Religion is a Mental Illness

Is Peter Boghossian What Sexism Looks Like?

Or How Does One "Know Better"

helenpluckrose.substack.com

When split out by gender, women were more likely to identify as feminist, with nine per cent using the label compared to four per cent of men. But men were more supportive generally of equality between the sexes - 86 per cent wanted it for the women in their lives - compared to 74 per cent of women.

The moral of this story is that sexists come in all shapes and sizes, political persuasions, and all it requires to fit the bill is to be a bloke who thinks he knows better than a woman who TRULY does.

Peter Boghossian appears to think he knows better than female experts in the field about how to prevent and avoid male violence.

I am not going to hit you over the head with why many women found his style of interrogation offensive and inappropriate.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear

When I taught physics at Yale in the 1980s and ’90s, my colleagues and I took pride in our position on “science hill,” looking down on the humanities scholars in the intellectual valleys below as they were inundated in postmodernism and deconstructionism.

This same attitude motivated the mathematician Alan Sokal to publish his famous 1996 article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in the cultural-studies journal Social Text. He asserted, among other things that “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct” and that “the scientific community . . . cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”

Mr. Sokal’s paper was a hoax, designed to demonstrate that postmodernism was nonsense. But today postmodern cultural theory is being infused into the very institutions one might expect to be scientific gatekeepers. Hard-science journals publish the same sort of bunk with no hint of irony:

• In November 2022 the Journal of Chemical Education published “A Special Topics Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconscious Racism in STEM.” From the abstract: “This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics.” The course promises “to explore the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.”

• In March 2022 Physical Review Physics Education Research published “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study.” From the abstract: “Within whiteness, the organization of social life is in terms of a center and margins that are based on dominance, control, and a transcendent figure that is consistently and structurally ascribed value over and above other figures.” The paper criticizes “the use of whiteboards as a primary pedagogical tool” on the grounds that they “play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. . . . They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

• A January 2023 paper presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, the world’s biggest gathering of mathematicians, was titled “Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Structural Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice.”

Undergraduates are being exposed to this stuff as well. Rice University offers a course called “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter,” in which “students will apply chemical tools and analysis to understand Black life in the U.S. and students will implement African American sensibilities to analyze chemistry.” The course catalog notes that “no prior knowledge of chemistry or African American studies is required for engagement in this course.”

Such ideas haven’t totally colonized scientific journals and pedagogy, but they are beginning to appear almost everywhere and are getting support and encouragement from the scientific establishment. There are also indications that dissent isn’t welcome. When a group of physicists led by Charles Reichhardt wrote to the American Physical Society, publisher of the Physics Education Research journal, to object to the “observing whiteness” article, APS invited a response, then refused to publish it on the grounds that its arguments, which were scientific and quantitative, were based on “the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued.”

“This is akin to stating that an astronomer must first accept astrology as true before critiquing it,” the dissenters wrote in the final version of their critique, which they had to publish in a different journal, European Review.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but in 2021 Mount Royal University in Canada fired a tenured professor, Frances Widdowson, for questioning whether indigenous “star knowledge” belonged in an astronomy curriculum. The same year, New Zealand‘s Education Ministry decreed that Māori indigenous “ways of knowing” would have equal standing with science in science classes. The Royal Society of New Zealand investigated two scientists for questioning this policy; they were exculpated but resigned. The University of Auckland removed another scientist who questioned the policy from teaching two biology classes.

In 2020, Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society published an article by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein titled “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Ms. Prescod-Weinstein wrote: “Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression.” This sentence, which dramatically misrepresents Einstein’s theory of general relativity, wouldn’t have been out of place in Mr. Sokal’s 1996 spoof.

Had an article like this appeared in 1996, it would have been dismissed outside the postmodernist fringe. But last year Mr. Sokal himself, noting that the article was No. 56 in the Altmetric ranking of most-discussed scholarly articles for 2020, felt the need to write a 20-page single-spaced rebuttal. The joke turns out to be on all of us—and it isn’t funny.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”

Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research

Download Citation | Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research | Glaciers are k

ResearchGate

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

A New Front in the War on Merit

Researchers propose measuring the “diversity factor” of new scientific discoveries.

City Journal

Millions of academic studies are published each year. Some fundamentally alter the course of history, while others never even get cited. Those curious about the effect of specific researchers, papers, or journals often turn to a metric called “impact factor.” This metric counts the number of citations accrued by a researcher or research paper, or the average number of citations for studies in a specific journal. It’s a sensible and simple method for measuring influence.

According to a new “study,” it’s also an exercise in racism and sexism.

