The Father of All Pseudothinkers

From Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Father of All Pseudothinkers

It is hard to resist discussion of artificial history without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel. Hegel writes a jargon that is meaningless outside of a chic Left Bank Parisian café or the humanities department of some university extremely well insulated from the real world. I suggest this passage from the German “philosopher” (this passage was detected, translated, and reviled by Karl Popper):

Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten and or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.

Even a Monte Carlo engine could not sound as random as the great philosophical master thinker (it would take plenty of sample runs to get the mixture of “heat” and “sound.” People call that philosophy and frequently finance it with taxpayer subsidies! Now consider that Hegelian thinking is generally linked to a “scientific” approach to history; it has produced such results as Marxist regimes and even a branch called “neo-Hegelian” thinking. These “thinkers” should be given an undergraduate-level class on statistical sampling theory prior to their release into the open world.

Hegel -> Marx -> Frankfurt School -> Postmodernism -> Social Justice Theory -> Critical Theory. Blah. That's a lot of blather and pseudoscience still flowing.