Is this true, Yea Forums?
Is this true, Yea Forums?
Zachary Jenkins
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Oliver Nelson
Kevin Moore
No.
Camden Harris
There is nothing more awful than being a student at an US-American university.
Nicholas Brown
Post your face when you realized the entirety of "continental philosophy" was just free-associative drivel. This was mine.
Daniel Scott
Dilettante STEM graduate here.
It's absolutely true.
It's not that lit is easy to bullshit, it's that lit graduates get too caught up in the argument to question whether or not their rival interlocutor actually knows what they're on about.
In other fields it's pretty easy because of the nature of STEM.
A retard talking about lit is harder to spot than a retard talking about sci
John Robinson
Yeah, but not because literary criticism itself is flawed. Most people involved in the field only have the faintest glimmer of intelligence, and historically they tend to view complexity as a sign of intellectual merit. They venerate Hegel not because he is insightful, but because he is difficult to understand. This encourages them to obfuscate their own language and reach for words they are unable to precisely define to signify genius. Even when listening to someone else speak, they go so far as to attribute complexity and opacity where there is none, so someone like the straw figure in panel four can talk without understanding himself, and rather than thinking that he's an idiot the grad student will assume that there are hidden depths of which he can only see a fraction. The emperor's new critique, if you will. Wasting his time trying to parse nonsense, the student fails to exercise skepticism or even common sense. This is the common mode of communication in (at least pseud level) literary criticism.
The reason that philosophy and literature lend themselves to confusion is not because of their conceptual complexity. Indeed, the vast majority of literature is relatively straightforward in the abstract (or non-verbal), albeit sometimes difficult to hold in working memory all at once. Meanwhile many of the core concepts of engineering and the physical sciences make no intuitive sense at all, and are virtually impossible for the human mind to truly comprehend. The advantage of physics is that all of its workings can be translated into symbolic notation, and any old high school student can manipulate those symbols to come to meaningful discoveries about them, even without truly understanding them. There is no good notation for thoughts in the liberal arts, only words, which are a crude mechanism for conveying ideas.
The entire idea of this post is very simple, it takes about two seconds for you to either agree or disagree with what I'm saying. But it took me two paragraphs to express it because the only tools available to me are so unwieldy. Hopefully someday we will take steps toward some pre-Babel language that allows communication more directly from mind to mind, but I fear not in our lifetime.
Connor Jenkins
The virgin defensive postmodernist
The chad empiricist
Jayden Walker
this but unironically
Leo Rivera
I wasn't being ironic. Or rather, I was, but not in such a way as to invalidate the main thrust (hehe) of my post, but so as to elucidate it.
William Peterson
Juan Robinson
>studying literary criticism
>never seen this
fml, i can't even continue my book on literary criticism exactly
Gavin Smith
any field that doesn't have technical gatekeeping is easy to bullshit
Ryan Edwards
I don't know the other, but as an engineer that I am, I think that 48 sec is a lot
Asher Hill
I'm pretty sure that in real life the xkcd guy would come across as a retard in any discussion, no matter what it was on.
Grayson Allen
A challenger appears!
Levi Williams
I'd switch lit crit with sociology. Sociology is easier to bullshit by far considering how much of academic sociology is almost literally doing what's said in the comic.
Carson Powell
It's important to promulgate your half-baked "insights" as comedy so that when people point out they don't add up, you can fall back on "it's just a joke bro"
Josiah Walker
He is actually right in the case of math
John Bell
To be considered a good student of literature, you need to have a knowledge of texts, styles, and movements, as well as a knowledge of the formative origins of each of these elements, that far exceeds that of the average layperson. For example, I can imagine it would be difficult for someone who isn’t a literature student to pinpoint which of Siegfried Sassoon’s poems marked the stylistic change in his writing that represented his shift away from a Georgian approach to war-poetry, or why Wyndham Lewis specifically didn’t like the stream-of-consciousness sections of Ulysses. There’s a wealth of material that a literature student would be more likely to know than a non-literature student, just as there’s a wealth of material a STEM student would know that a non-STEM student wouldn’t know. Applying this knowledge well and precisely in articles of literary criticism is equally something that literature students study for for years. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Sebastian Williams
It's a nice post, unfortunately it will go unnoticed because nobody on this board actually reads.
Parker White
In what way? The older one's example is exactly as spurious as the child claims. It's clear that the labels would be different with alien species.
Easton Taylor
Not everyone punches themselves in the face, though that's pretty easy.
Elijah Baker
You do realize they don't just label the numbers weird but use a different base, right?
Jacob Roberts
No, please relate your knowledge about alien mathematics.
Hudson Fisher
It IS easy, there's just no profit in it.
Josiah Sullivan
you can be trolling us with that but I will never know even if I read those writers
Ian Parker
It really is futile to discuss math with undergrads
Gabriel Campbell
> But it took me two paragraphs to express it because the only tools available to me are so unwieldy.
More like because you can't be laconical
Adam Bailey
Yeah it's a talent when it's done right. Like interpreting texts on a case to case basis. Unfortunately that seems to be pretty rare, and you are more likely to come across some nonsense like "a feminist-marxist reading of Blood Meridian using a deconstructionist heuristic". Just fuckin fart talk. A decent amount of literary academics don't give a shit for the literature; they just seem to want to peddle patchwork interpretations
Logan Butler
i don't really want to shitpost about OP's comic but it made me think of this xkcd parody i like and will now show to my frens on Yea Forums
thanks
Hudson Sanchez
Then just lay it out for the other supremely educated gentlemen of this board. I'll just listen quietly while you discuss it, gladdened by the transcendent cadence of your words.
Landon Taylor
xkcd makes fun of nice guys/fedoras/entitled people all the time, though. This parody doesn't make sense
William Roberts
Guy who makes it is just a self-aware nice guy so he will occasionally mock them in order to mask this fact.
Dylan Cook
Irrelevant, we can switch base. The point is that if we translated the labels, the rules of this alien math would be the same as ours.
Caleb Gray
except that I could grab enough information out of a wikipedia skim to hold up my end of that conversation with you at a bar
memorizing factoids do not a discipline make, and the underlying process of criticism is easy to fake, although not to the point where anyone with genuine skill in the field would be fooled.
Dylan Reyes
>although not to the point where anyone with genuine skill in the field would be fooled
So you ultimately disagree with the comic
Ryder Reed
Physics: A decade
Thomas Parker
pls user, I said genuine skill and the comic specified grad student
Julian Taylor
Memes memes
everyday memes
in my life in my posts
in my dreams in my bed
Memes memes memes
Owen Cox
Fair point, but I’d argue that a grad student would have enough skill to identify a pseud
Samuel Gutierrez
I'm a STEM student and took a literature course about Thomas Mann the last semester. People there was endless discussing about how the author was dismissing the role of women and minimizing them. How is Thomas Mann shitting womens on Mario and the Magician or Death in Venice? And even if he did that's just negligible taking in account the epoch he lived. We wasted the potential of these works in this pointless discussion about things that aren't really important or don't exist. I respect humanities but these guys at universities are truly insufferable.
Ethan Ramirez
Oh wow pseud alert
David James
you're equally insufferable. post essay
Juan Long
>mocks the comic without actually understanding the joke
Connor Hernandez
>How is Thomas Mann shitting womens on Mario
Levi Cooper
I always knew
Mason Richardson
>But it took me two paragraphs to express it because the only tools available to me are so unwieldy
Or maybe you're just a shitty writer