The paper, “A new tool for evaluating health equity in academic journals; the Diversity Factor,” published in PLOS Global Public Health, correctly points out that impact factor is an imperfect measure of cultural and scientific reach. Among the problems: researchers game the stats through self-citation, and journal-impact factors are skewed by studies that pick up extremely high numbers of citations. Still, impact factor represents a reasonably good proxy of the thing it purports to measure. While sensible researchers know not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, activists instead see imperfection as opportunity. Enter: the “diversity factor.” 

The authors propose that henceforth studies should be scored according to both impact factor and their new diversity metric. Though they admit that the diversity factor is still in development, they suggest it should award points on the basis of diversity within the dataset (for example, representation of ethnic minorities), representation of authors from multiple countries, greater female representation within the authorship group, and affiliation with non-prestigious universities. These recommendations, the authors contend, will offer “a more complete perspective on factors aligned with scientific excellence based on contribution to advancing diversity and inclusion, improving health outcomes, and achieving equity.”

These exhortations represent a solution in search of a problem. It’s true that the predominance of men in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge was for a time propagated by racial and ethnic bigotry and sexism. But the goal of impact factor is to offer a snapshot measure of scientific influence, not to referee the ethics of the social and political environment in which a discovery was made. Jonas Salk’s scientific legacy ought to be defined by the development of the polio vaccine, not the absence of Aboriginal trans men on the research team that developed it.

The retroactive application of the diversity factor would be pedantic, but the potential future application of the diversity factor (or similar schemes) is alarming. Research impact has been an important consideration when it comes to the allocation of grants and the recruitment and promotion of college professors. Awarding points to research on the basis of commitment to socially desirable ideas about inclusion induces researchers to fret over concerns other than producing meaningful advancements to our knowledge.

The diversity-factor proposition also amounts to triple counting of commitment to socially fashionable ideas within academia. Studies that track with preferred leftist narratives already tend to get cited more than those that don’t. Moreover, journals often place just as much focus on ideological commitment to leftist ideas as methodological rigor in determining what gets published and how it’s scrutinized. To understand this point, look no further than the publisher PLOS Global Public Health. A PLOS journal forced one researcher to make petty corrections to a study after its politically inconvenient results drew fire from trans activists. A few years later, PLOS made it up to those activists by publishing a paper that completely abandoned sound research practices en route to findings that track with trans activists’ preferred narratives.

The end of affirmative action should have heralded a return to meritocracy over identity politics. Instead, activists are working overtime to redefine merit.

"Facts are only offensive to those who have taken refuge in fantasy." -- Michael Sherlock

Activists Now Have the Power to Spike Scientific Research They Don’t Like | National Review

The retraction of a paper on rapid-onset gender dysphoria is part of a disturbing trend.

National Review

Asignificant social-science paper, co-authored by my casual friend Michael Bailey, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Northwestern, was just retracted by the prestigious Springer-network journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. It’s worth looking at exactly why this happened.

On May 23 of this year, the good Dr. Bailey took to social media to state simply: “I have been informed that my paper, with Suzanna Diaz, will be retracted by the publisher.” Springer took this final — and extremely rare — step after several other actions against the academic piece, including the May 16 addition of a short publisher’s note warning readers about the paper and noting that one of its supplementary indices had been removed for ethical reasons. Bailey and Diaz’s article dealt with a relevant and touchy topic — it provided perhaps the best evidence so far for the phenomenon known as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — and quite a few activists greeted the paper’s final retraction with confetti.

On Twitter, trans-rights activist “Katy Montgomerie” gleefully announced: “There is no evidence for the existence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria at all. There’s only two papers on it, both by anti-trans activists. The first was so bad the journal apologized and issued corrections, the second has been retracted.” Montgomerie’s post drew 11,200 likes and — so far — more than 1,700 retweets.

However, as the speed and intensity of that reaction hint, a deeper look at this affair reveals some very troubling patterns. First, simply put, Bailey and Diaz’s paper was not un-papered because they got something wrong: All of their data — which you can review in full here — hold up. Instead, the official reason given for the retraction was a technical administrative concern. So far as I can parse this all out, “questions arose” about whether parents, who cheerfully consented to taking a survey and then consented to having that data used by the surveyors, consented to having that data used in an academic research article.

And, what is the meaning of “is,” Mr. Clinton? It should be noted here that Bailey and Diaz were absolutely up-front about all of this technical stuff, saying early in the piece that “the initial purpose of [our] survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for . . . parents with shared concerns” — and also that exactly zero actual parents seem to have ever complained to Springer.

To be fair to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Springer journals do follow notably strict rules regarding what is called “institutional review board” (IRB) consent. However, as far as I know, no other recent paper has been pulled for an alleged violation at this level. In fact, during a few online debates, Bailey has helpfully provided a whole list of roughly equivalent works that have not been retracted.

