEM professor wrote using a Recursive Transition Network in 1996:

https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

Every now and again, I come back to it for a good chuckle. Here's what I got this time (link to the full essay below the excerpt):

"If one examines subcultural capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject subdialectic cultural theory or conclude that the significance of the artist is significant form, but only if culture is interchangeable with art. It could be said that many desituationisms concerning the capitalist paradigm of context exist. The subject is contextualised into a presemanticist deappropriation that includes truth as a totality."

https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/?1298795365

Most adults can learn a new language in ~6 months; the real test is how much substance is in each topic. Anyway the real joke about Phd's in Literature has to do with the perception that it's total BS. The great example of this is so-called ‘postmodern generator’ written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. Using this software (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo) NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal’s generated a brilliantly meaningless article which was accepted by a cultural criticism publication, Social Text Vol. 46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). (Sokal, A., 2007, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/, accessed May 13, 2007)

PS: However, the same could be said for CS depending on your standards for quality (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/).

Feels a bit like it came from a markov postmodernism generator:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Postmodernist arguments and critiques are like the blue/gold dress. Some people see it as pure obscurantism, just all white noise. Other people see it as full of interesting ideas.

I've never seen these two groups successfully hold a conversation about it without getting progressively angrier at each other, mostly devolving into insulting each others' intelligence (like many of the replies to your comment).

Add a layer of politics on top of that, to really rile people up, and this whole thread is just a recipe for disaster.

I hesitated to start. Partly because I found the original Harry Potter kind of boring/frustrating. And partly because it's fanfiction, a sort of writing I do not normally enjoy.

Still, I found it enjoyable and worth my time. Even though I thought Harry's portrayal was pretty uneven (swinging between "scientist/genius in an irrational world" and "arrogant prick demigod").

I liked Drako's additional depth far better than Rowling's one dimensional jerk.

http://www.elsewhere.org/rationality/

(rehash of my previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231266 )

I don't really know if this is a fair characterization of postmodernism or not, but I have to wonder about the circumstances under which a total lack of structure would actually be useful in a human life? It seems like to me an interesting but not very profound observation to make that our minds traffic in structure and patterns. What alternative, I wonder, is proposed to solving problems using logical constructs?

For those that need an introduction to the finer points of POMO, don't miss this: http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/ (don't miss the footer!)