User talk:VermillionBird

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[edit] Obligatory first posting

(or Welcome to the Wikipedia)

I noticed you were new, and wanted to share some links I thought useful:

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. Wikipedia:About, Wikipedia:Help desk, and Wikipedia:Village pump are also a place to go for answers to general questions. To read up on the latest wikinews, have a look at the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~~~~.

Be bold!



(Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 21:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, Sam Spade, for your welcome and the links. I shall strive to do my best for Wikipedia. VermillionBird 00:17, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

[edit] Fashionable Nonsense

I like and appreciate what you are doing with respect to the Fashionable Nonsense nonsense. I haven't personally read the book, although I read part of Sokal's hoax. So unfortunately I can't offer specific criticism of the book yet. I think that not many people in critical theory take it seriously enough to criticize it, because's Sokal's version of "postmodernism" is such a strawman. And the people who think Sokal is a genius don't read critical theory. I'll keep an eye on what you are doing, and if I have something to contribute, I'll try to do so. COGDEN 23:45, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)

Great. One of the primary motivations of this project was to provide an "authoritative" summary so people who haven't/won't read the book don't have to do so to be able to have an informed response when the subject comes up. VermillionBird 17:13, 2005 Mar 8 (UTC)

I also wanted to say hello -- I noticed your post on my talk page. My feeling is a little less strong than yours; I don't think FN should be removed, I just think the debate should be reported in detail. A lot of very interesting things have been said, and I think, in retrospect, that Sokal's gimmick has done some good for critical theory, by pusing theorists to keep working to get their ideas accross; at any rate, if it's becoming less popular these days, it isn't because of Alan Sokal, but because of more general trends in the humanities and social sciences, ones that long predated his hoax and his book.

I'll try to post some things when I get a chance, but I'm awfully busy these days so unfortunately I may not be able to help very much. Thanks for contacting me though. Solemnavalanche 09:52, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

i also haven't read FN, but i am quite familiar with the Sokal Affair, and being an electrical engineer with some credentials and experience in academia, i really feel that the first premise of the book is quite valid. scientists should not use, say, theological concepts in their scientific publications, and if a scientist want's to venture into theology, they have to presume that there will be some real theologians that will be far better trained and tested in the field than they. the Social Text journal (and other authors publishing in it) was getting into stuff where they literally had no idea what they were talking about and Sokal noticed it. r b-j 17:19, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
That the first premise is valid I'll grant you immediately. That the work is at all important or, more importantly, relevant, is an entirely different matter. Do we discount all of Einstein's work because he ventured into theology when he wrote "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice?" Of course we don't. Willful ignorance has no place in an educated debate about any subject, precisely because it has rhetorical power.
The editors of Social Text clearly made errors in judgement. But we ask what they were expecting: a half-baked attempt by a physicist to relate his profession's evaluation of ontological problems with those of the literary-dependant professions (and we must acknowledge that, at bottom, neither one is closer to the answer,) and we ask what they got: exactly that. That it was intentionally half-baked rather than sincerely half-baked is, from an objective point of view, of little importance.
Furthermore, those editors did express concern about the unusual physical claims made in the essay. But he insisted and they allowed him the right that their discipline holds tantamount: he can make whatever statements he wants and the reader can make whatever he or she wants of those statements. To those editors, they had no responsibility to confirm the accuracy of the scientific concepts presented in the essay, because it was not a scientific work, a point Mr. Sokal knowingly and dissemblingly exploited.
But, hell, if you want to contend, despite the above, that the editors of Social Text exemplify some demonic archetype evident that anyone who's not a scientist or -- even better -- an engineer is a rabid, antilogical hippie, for the sake of arguement, I'd admit that. Why?
Because that impugnation does nothing to support the endlessly baseless approach of Fashionable Nonsense. Anyone with an advanced degree in the humanities could come up with an equally flaccid critique of the sciences. They mostly have something better to do. And so, fortunately, do most scientists.
What bothers me about this set of situations is not the people who like to jump on a bandwagon, and point fingers and laugh, or even the people who use it to reinforce or perpetuate useless stereotypes. But the perpetuation of the illusion of some barrier between the various scopes and approaches of intellectual discipline is wasteful and stupid. The attempt to expand that barrier is even worse. But to attempt to justify it by pretending to make claims to exploit that barrier with lies should be treated as exactly that: Baseless lies. VermillionBird 03:19, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] POV vs Accuracy

It's a fine line. Generally, when there are substantial variant points of view (That is, not the flat earth society or people who believe that the moon is made of green cheese), we do not strive for accuracy in terms of the subject matter. Rather, we strive for accuracy regarding representation of all the viewpoints regarding the topic. So, in this case, what would be important would be a fair and detailed representation of the view that Fashionable Nonsense is not scholarly, based on accounts of people in the field of critical theory who have criticized the book. And this would be coupled with accounts by people who praised the book. Snowspinner 16:42, Mar 8, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks for removing my vandalism from Wu Hu. — JIP | Talk 15:13, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Yves Klein and IKB

Thanks for updating the IKB article. I had thought the Image:Untitled blue monochrome.png looked rather light, but just trusted the previous RGB values in the IKB article.

The funny thing now, is that Image:Untitled blue monochrome2.png doesn't match the colour of the swatch on IKB. A saw one of Klein's originals at the Tate Modern a couple of weeks ago, and although it is virtually impossible to compare colours from memory, the colour on Image:Untitled blue monochrome2.png looks the most right on my laptop monitor. -- Solipsist 08:27, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for catching that. It was a color management thing I didn't notice. I've updated the IKB article to match the image. VermillionBird 16:10, 19 October 2005 (UTC)