All right: enough wordplay. In reality, anyone opening this article knew at once what had happened here. Almost immediately after the Archives of Sexual Behavior published the paper, frantic transgender activists started protesting the journal and threatening boycotts. A May 5 open letter signed by academics, including Marci Bowers of WPATH and What Is a Woman? fame, the director of the Gender and Life-Affirming (GLAM) medical program at Anchor Health, and a former board member of Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality, not only panned Bailey and Diaz’s article but also called for the removal of Archives editor Kenneth Zucker, in favor of “an editor who has a demonstrated record of integrity . . . on trans matters.”

In what would be a death knell for any scientific journal — if actually done, on scale — the scholar-activists threatened to “no longer submit to the journal, act as peer reviewers, or serve in an editorial capacity” until this replacement was implemented. The letter-writing was accompanied by a social-media campaign that the Tennessee Star accurately summed up as: “criticism from transgender activists and allies.” And the activism worked, at least in causing a quick retraction (and, who really knows how long the annoyed-looking Zucker will stick around?).

All of this matters in large part because it keeps happening. Brown University’s Lisa Littman, the first scientist to bring up ROGD — which is an obvious reality, in an era when the trans-identified population has swollen to 3–5 percent of all young people — was similarly targeted after her widely read PLOS ONE paper discussing the topic. The paper caused an “explosion” of controversy, after being attacked by activists breathlessly claiming that it had major statistical problems, and it was subjected to a highly unusual “post-publication review of the study’s methods and analysis.”

The paper (unsurprisingly) survived and is now back online with only minor changes made. However, the Tennessee Star noted that a disgusted Littman herself left Brown following the affair, “after the school falsely implied that her 2018 paper on the phenomenon — marked by ‘social or peer contagion’ in friend groups or online communities — had been discredited by its publisher.” Littman and Bailey & Diaz hardly stand as exceptions on this front.

In 2020, one of the best studies that I have ever read on police shootings — a piece from Big Ten psychologists Joseph Cesario and David Johnson, which found that race has almost nothing to do with officer-involved shootings when other characteristics are adjusted for — was temporarily retracted by the authors themselves. They did so after the article was accurately cited by Manhattan Institute firebrand Heather Mac Donald, and a resultant hail of criticism from the left.

Perhaps most remarkably, the 2017 publication of Bruce Gilley’s pro-Western “The Case for Colonialism” in the journal Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of 15 of the journal’s 30-odd editorial-board members, the retraction of both print and online versions of the article, two raging petitions signed by more than 1,000 people, and perhaps a dozen death threats to Gilley himself.

We see Many Such Cases. And in each, this sort of thing represents almost textbook bullying. The strategy behind it can be outlined as follows: First, in the majority of social-science fields dominated by left-wing activists, restrict research into certain topics — using internal review panels, social sanctions, granting patterns, etc. Next, viciously attack the occasional well-done paper on tapu themes that manages to sneak through, getting most such articles pulled or “discredited.” Finally, tell smart heterodox critics of The Tower that ideas such as ROGD — or frequent detransition, or left-wing authoritarianism, or the harms of Covid masking — “can’t be taken seriously . . . because there are just no good studies supporting them.”

As it happens, there are solutions on the horizon. I myself am a member of the team working with Lee Jussim at the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (JOIBS), and we plan to re-run Bailey and Diaz’s article in full in the very near future. The threatening letter to the Archives of Sexual Behavior that I describe above was at least partly countered by a supportive missive, with dozens of signatories, from the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism — with whom I have also worked. For that matter, after a bit of time on the cross, Gilley’s famous article was reprinted in full by the pro-free-speech journal Academic Questions.

However, as we wait for new and perhaps more trustworthy experts and leaders, it’s more than fair that we keep a dubious weather eye trained on the old ones — a new cast of mind that probably was not a case of “rapid onset” for most of us.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been re-written, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street and building has been re-named, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Sage Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Sage Journals

APA’s refusal to acknowledge white supremacy in current events is a display of white supremacy that advances its centuries-long arc of white supremacy. Positioning itself as the powerful savior, the magnanimous arbiter of scientific healing, while deleting its white supremacist origin story is yet another manifestation of its whiteness. APA’s statements provide a window into the profession’s history of racism and white supremacy, while capturing its active efforts to refuse and deny it. This paper challenges this refusal, redirecting collective attention back to the past to delineate the patterns shaping our unfolding present. Organized psychology is the foundation for implementing antiracist psychological practices. However, these practices—whether they are APA statements, clinical tools, or research protocols—cannot be reimagined as antiracist until the whiteness overpowering them is revealed. This process requires interrogating contemporary practices and situating them in the histories and systems of oppression that gave rise to them.

