Hi there! I'm glad you're genuinely fascinated! Deciphering the meaning of words used by commoners can be totes challenging!
I too enjoy learning things outside my main areas of interest, sometimes even conversing with people who exist outside the monoculture of my university program. I find there's a lot of misinformation/pathos around these beautiful people and their diverse cultures.
Instead of using every word literally, they rely on a series of adaptive techniques (or "linguistic crutches", as I like to call them). They're just like the similes or metaphors we all learned about in English Composition I and II, but theirs don't always capture the depth, breadth, and/or nuance of a topic like ours do. Sometimes they speak in generalities or fail to support their comments with peer-reviewed meta-analyses. Nevertheless, they still seem to understand each other! It's truly very fascinating!
Despite not knowing how words work or what Science is, it's a longstanding cultural practice of theirs to make unlicensed casual, general observations about their lived experience and the world they live in. They're known to do it in bars, in line at the gas station, in newspapers, comment sections on the internet, and even over the telephone!
Sometimes, PhD students mistake these for formal theses and miss the point entirely. Other times, people who think they look smart ask them patronizing, bad-faith questions.
In this case, the user is likely not saying that the text fails to encode meaningful information or is especially difficult to understand. Instead, this is a commonly-employed polite term for "banal bullshit".
Put another way, they're likely expressing their opinion that this class of content is frequently superficial, lacks criticality, contributes minimally to the advancement of knowledge, and offers limited utility or actionable insight for broader discourse or practical application, as if the authors just wanted an excuse to use a new word or phrase they've just learned, whether to drive revenue, to prove to their peers that they're a Good Person, or some secret third thing.
Ah there it is. Thank you. You did almost well. But I think you kinda forgot your point halfway through.. is this a context size thing? Because, you seem to want to make a maneuver here where you want to 1. mirror a tone, and 2. say something about "PhD Students" and their bad faith. But, because of (1) both you and the gp have now also become PhD students, which really ends up confusing your overall conceit here (but congrats on your degree, I know its a tough road).
But, got it: "colonialism" is just a word that gets people riled up, like gp, and so the comment it just mocking tech people who talk about colonialism. Its not making any claims about what they say necessarily, just that they are saying it.
Thank you! Good luck meaningfully encoding information today ;)
I too enjoy learning things outside my main areas of interest, sometimes even conversing with people who exist outside the monoculture of my university program. I find there's a lot of misinformation/pathos around these beautiful people and their diverse cultures.
Instead of using every word literally, they rely on a series of adaptive techniques (or "linguistic crutches", as I like to call them). They're just like the similes or metaphors we all learned about in English Composition I and II, but theirs don't always capture the depth, breadth, and/or nuance of a topic like ours do. Sometimes they speak in generalities or fail to support their comments with peer-reviewed meta-analyses. Nevertheless, they still seem to understand each other! It's truly very fascinating!
Despite not knowing how words work or what Science is, it's a longstanding cultural practice of theirs to make unlicensed casual, general observations about their lived experience and the world they live in. They're known to do it in bars, in line at the gas station, in newspapers, comment sections on the internet, and even over the telephone!
Sometimes, PhD students mistake these for formal theses and miss the point entirely. Other times, people who think they look smart ask them patronizing, bad-faith questions.
In this case, the user is likely not saying that the text fails to encode meaningful information or is especially difficult to understand. Instead, this is a commonly-employed polite term for "banal bullshit".
Put another way, they're likely expressing their opinion that this class of content is frequently superficial, lacks criticality, contributes minimally to the advancement of knowledge, and offers limited utility or actionable insight for broader discourse or practical application, as if the authors just wanted an excuse to use a new word or phrase they've just learned, whether to drive revenue, to prove to their peers that they're a Good Person, or some secret third thing.