Links to Consider, 8/4
Richard Hanania on Academia; David Rozado on the rise of extremist labels; Jason Manning on aggressive suicide; Dan Williams on truth vs. error
Universities have become a kind of halfway house for the most neurotic and conformist members of the educated class. People who care about truth and are passionate about their work would be outraged by DEI and IRB requirements and less likely to stand for them. If you go into academia, however, because you want the status of being a professor so it can make you feel like an intellectual who is more enlightened than other people, then the more paperwork the better.
You would think people who try to become professors are those most interested in ideas. My experience is, if anything, the opposite. They’re the kind of people who like the idea of thinking about themselves as people interested in ideas, but actually lack genuine curiosity about the world. If they did have curiosity about the world, they would go participate in it, where they’d have real experiences, find out how it works…there are exceptions, but the majority of academics have little to nothing important to say because they’re playing a status game, not a truth game.
You get what you select for, and academia is selecting for people who play a very conformist game.
Recent pointer from Ed West. Hanania’s post is about the Tech Right, and it is timely given some recent news.
West also points to a tweet-graph from David Rozado, pointing out the exponential rise in the use of the term “far-right” in major newspapers, and a lesser but still spectacular rise in the use of the term “far-left.”
Jason Manning is reminded of a paper he wrote about 10 years ago on Aggressive Suicide.
While suicide is often considered deviant, it may also be a kind of social control that expresses and handles moral grievances. The moralistic nature of suicide is especially clear in cases where suicide is used to bring harm against othersdthat is, cases in which suicide is a kind of interpersonal aggression. The current paper explores aggressive aspects of suicide in a variety of social contexts. Anthropological studies reveal that in many tribal and traditional societies killing oneself is a recognized means of pun- ishing others, who will be subject to supernatural curses or sanctions administered by third parties. Examining a sample of suicide cases in the contemporary U.S., I find that aggressive suicide also occurs in the modern metropolitan world. The chief punitive mechanism in modern aggressive suicide is the infliction of psychological harm, such as guilt. Drawing on Donald Black' s paradigm of pure sociology and my previous theoretical work on moralistic suicide, we can explain aggressive suicide with the relational structure of the conflicts in which it occurs. Available data reveal that aggressive suicide is most likely to occur among intimates, and that variation in relational distance predicts the nature and severity of suicide' s consequences for the living.
My guess is that there is also such a thing as aggressive transing. I think of transitioning as like suicide in that you kill the person you were in order to come back as someone else.
you are not a disinterested truth seeker. Instead, your beliefs are biased by motives and interests like self-aggrandisement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.
…For these reasons, the truth is not the default when people form beliefs about the world beyond their immediate material and social environment.
He calls the essay speculative, but to me it has the ring of truth. Another excerpt:
it should make us understand that lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere. They are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.
In other words, we should be grateful for the norms and institutions of social epistemology that work (the Constitution of Knowledge, as Jonathan Rauch puts it). We have to try to make sure that the incentives people have are to work within and improve those norms and institutions rather than evade and degrade them.
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Britain, where Williams is based, already appears to be in the process of 'reverting to the epistemic state of nature.' Early last week, shortly after Williams posted this essay, the latest in an epidemic of 'knife crime,' mostly carried out by the beneficiaries of mass immigration or their progeny, occurred when the British-born teenage son of Rwandan refugees attacked the pre-teen girls attending a 'Taylor Swift dance lesson' in Southport, wounding about ten of them and killing three. The response of police to the ensuing protests contrasted sharply to the kid-glove treatment police have accorded to the pro-Palestinian ('from the river to the sea') protests and recent protests and riots by members of the immigrant community, a phenomenon Brits refer to as 'two-tiered policing.' The newly elected Prime Minister, whose Labor Party achieved a parliamentary majority with a historically low percentage of eligible voters, has given authoritarian speeches blaming the protests on the mythical 'far right' while failing to alleviate the concerns of citizens about the safety of their children. Thanks in part to mass immigration, Britain has become what AK calls a 'low-trust society.' Against this backdrop, Williams' call for 'maintaining and improving our best epistemic norms and institutions, and winning trust in, and conformity to, them' seems a bit divorced from reality.
As an engineering retiree with past associations with a few engineering schools and living in a university town with a large engineering college, I take exception to Hanania's characterization of universities. It's probably true of many humanities programs as well as social and behavioral sciences but less so for say math, chemistry, and physics. Maybe even less for most economics departments. And professional colleges will vary too. But where I have the most heartburn is for engineering and computer science. Of course there's variation in the caliber of the professors but for the most part he's not describing the ones I know. I don't know if DEI has crept into the hiring beyond a pronounced favoritism for hiring women engineers but it's not a part of the day to day for the people I know and most are not detached from the real world.