“No More Building Resiliency” takes aim at celebrated psychological frameworks that uphold whiteness, thereby bending the moral arc of the universe towards injustice. Encouraging resilience among the nonwhite, marginalized people assaulted by whiteness and its intersecting systems of oppression, rather than condemning the sources causing harm, is an injustice. American psychology’s narrow view and orientation to individual-level change, which renders itself ineffective at best (e.g., Price et al., 2021), is harmful in more subtle ways (Chen et al., 2021; Fadus et al., 2019). Pathologizing minoritized children for attachment deficiencies theorized by white psychologists while sidestepping the violent family separation forced by the legacies of slavery and colonization is another (Causadias et al., 2021; Coard, 2021).  Detouring away from oppressive legacies is the first, most important step in an antiracist journey. However, this sharp turn cannot transpire until American psychology’s sordid history is exposed and its contemporary threads are unraveled (Legha et al. 2022). This antiracist approach to psychological practice, therefore, offers seven historical themes illuminating the whiteness engulfing commonplace psychological practices. This historically oriented approach rejects seeking reductive answers through natural processes born from colonial social order (APA Div 45 Warrior’s Path Presidential Task Force [Warrior’s Path], 2020). There are no boxes to check or competencies to master, as is often the norm for psychological practice. Anchored by CRT, abolition, and decolonization, it, instead, inspires asking better questions that lack immediate answers. Each historical theme, therefore, begins with a question prompt to implicate clinicians in remaking psychology’s white supremacist history into an antiracist future. This prompt also positions the millions of clients receiving psychological services each year to hold their providers accountable by interrogating their clinicians’ practices. Everyone owns the past, present, and future of American psychology. By transparently exposing the past and present manifestations of oppression, this antiracist future becomes closer to being within reach.

White saviorism is the white supremacist assault, thinly veiled by the language of “strengths-based,” “trauma-informed,” and playful acronyms suggesting “we got you.” Saving people from harm rather than eradicating the harm is the strategy to cover up and sustain the harm.

Thus, objectivity, much like race, reveals itself to be a socially constructed weapon leveraged by (white) people in power to advance their (racist) contentions by claiming they are numerical and, therefore, indisputable.

The lesson is clear: measurement does not imply truth. “[N]umbers are interpretive, [embodying] theoretical assumptions about what should be counted, how one should understand material reality, and how quantification contributes to systematic knowledge about the world” (Poovey, 1998, p. 12). Data–a manifestation of power, not a construct free of it–demands interrogating what is being measured and what for, who is doing the measuring and to whom are they doing it, and what (personal) agenda they are advancing and what truths they are trying to obscure.

Locating health and pathology within individual psyches and bodies represents an active and deliberate erasure of oppressive histories and racist structures.

American psychology needs a complete redo.

There are no boxes to check or competencies to master, as is often the norm for psychological practice.

Resiliency, another rigged discourse, suggests that minoritized people have–or should have–a unique ability to live with and thrive in the face of oppression as a sign of wellbeing, rather than a violence they have no choice but to suffer (Wingo et al., 2010). It harkens back to theories of “racial resistance” contending Black bodies, including children’s, were stronger in order to justify their enslavement.

"Satan doesn’t whisper, 'Believe in me.' He whispers, 'Believe in yourself.'" -- Matt Smethurst

Why I’m sticking up for science

I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government im

The Spectator

I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister. Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science. Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars. Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died). I was delighted to meet Professor Cooper for lunch, with others of the seven. His resignation letter cited the society’s failure to support science against its denigration as ‘a western European invention’. He was affronted, too, by a complaint (not endorsed by the NZRS) that ‘to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation’. Is there an implication here – condescending, if not downright racist – that ‘indigenous’ children need separate, special treatment?

Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?

To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt. Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.

My speeches in Auckland and Wellington were warmly applauded, though one woman yelled a protest. She was politely invited to participate, but she chose to walk out instead. I truthfully said that, when asked my favourite country, I invariably choose New Zealand. Citing the legacy of Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday, I begged my audiences to reach out to their MPs in support of New Zealand science. The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world. Science reads the billion-word DNA book of life itself. Science eradicates smallpox and polio. Science navigates to Pluto or a tiny comet. Science almost certainly saved your life. Science works.

Postscript on the flight out: Air New Zealand think it a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora!

Maori ‘ways of knowing’ is not science, says Richard Dawkins

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has hit out at the New Zealand government for proposing to teach traditional Maori mythology as e

thetimes.co.uk

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has hit out at the New Zealand government for proposing to teach traditional Maori mythology as equal to modern science.

