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[–]ClassroomPast6178[S] 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

It’s not as unusual as you might think. Inconvenient data keeps popping up across the whole gamut of social justice research. The racism report that was just completed and published had some of the most egregious misrepresentations of data I’ve ever seen because the data showed that racism, whilst present in the UK, is no where near as prevalent as claimed.

I’m not surprised that research intended to clear academia of bias and censorship, and finding the opposite, has elicited this reaction.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Yeah I don't think it's uncommon. Universities these days hold very much the same position the Catholic church did in Galileo's time. They do fund a promote research and higher learning, but they also have a kind of modern orthodoxy that doesn't like it when you unpleasant conclusions that deviate from their body of what is considered "unworthy of debate because everyone knows it".

You see the creep into the other sciences besides humanities as well. You saw it with the whole evolution vs creationism controversies 20 years ago, universities became anthemic towards even the discussion of the ideals or debates against them even where it's fairly easy to make a strong argument against the hardline creationists, but that betrays an unwillingness to engage with ideas that undermine the known corpus of knowledge, these days you have popular science mouthpieces like Niel Degrasse Tyson who is admittedly more public speaker than scientist and very good at what he does, but he'll stray into theoretical physics with an authoritative certanist view even where the evidence for that view isn't as established as many think. And you get those types slowly worming their ways into the university system who grew up listening to it and find themselves radicalized in this crusade against ideas, you'll get people who will scoff at ideas like "Maybe dark matter doesn't exist, and our understanding of physics might be totally wrong" which while admittedly an unlikely prospect, is an idea we must contend with as direct evidence for the stuff fails to materialize to the point we aren't even sure what it is.

[–]ClassroomPast6178[S] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Degrasse Tyson is a full on Troon supporter. Apparently his latest book argues in favour of all that shit, probably because of his politics and the politics of his fans.

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I've seen a couple of interviews where he talks about it but I think he is only aware of the issue on a very surface level as he seems to only regurgitate the popular talking points. One being that people need to be free to express themselves as they wish, which I don't think anyone is arguing against, not seriously, the other is this somewhat naive view that the easy solution to the problem is to provide private unisex bathrooms, which indeed is a smart solution in certain contexts, new buildings probably will be smart to have a kind of all purpose handicap/changing table/gender non-conforming room for people who otherwise can't use the regular bathroom. But that doesn't fix the problems of people feeling entitled to go into restrooms where they make the intended occupants uncomfortable, nor does it fix the sports cheating problem, not does it begin to address the issues behind what appears to be a mass sterilization programme of the "feeble minded" at massive profits to the medical industry.

We have some historical reason to be worried about this, eugenics as a movement has enforced involuntary sterilizations of those deemed unfit for breeding in the past. You saw that sort of thing in native populations for example, beyond the standards of physical or mental abnormalities. I say there is truth to the idea of "trans genocide" in so far as sterilization of a group amounts to genocide. Yet in this case it appears that they're getting them to agree that they need to be sterilized or else they will kill themselves rather than doing it in secret and not telling them as was done in the past.

I think for the most part it betrays an unwillingness of people in public to breach unpleasant topics. Consider it a sort of toxic positivity if you will. I think people in science fields are highly susceptible to it as they attempt to counter the more luddite ideas from the popular culture.

I think in the larger contexts of the new atheist movement they made similar mistakes as the communists made during the revolutions of the earlier 20th centuries. While the church is certainly not above criticism, they seem to have blamed the whole of humanities problems on religious beliefs. This ides that the only reason humans are killing each other in wars is because their gods are different. Which I find laughably naive. I reckon some of what we are seeing now comes from an outright rejection not merely of the ideals of religion but an unfamiliarity with religious teaching as they pertain to myths legends and the kind of roundabout way that these stories provide a kind of wisdom of how humans relate to each other and the world, I think the scientists often times get too hung up on the literal viability of such myth and miss that the point of any is to provide some kind of moral teaching.

We had this problem with the creationism vs evolution debates, the hardline creationists failed to understand the material necessity of scientific observation to come from an observation to conclusion route rather than trying to piecemeal the evidence into their pre-conceived model, but the evolutionary side as well failed to see how in their own circles orthodoxy can produce similar if as of yet less pronounced results. I also think that while a materialist outlook is necessary in any sort of physical sciences, it's extremely foolish to disregard religion as having "nothing to it" or being utterly old fashioned. It shows a lack of familiarity with history, or even with the world as it is. There may indeed be no material cause by which we can point and prove the existence of god. Yet we see religions form and influence populations and societies all throughout history. There is some power there. Anyone who has been successful in politics understands that. Look even at the supposedly atheist communist regimes of the 20th century and see them create new pantheons surrounding their revolutionary leaders. The giant statues of the Kim dynasty for example. Hell you could even go back to the American revolution and see a similar form of deification taking place. They carved the faces of their presidents into some mountain in the middle of nowhere. And people go and make pilgrimages to it.

It can perhaps be argued that man makes his own gods, but can we not also argue that a good given power by men can wield the power given over men? Even if the god itself is not real, does that mean it's power is not real if the people believe in it?

[–]OuroborosTheory 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Tyson's sorta notorious for taking the most superficial read on, well, anything: science historians upbraided him for making up fantasies about Giordano Bruno and the team ranted that since they were in the sciences and the critics in the humanities they outranked them: presumably all a history professor has to do is check out some books at the campus library; he also said Columbus discovered the Earth was round and that the Maya don't exist any more

even Cosmos II: The Second Cosming was more about "sensawonda" and visuals than giving a good sense of the combination of scutwork with fantastic leaps of imagination you need in science

I think what happens is that they "outgrow" their formal position once they become a TV star with hit bestsellers, the talk-show circuit, even their own production company (for the RW you can see that with Jordan Peterson before he was rendered clinically dead): instead of seeing the other departments as colleagues, the campus's other professors are swept by, mildly pitied as lesser creatures who couldn't Make It; Sam Harris's specialty is fMRIs, but he's interviewed about Syria

yes, there's a SMBC comic for this