How Democracy Dies

[Oexmelin]

My point is that it does cause damage to society, but that the damage is long-term; it erodes our ability, as a society, to fight sloppy thinking in general. It isn't causative of our current ills (that has many parents), but it isn't helping.

But I (mostly) agree with all that (we could quibble about the kind of reality science runs up against).

My point wasn't that the humanities have no influence whatsoever on the fabric of society - but that the very thing that (initially) irks you - the decline in the value of truth - cannot so simplistically be attributed to a specific trend within the humanities as academic discipline that would have, somehow, rendered us collectively helpless against Trumpism. 

Now, if you would rather argue that, rather than the cause of it, it "isn't helping", it's a slightly different discussion, and it is one that is precisely discussed rather seriously within academia. Mostly because no one really know what "helping" would look like. To sum up grossly some of the terms of the debate, the problem we, collectively, seem to have, is that we haven't really found a good way to tie together "matters of fact" with "matters of concern". While matters of fact contain a lot of "knowledge", they also contain some components of "politics" - because a fact is meaningless if it isn't attached to some collectively recognized way to be recognized as true. And while "matters of concern" contain a lot of politics, they also contain some components of "knowledge", because concern cannot emerge without data of some kind. To be able to express both, in a way that recognizes individual, and collective actors, seems to be our current predicament.

[mongers]

As it stands, it is no wonder people have become so compartmentalized. Why bother with a field filled with impenetrable jargon, that makes no pretence at arming people to actually sift facts for objective truth.

......

What I have seen, however, from students, is an obsession over uncovering bias. It's the idea that, once you have discovered the hint of an author's perspective on things, or an ideological orientation, or even some weakness in the overall architecture of an author's argument, the thesis can be safely disregarded. It's always done in the name of truth and objectivity. 

Now, this, the idea of "unmasking" as the end-all, be-all of critique, I have seen academics do. But I have seen a lot of people do it - it's been a political trick since at least the 18th century. Whether or not this current incarnation of unmasking-as-critique is the product of academia, we can perhaps debate, and there might be more grist to your mill there. My own sense is that "unmasking" is first and foremost, a political gesture, answering a political climate - not an epistemological crisis about the nature of truth.

Thanks, interesting.

[viper37]

Oh, and one more thing:  it's hard to find a phrase more Orwellian than "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences".  That's the justification used for why it's okay for people to be fired for saying dumb things in their personal life. 

If freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, then what the fuck does it actually mean?  Freedom from having your vocal cords severed?  The whole point of having freedom of speech is to not discourage people to voice things that may not be popular, and that doesn't end at First Amendment.  First Amendment is just a US government recognition of the concept, but the concept is universally applicable.

Frankly, I find people wishing for people to be fired and celebrating when it inevitably happens to be very scary.  The people in history who have the most innocent blood on their hands have usually being authoritarians who believed themselves to be righteous in their violence.

Freedom from having the state restrict speech.

Freedom of speech means nothing if it is limited to your living room.  Or I was told a prominent leftist of this forum.

[viper37]

Activists =/= Ivory Tower. The two are mutually exclusive.

whatever.  people from the likes of social sciences at UQAM.  People who don't work and don't have to study to get a pass, so when they don't plan rebellions or vandalize stores, they send threatening letters to people who don't use a totally new gender neutral pronouns or get them fired from their jobs.

As demonstrated by the latest crisis we suffered over here, these people have at least lots of sympathizers in the teaching and political corps.

[grumbler]

Society should retaliate by cutting off funding for universities until they get their shit together.

This makes no sense, in a 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' sort of way.

Please stop feeding the troll.

Thanks.

[grumbler]

However - in the end, sloppy science will run up against reality, however painful the damage it may do along the way...

Indeed.

[grumbler]

Activists =/= Ivory Tower. The two are mutually exclusive.

whatever.  people from the likes of social sciences at UQAM.  People who don't work and don't have to study to get a pass, so when they don't plan rebellions or vandalize stores, they send threatening letters to people who don't use a totally new gender neutral pronouns or get them fired from their jobs.

As demonstrated by the latest crisis we suffered over here, these people have at least lots of sympathizers in the teaching and political corps.

Oex is arguing, correctly, that "Ivory Tower" intellectualism is criticized precisely because it is not concerned with practical outcomes to practical concerns.  Activism is the opposite of that unconcern.

Now, criticism of the Ivory Tower approach isn't always accurate or valid, because there is value to having people think about issues that have no immediate practical applications (say, theoretical physics), but to accuse Ivory Tower intellectuals of being absurdist in their activism is a contradiction in terms.

[Eddie Teach]

Chip, you seem pretty hostile toward universities. You're not a grad student by any chance? 

[chipwich]

I didn't get scammed that hard.

[DGuller]

I didn't get scammed that hard.

So you think your college education was a scam?     I can see why you would think that.

[Zoupa]

I didn't get scammed that hard.

So you think your college education was a scam?     I can see why you would think that.

[viper37]

If a scholar attempts to publish their sloppy thinking it will immediately be detected through the review process. 

if that were true, there would be so much bad studies out there - in all fields, even hard sciences.

[viper37]

How has it impacted the tens of thousands of people who come out of business school,

The master race is immune to that.   
It has impacted a lot of them, in many faculties.  But it is hard to discern between those that never received good teaching and those who should never have studied there *points at a certain recent scandal*.
But people coming out of law school, practicing in a business and not knowing the basics of the law as it applies to construction projects, that I have seen.  People coming out of business school, working in a bank, and having no idea what to do besides pushing a button and repeating what they've been told, I have seen my fair share.  And unfortunately, the weaker ones aren't always chaffed out.
Same goes for engineers.  I have seen some really, really bad engineers, totally incompetant, borderline dangerous.

But you can easily spot them and challenge them.  And eventually, many of them are caught.  But in social sciences, not so much.  Even some accounting teachers can get long carreers spouting crap just because they work with the social science departments to publish their crappy work...

[viper37]

How can professors arm people with the necessary intellectual tools when the shift in post secondary education has been away from liberal arts degrees to STEM and business degrees?

a) not a universal truth

b) slightly misleading.  More people receive post secondary education today than 100 years ago.  I don't think there's a shift away from liberal arts degrees.  But we most likely do have less students in philosophy than in the late middle ages.  Not sure it is an apt comparison, though. 

[viper37]

Simply telling people "The Facts' or deploying scientific evidence has been spectacularly ineffective in the political sphere.

you don't say...  #Syt's sisters#