The government of the former prime minister Jacinda Ardern proposed adding Matauranga Maori, or “Ways of Knowing” to the science curriculum, provoking a furious row. The proposal was put forward by the ministry of education, led at the time by Chris Hipkins, who succeeded Ardern after her shock resignation in January.

In a letter to The Spectator, Dawkins, who has recently returned from a speaking tour of New Zealand, attacked the policy of equating Maori knowledge and religious beliefs, which date back to the 13th century and include creationism, with modern science.

Dawkins defended New Zealand scientists who had opposed the plan and faced censure and allegations of racism. A number of fellows at the New Zealand Royal Society, including Garth Cooper, a medal-winning biochemistry professor at the University of Auckland who is of Maori descent, resigned from the society last year.

Seven professors, including Cooper, wrote a letter titled “In defence of science” to the New Zealand Listener in 2021, acknowledging that Matauranga Maori should be taught in schools but should not be equated with modern science. The letter said that indigenous knowledge and beliefs were “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices” but that “in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself”.

Five Royal Society members reportedly complained that the letter had caused them “untold harm and hurt”.

“Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear,” Dawkins wrote, attacking the New Zealand government for “self-righteous virtue signalling”.

“New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father,” he wrote. “Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum.”

The government has taken several steps to incorporate indigenous beliefs into government policy over recent years. In 2017, the Ardern administration granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, closing one of New Zealand’s longest-running court battles. The Maori had campaigned for more than a century to secure legal protection for the river, and the ruling prompted other countries to grant legal rights to natural treasures.

Dawkins is a long-term critic of Matauranga Maori. In a 2021 letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand, he wrote: “Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods. Creationism is still bollocks even if it is indigenous bollocks.”

Thus the creationists began to portray themselves as an oppressed minority. “Under the present system . . . the student is being indoctrinated in a philosophy of secular humanism,” one typical creationist complained. “The authoritarianism of the medieval church has been replaced by the authoritarianism of rational materialism. Constitutional guarantees are violated and free scientific inquiry is stifled under this blanket of dogmatism.” That is what a fundamentalist Christian state education official in Arizona was getting at when he said that if parents tell their children that the earth is flat, teachers have no right to contradict them. No one has a right to impose his opinion on others—and the idea that humans evolved from earlier species is, the Christians said, ultimately just some people’s opinion.

-- Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"

The Approaching Disintegration of Academia

Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.

Quillette

Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.

It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?

After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”

Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.

That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.

When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:

The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)

Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.

Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.

Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:

That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.

Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.

What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.

It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.

Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?

The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.

Liberal Organizations Should Not — And Boy Is It Crazy That I Have To Type This — Explicitly Denounce Objectivity And Rigor

On the Urban Institute and 'superpredators' and the importance of basic intellectual standards

jessesingal.substack.com|Jesse Singal

Recently, the Urban Institute, a highly respected think tank, published an article online headlined “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo.” The article argues that “long-standing values and practices rooted in racism, ableism, and classism are ingrained in the fabric of research, leaving many researchers unaware of the harm they are causing. Researchers can counteract harmful aspects of these practices by sharing power with the people and communities they study.”

To help researchers do better, the post lists three “Harmful Research Practices.” Two of them are ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigor.’ This seems strange. Aren’t objectivity and rigor the hallmarks of any decent knowledge-producing body? The Urban Institute, after all, touts itself as “a nonprofit research organization that believes decisions shaped by facts, rather than ideology, have the power to improve public policy and practice, strengthen communities, and transform people’s lives for the better.” It’s unclear what the words ‘unbiased’ and ‘authoritative’ and ‘facts’ could possibly mean in the absence of ideals like objectivity and rigor, even if, as is true of literally every human ideal, these concepts can be abused to justify malevolent acts or beliefs.

(To be clear, the post explicitly calls objectivity and rigor “Harmful research practices.” It does not say something like “they are generally good things that can be abused.” If the post did say that, there would be no reason for it to exist, because this is a very obvious point. But whenever these sorts of arguments arise, someone pops up to say, “Well, really what they’re saying is…” No! That’s a motte-and-bailey tactic and it’s annoying and we should glide on right past it.)

This explicit denunciation of objectivity and rigor and other crucial intellectual concepts isn’t new, unfortunately. It’s been percolating in liberal spaces for a while — particularly in education. Back in 2019, for example, I wrote about a slide from a training given to administrators in the New York City public school system which described ‘Individualism,’ “Worship of the Written Word,” and, yes, ‘Objectivity,’ among other things, as elements of “White Supremacy Culture.” (The New York Post originally broke that story, reporting that some administrators, unsurprisingly, were not happy with the training.)

Mandated diversity statement drives Jonathan Haidt to quit academic society

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt is resigning an academic association after attempts to force diversity statements into his work.

reason.com|J.D. Tuccille

"The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired.

