Learned folly

Cosma Shalizi links to several posts of Mark Liberman One Must Imagine Liberman Happy starting with Can Derrida be "even wrong"?. Excerpt:
"My colleague would open one of Derrida's works to a random page, pick a random sentence, write it down, and then (above or below it) write a variant in which positive and negative were interchanged, or a word or phrase was replaced with one of opposite meaning. He would then challenge the assembled Derrida partisans to guess which was the original and which was the variant. The point was that Derrida's admirers are generally unable to distinguish his pronouncements from their opposites at better than chance level, suggesting that the content is a sophisticated form of white noise. On this view, as Wolfgang Pauli once said of someone else, Derrida is "not even wrong.". "
My friend Pavaman once cured Venkateswara Rao's addiction to philosophy by a random reading (mixing up phrases from different sentences and asking Rao to explain, which Rao patiently did)of Sartre.
The latest of the posts "debunking reactionary appropriations of neuroscience as carefully as though they were actual attempts to advance human knowledge, and not meretricious myth-making" by Liberman The defend-your-turf area?
P.S. More about Cosma Shalizi in the later half of the article The Tenure Tracts. Mark Liberman and Andrew Gelman should have also been mentioned in the article. Excerpt:
"If there’s one thing Shalizi can’t stand, it’s misinformation bandied about in the name of science. “A lot of the time, when I’m motivated enough to post something, it’s because I think someone is ‘being wrong on the Internet,’ as the saying goes—and this cannot stand,” Shalizi says. “It’s usually something I’ve read more than once and it seems such a pack of lies, or utter misunderstandings, that I feel like writing something. I wish I wasn’t so destructively motivated, but I am.”

When asked how much time and effort that takes, he says, “Quite a bit, to be honest. Part of that is the fact that I’m way over trained as an academic, and part is also wanting to leave people no excuse or way out,” Shalizi says. “If I can show that they’re just totally wrong, thoroughly wrong, then I will try to do that.”"