While no one took the Liberal Arts seriously anyway -- this sort of bad research started in those departments first. I don't know when we stopped controlling for personal biases (if we ever did) but it's rampant across academia.
The fat girl studying fat people, the brown dude studying how people hate brown people -- etc. People are encouraged to research what is personal to them and so they never break down their biases.
That on top of the "diversification" of academia which led to shit researchers and shit scientists getting pushed through because of DiVeRsiTy -- and you also have a large cohort of people with no idea of scientific rigor or integrity, because it's never been demanded of them.
Worse- they aren't just diversifying the people, but also the scientific method because literal voodoo witchcraft needs to be considered just as "valid" a system for gaining understanding of observed phenomena.
Literal voodoo witchcraft needs to be considered just as "valid" a system for gaining understanding of observed phenomena.
Literal voodoo witchcraft needs to be considered just as "valid" because actual scientific inquiry shows all of their hypotheses about economics, psychology, sociology, etc to be completely worthless.
True story from my "Blue pill" days as a Sociology graduate student:
Grad Student wants to prove that men not doing housework leads to frustrated women and bad sex lives. Does a regression analysis on some big data set (these people NEVER collect or collate their own data) -- finds out that people in traditional marriages with a traditional division of labor are the happiest. Complete failure to reject the null hypothesis.
The ensuing 10 minute presentation on how these women must have internalized misogyny made my eyes roll out of my head -- and I haven't even begun to realize how stupid these people were yet.
"I'm wrong, therefore I must be right in a different, impossible to disprove way" is the thinking behind essentially everything wrong with current year politics.
Hypothesis: Whitey bad
Test: Whitey kills or harms non-whitey disproportionately?
Result: No
Conclusion: Whitey harms non-whitey in invisible way that cannot be measured, thus whitey bad
Hypothesis: Capitalism bad
Test: Non-capitalist societies more successful?
Result: No
Conclusion: Capitalism made all non-capitalist societies fail, somehow, thus capitalism bad
Hypothesis: Covid kills healthy people
Test: Covid kills healthy people?
Result: No
Conclusion: "Long covid" causes every symptom imaginable and cannot be tested for, thus covid kills healthy people
Hypothesis: LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ folx are in danger!
Test: Folx more likely to be victim of violent crime?
Result: No, especially after controlling for behavior
Conclusion: Everything bad that happens to a non-straight person is a result of bullying, thus folx are in danger
Find me a single leftist viewpoint that doesn't follow this exact pattern. I'd be very impressed if you could find one.
Pretty much. Science is just the least biased way to interpret data and formulate conclusions based on those findings, but because the predominantly white west codified it, it's now an aspect of "huwaite colonialism".
They don't really respect voodoo or whatever, they're just grasping at straws for anything they can use to chip away at the foundations of society- just like when Twitter spent a week or so trying to argue that 2+2 =/= 4.
I don't know when we stopped controlling for personal biases (if we ever did) but it's rampant across academia.
Richard Feynman was complaining about it in the 70s. And most of the History of Science you learn in grade school has the basic template of "rogue scientist discovers X and is ignored because it flies in the face of all the people who think Y" So probably closer to "never" than "recently" since scientists don't stop being human when they step into the lab.
This is true, but at least it was once a confounding variable that you tried to control for. With raw data there are ways we can do checks to see if someone is full of shit (even after the fact) --
--but these idiots with Liberal Arts degrees (and I am one of them and was once an idiot) have no such controls.
When a quack doctor releases data showing something outrageous, it's usually very easy to find the flaws in the data collection or the data interpretation.
When I was a grad student in Sociology (I told you I used to be one of those idiots), my department hired a professor whose parents were illegals and who wrote exclusively about the terrible plight of illegals. They made a big show about how they hired him and gave him the biggest starting salary they ever gave any professor and fast tracked him on tenure.
Two years later he was gone (as was I. Long gone at that point) -- I dunno if he failed tenure review or what, but all of his work was so infiltrated with his own biases it wouldn't surprise me. But in a Sociological journal you don't have that raw data, you don't have controls for confounding, you just have a name on a page and trust they have integrity.
This is how bad ideas get spread and passed off as legitimate. Academia as an institution needs to be burnt down and rebuilt from the foundations.
The role on academia in the next decades will be to clean the records.
They will scrub everything unwanted. Texts, data, studies, records, books, papers. It will all be memoryholed.
You can't have data or studies casting doubt on blank slate theory, or consequntialism as a sound ethical model. You can't just have stuff like heritability and twin studies lying around.
Academia will be reduced to a toolbox to support leftist thought. It's already almost there.
They'll hide the methodology behind paywalls, traditions and customs, groupthink, and gaslighting, and people will only see the headlines.
Lo and behold - it turns out that the leftists were right all along! About everything! Look, the Science proves it!
Everyone has biases, it's human nature. but at least when it's white males running the show you'll have less of it. Like with crime, all groups have crime, some less so. When you have White males running things they're, on average, more likely to care about integrity and the like, not always, just in comparison to most other groups. That's part of why the West has been so successful, such traits. Diversifying definitely messed that up, not to mention having too low IQs, or being as hardworking, that leads to poorer results too. And it's just stats in general, they can be manipulated very easily if the person is willing and frames it in a positive or negative light.
So, to summarize, while I believe quoting a Don Henley song, "I can get you any result you like, how much are you willing to pay for it?"
While no one took the Liberal Arts seriously anyway -- this sort of bad research started in those departments first. I don't know when we stopped controlling for personal biases (if we ever did) but it's rampant across academia.