The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.

www.commonsense.news|Zac Kriegman

Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.

About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.

But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.

This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell.

I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000.

In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.

This concerned me. I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

But it’s more complicated than that. Police are authorized to use lethal force only when they believe a suspect poses a grave danger of harming others. So, when it comes to measuring cops’ racial attitudes, it’s important that we compare apples and apples: Black suspects who pose a grave danger and white suspects who do the same.

Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable data on the racial makeup of dangerous suspects, but we do have a good proxy: The number of people in each group who murder police officers.

According to calculations (published by Patrick Frey, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County) based on FBI data, black Americans account for 37 percent of those who murder police officers, and 34 percent of the unarmed suspects killed by police. Meanwhile, whites make up 42.7 percent of cop killers and 42 percent of the unarmed suspects shot by police—meaning whites are killed by police at a 7 percent higher rate than blacks.

If you broaden the analysis to include armed suspects, the gap is even wider, with whites shot at a 70 percent higher rate than blacks. Other experts in the field concur that, in relation to the number of police officers murdered, whites are shot disproportionately.

There has been only one study that has looked at the rate at which police use lethal force in similar circumstances across racial groups. It was conducted by the wunderkind Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is black, grew up poor, had his fair share of run-ins with the police and, initially, supported BLM. In 2016, Fryer, hoping to prove the BLM narrative, conducted a rigorous study that controlled for the circumstances of shootings—and was shocked to find that, while blacks and Latinos were likelier than whites to experience some level of police force, they were, if anything, slightly less likely to be shot. The study generated enormous controversy. (In 2018, Fryer was suspended from Harvard over dubious allegations of sexual harassment.)

Unfortunately, because the BLM narrative was now conventional wisdom, police departments, under intense scrutiny from left-wing politicians and activists, scaled back patrols in dangerous neighborhoods filled with vulnerable black residents. This led to soaring violence in many communities and thousands of needless deaths—otherwise known as the Ferguson Effect.

For many months I stayed silent. I continued to read Reuters’ reporting on the movement, and started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way we were reporting news stories to the public.

In one story, Reuters reported on police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back—but failed to mention that they did so only after he grabbed a knife and looked likely to lunge at them.

In another story, Reuters referred “to a wave of killings of African-Americans by police using unjustified lethal force,” despite a lack of statistical evidence that such a wave of police killings had taken place. (In 2020, 18 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, according to The Washington Post database.)

And in yet another, Reuters referred to the shooting of Michael Brown as one of a number of “egregious examples of lethal police violence,” despite the fact that an investigation conducted by the Justice Department—then run by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder—had cleared the police officer in question of all wrongdoing.  

A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline.

At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies. When Donald Trump declared, in July 2020, that the police kill more white than black people—this is true—Reuters, in its dispatch, repeated the false claim that blacks “are shot at a disproportionate rate.” In December 2020, Reuters reported that black Americans “are more likely to be killed by police,” citing a 2019 National Academy of Sciences study that, our reporters claimed, found that black men were 2.5 times likelier than white men to be killed by police. In fact, the only rigorous study to examine the likelihood of police use of force—Roland Fryer’s—found that police, as mentioned, were less likely to use lethal force against black Americans.

All this left me deeply unsettled: It was bad for Reuters, which was supposed to be objective and withhold judgment. It was bad for our readers, who were being misinformed. And it was bad for black people in rough neighborhoods, where local officials, prompted to take action by reporting like ours and the public outcry it triggered, were doing things like defunding the police.

Reuters, which is headquartered in London, is hardly the biggest news organization in the United States, but its stories are published in newspapers across the country and read by millions of Americans. It influences our perception of reality. It matters. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should speak up, but I wanted to preserve my career. My wife, Cynthia, and I started arguing. I’d stay up late into the night compulsively reading the news and studies about policing. I took a two-month leave of absence while I agonized over what to do.

While I was gone, I started writing a post about the disconnect between what we thought was true and what was actually happening. I wasn’t sure what I planned to do with it. Maybe I would share it. More likely it would just be a kind of therapy, a chance for me to work through some of these issues.

In my post, I examined all the data I had compiled, and I cited the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey and several academic studies (see, for example, here, here, here and here) to help back up my conclusions—in addition to Fryer’s.

I also pointed out that there had been zero properly designed studies refuting Fryer’s findings. And I noted that a growing number of criminologists—like Paul Cassell, at the University of Utah; Lawrence Rosenthal, at Chapman University; and Richard Rosenfeld, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—now believed that the false rhetoric around police bias had played a key role in the recent spike in violent crime. This suggested that the BLM lie had led to the murder of thousands of black people.

