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!
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!