The fat girl studying fat people, the brown dude studying how people hate brown people -- etc. People are encouraged to research what is personal to them and so they never break down their biases.
That on top of the "diversification" of academia which led to shit researchers and shit scientists getting pushed through because of DiVeRsiTy -- and you also have a large cohort of people with no idea of scientific rigor or integrity, because it's never been demanded of them.
Worse- they aren't just diversifying the people, but also the scientific method because literal voodoo witchcraft needs to be considered just as "valid" a system for gaining understanding of observed phenomena.
Close.
Literal voodoo witchcraft needs to be considered just as "valid" because actual scientific inquiry shows all of their hypotheses about economics, psychology, sociology, etc to be completely worthless.
True story from my "Blue pill" days as a Sociology graduate student:
Grad Student wants to prove that men not doing housework leads to frustrated women and bad sex lives. Does a regression analysis on some big data set (these people NEVER collect or collate their own data) -- finds out that people in traditional marriages with a traditional division of labor are the happiest. Complete failure to reject the null hypothesis.
The ensuing 10 minute presentation on how these women must have internalized misogyny made my eyes roll out of my head -- and I haven't even begun to realize how stupid these people were yet.
I have more stories, too.
"I'm wrong, therefore I must be right in a different, impossible to disprove way" is the thinking behind essentially everything wrong with current year politics.
Hypothesis: Whitey bad
Test: Whitey kills or harms non-whitey disproportionately?
Result: No
Conclusion: Whitey harms non-whitey in invisible way that cannot be measured, thus whitey bad
Hypothesis: Capitalism bad
Test: Non-capitalist societies more successful?
Result: No
Conclusion: Capitalism made all non-capitalist societies fail, somehow, thus capitalism bad
Hypothesis: Covid kills healthy people
Test: Covid kills healthy people?
Result: No
Conclusion: "Long covid" causes every symptom imaginable and cannot be tested for, thus covid kills healthy people
Hypothesis: LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ folx are in danger!
Test: Folx more likely to be victim of violent crime?
Result: No, especially after controlling for behavior
Conclusion: Everything bad that happens to a non-straight person is a result of bullying, thus folx are in danger
Find me a single leftist viewpoint that doesn't follow this exact pattern. I'd be very impressed if you could find one.
I got another one for your list from my Grad School days - using a buzz word you probably don't hear that often anymore:
Hypothesis: Poor black people live in food deserts and are unhealthy because of institutionalized racism
Test: Poor blacks unable to access fresh vegetables/food in a cost-effective way?
Result: No, it turns out even in rural Southern Georgia, everyone has reasonable access to fresh food.
Conclusion: Black people make bad choices because of whitey.
Pretty much. Science is just the least biased way to interpret data and formulate conclusions based on those findings, but because the predominantly white west codified it, it's now an aspect of "huwaite colonialism".
They don't really respect voodoo or whatever, they're just grasping at straws for anything they can use to chip away at the foundations of society- just like when Twitter spent a week or so trying to argue that 2+2 =/= 4.
Richard Feynman was complaining about it in the 70s. And most of the History of Science you learn in grade school has the basic template of "rogue scientist discovers X and is ignored because it flies in the face of all the people who think Y" So probably closer to "never" than "recently" since scientists don't stop being human when they step into the lab.
This is true, but at least it was once a confounding variable that you tried to control for. With raw data there are ways we can do checks to see if someone is full of shit (even after the fact) --
--but these idiots with Liberal Arts degrees (and I am one of them and was once an idiot) have no such controls.
When a quack doctor releases data showing something outrageous, it's usually very easy to find the flaws in the data collection or the data interpretation.
When I was a grad student in Sociology (I told you I used to be one of those idiots), my department hired a professor whose parents were illegals and who wrote exclusively about the terrible plight of illegals. They made a big show about how they hired him and gave him the biggest starting salary they ever gave any professor and fast tracked him on tenure.
Two years later he was gone (as was I. Long gone at that point) -- I dunno if he failed tenure review or what, but all of his work was so infiltrated with his own biases it wouldn't surprise me. But in a Sociological journal you don't have that raw data, you don't have controls for confounding, you just have a name on a page and trust they have integrity.
This is how bad ideas get spread and passed off as legitimate. Academia as an institution needs to be burnt down and rebuilt from the foundations.
The role on academia in the next decades will be to clean the records.
They will scrub everything unwanted. Texts, data, studies, records, books, papers. It will all be memoryholed.
You can't have data or studies casting doubt on blank slate theory, or consequntialism as a sound ethical model. You can't just have stuff like heritability and twin studies lying around.
Academia will be reduced to a toolbox to support leftist thought. It's already almost there.
They'll hide the methodology behind paywalls, traditions and customs, groupthink, and gaslighting, and people will only see the headlines.
Lo and behold - it turns out that the leftists were right all along! About everything! Look, the Science proves it!
Everyone has biases, it's human nature. but at least when it's white males running the show you'll have less of it. Like with crime, all groups have crime, some less so. When you have White males running things they're, on average, more likely to care about integrity and the like, not always, just in comparison to most other groups. That's part of why the West has been so successful, such traits. Diversifying definitely messed that up, not to mention having too low IQs, or being as hardworking, that leads to poorer results too. And it's just stats in general, they can be manipulated very easily if the person is willing and frames it in a positive or negative light.
Reading chicken livers has better reproducibility.
Believe in Science™
reposed to discussions.app
That's cool and crazy.