To drive home my point, I included this striking statistic: On an average year, 18 unarmed black people and 26 unarmed white people are shot by police. By contrast, roughly 10,000 black people are murdered annually by criminals in their own neighborhoods.

When I returned from my leave of absence, I was ready to post my summary to the Hub, where my colleagues regularly posted things about any number of hot-button issues. Cynthia wasn’t sure. She wasn’t just worried about my job, but also about her job, and she was worried that word would get out to the rest of our community. BLM lawn signs lined our street. Our friends sympathized with the cause. We wondered whether we’d be ostracized. We spent many hours over many weeks talking it through. I had come close to posting and then pulled back, and then again, and again. We were talking about it in couples therapy. Finally, I got the okay from Cynthia to publish. She understood that this was about me speaking freely and honestly about something I knew about, cared about and felt I had the responsibility to do something about. I took a deep breath and shared my post on the Hub. It was early May 2021.

Within an hour or two, the moderators had taken down my post.

I messaged my Human Resources contact to inquire why my post had been removed. She told me anyone could flag a post for review, at which point it would be immediately taken down. She didn’t say anything else. I had no idea who had objected or what the grounds for the objection were, or when, if ever, my post would be reinstated.

Over the next two weeks, I kept checking back with her to see when they would reinstate it. After a good bit of waiting and wondering, she told me that “a team of human resources and communications professionals” was reviewing it. I asked if I’d be allowed to discuss the moderators’ concerns with them. She said no. Finally, she told me my post would not be reinstated because it had been deemed “antagonistic” and “provocative.”

When I asked what, exactly, was antagonistic or provocative, she suggested I speak with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. So, I scheduled a meeting.

I should mention that, while this was going on with H.R., I met with my manager, who expressed surprise and concern that I had written and then shared my post. It could hurt me at the company, she said. It could put the kibosh on any future promotions.

The next week, I met with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. I asked what was wrong with my post. She said she couldn’t tell me, because she hadn’t been involved in the decision to remove it. (I was unclear whether she’d actually read it.)

The next week, there was another meeting—this time with H.R. and Diversity and Inclusion. I wanted to know what I had to change in my post to make it acceptable. They suggested scrubbing all instances of the term “systemic racism,” to start.

So I did that, and the piece was reinstated. I was relieved. Such discussion about facts and statistics had to be permitted. It was impossible to report the news accurately if employees were not allowed to have internal, sometimes heated discussions about pretty much anything.

Then the comments started rolling in. A handful of BLM supporters, all of them white, said that, as a white person, I had no place criticizing BLM. They called my review of the academic literature “whitesplaining” (failing to note that many of the academics I cited were black). I was publicly derided as a “troll,” “confused,” “laughable,” and “not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation” with. One colleague said: “I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so. My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,’ I'm not obligated to do so.”

Notably absent from the attacks directed at me was even a single substantive challenge to the facts I was citing.

It was insulting and painful. Not a single executive, no one in H.R., no one in Diversity and Inclusion, condemned any of the public attacks on me. They were silent. I’m not surprised no one came to my defense. Who would take that kind of a risk? It became very clear very fast that my public takedown was intended to ensure that there would be no discussion around BLM or the question of police brutality and race.

After enduring waves of abuse, I emailed H.R. to express my concern about these attacks on me and their chilling effect. They responded by removing my post—and shutting down the conversation. I was told that, if I discussed my experience on any internal company communications channel, I would be fired.

I was distraught.  Here I was trying to bring the company's attention to how we were spreading lies that were contributing to the murders of thousands of black people, and I was compared to a Klansman sympathizer, and forbidden by the company to discuss any of it.

I had little doubt about the sincerity of H.R.’s threat to fire me.  But I still had a faint hope that the company’s senior leadership would right the ship if I could only make them aware of the matter.  Regardless, given the way the internal conversation had ended, I didn’t see a tenable way to continue working at the company without some sort of resolution.

So, I sent an email to colleagues and company leadership, again expressing concern about how the attacks against me had successfully shut down any productive conversation and left my reputation in tatters. The next day, H.R. called me to say that my access to all company computer and communications systems had been revoked.

Three days later, on June 8, 2021, I was fired.

“As we discussed on Friday,” H.R. said in their parting email, “you’ve violated our expressed direction and have repeatedly refused to follow the counsel offered.” The email went on:“The manner in which you’ve conducted yourself in recent weeks does not align with our expectations for you as a leader within Thomson Reuters.”

A decade ago, my experience at Thomson Reuters would have been unthinkable. Most Americans probably think it’s still unthinkable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Most of us don’t understand how deeply compromised our news sources have become. Most of us have no idea that we are suffused with fictions and half-truths that sound sort of believable and are shielded from scrutiny by people whose job is to challenge them. This is true, above all, of my fellow liberals, who assume that only Republicans complain about the mainstream media. But this is not a partisan issue. This is a We The People issue.

