Earnestness
If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as &quot;academic bogus,&quot; you&#x27;ll find a google scholar search for &quot;hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness.&quot;<p>First of all, I don&#x27;t think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these &quot;tee-hee postmodern bogus.&quot;<p>I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons.<p>First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia. 
-hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. 
-dialetics. Broadly meaning &quot;an conversation between two opposing points.&quot; Term dates back to Aristotle.
-Hegemony. Meaning &quot;a dominating power.&quot; Critical term in International relations.
-Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick.<p>So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery.<p>I myself used to think that the &quot;post-modern&quot; philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say.<p>PG seems to think that all &quot;useless&quot; research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in &quot;How to Do what you love&quot; that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he&#x27;s getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out &quot;whiteness.&quot;<p>His site, he&#x27;s free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It&#x27;s also done, if one can believe, in earnest.<p>Feel free to tell me I&#x27;m not being fair to the article. However you respond, I&#x27;ll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.