But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on?
I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.
... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.
> The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room
And for good reason. For example, philosophers (Zizek included) raved about Badiou's Number and Numbers. It is a nice history of the approaches to formalizing the concept of number, but there is no philosophy there. As soon as Badiou or Derrida or any other continental philosophers try to do anything else with mathematics it just becomes a grossly inappropriate and confusing analogy.
The kind of theoritical psychoanalysis Zizek talks about is not really classic psychoanalysis at all. Even Marxism at the lowest level is a theory of psychology.
I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.
... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.