In January, I filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination stating that I was fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment. (The MCAD works in conjunction with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) We’ll see whether the state finds that there are grounds for a lawsuit.

However that shakes out will not change the fact that thousands of black Americans are dead, in part because too many people are still unaware of basic facts about policing since their trusted news sources meticulously obscure the truth. The job of journalists is to report the stories that don’t comport with the prevailing or popular narrative. We desperately need them to do that again.

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, private property and a market economy.

1. Liberalism is wokeness, or a type of wokeness.

1. Liberalism decays into wokeness and wokeness is an inevitable result of liberalism.

Minority professor denied grants because he hires on merit: 'People are afraid to think'

'I don't care about the colour of your skin. I'm interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it,'

nationalpost.com

'I don't care about the colour of your skin. I'm interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it,' Prof. Patanjali Kambhampati says

An award-winning Canadian scientist said he has been refused two federal government grants for his research on the grounds of “lack of diversity” — even though he is originally from India and has repeatedly suffered racism.

Patanjali Kambhampati, a professor in the chemistry department at Montreal’s McGill University, believes the death knell for the latest grant was a line in the application form where he was asked about hiring staff based on diversity and inclusion considerations. He says his mistake was maintaining that he would hire on merit any research assistant who was qualified, regardless of their identity.

“We will hire the most qualified people based upon their skills and mutual interests,” Kambhampati wrote on the application.

“I’ve had two people say that was the kiss of death,” said Kambhampati. “I thought I was trying to be nice saying that if you were interested and able I’d hire you and that’s all that mattered. I don’t care about the colour of your skin. I’m interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the project and is good at it.”

Kambhampati said he didn’t go public after the first grant was rejected but decided to speak out now because the increasing use by the government of equity, diversity and inclusion, aka “EDI,” provisions, as well as woke culture, are killing innovation, harming science and disrupting society.

“I believe this is an important stand to make. I will not be silenced anymore,” he said.

Kambhampati’s work explores the cutting edge of super-fast laser science, a field that spans everything from telecom to medicine. He believes Canada can become a world leader in the field.

But his application for a $450,000 grant this month from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) was turned down because, the council said, “the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion considerations in the application were deemed insufficient.”

His grant application a year ago to the federally funded National Frontiers in Research Fund  — whose object is “to support world-leading interdisciplinary, international, high-risk/high-reward, transformative and rapid-response Canadian research” — was also turned down on similar grounds.

Because both applications were rejected at the bureaucratic level, it means that neither proceeded to the step where they would be forward to other scientists to review Kambhampati’s proposals.

But Kambhampati said he believes basing his hiring decisions on merit is a valid, moral position to hold.

“I think what’s happened is the woke and the social justice warriors have made a moralistic argument the way the religious right used to make moralistic arguments. And now people are afraid to challenge them. But I think it’s okay to say I believe that equality is a morally valid position. I believe that meritocracy is a morally valid position.”

A request for comment from NSERC was not answered on Tuesday.

Around the same time that Kambhampati’s latest application was turned down, another arm of the government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, gave Dr. Lana Ray, a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., a $1.2-million grant to study cancer prevention using traditional Indigenous healing practices. When the award was announced, Ray said “We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism.”

Kambhampati, 50, was born in India and moved to the United States when he was four. He lived and worked in Minnesota, Texas and California, before moving to Montreal in 2003 to take up a professorship at McGill. As an immigrant he said he had experienced numerous incidents of racism.

“In childhood I used to get constant beatings and name calling,” he told National Post, adding that as an adult, he would also get harassed by U.S. border guards, and has been racially profiled in Canada, too.

“Two years ago, I had eight police officers break into my house because I was sitting on my porch while brown. That happened on Canada Day.”

But he says his experiences taught him to treat everyone equally and fairly.

“People do different things. They have different abilities. They have different interests,” he said. “To me, the whole point is to treat people as individuals, so that’s what I do in my life. My way of dealing with racism, or sexism, or any other ‘ism’ is to treat people as individuals.”

As scientists, he said, “we don’t believe in EDI. We believe in merit, fairness and equality. You should be fair in your procedures and treat people as equals.”

However, “if I want to focus on merit, fairness and equality, then you get called out as a racist or sexist and I refuse to let that happen to me,” Kambhampati said.

“I actually get called a racist constantly by white university students who believe that prejudice plus power equals racism. And as a result (they say), I have internalized racism. So, if you are a minority who thinks that the racism of the woke left is overstated they say you have internalized racism.”

Kambhampati believes woke ideology, that is so prevalent on campus and has leached into government, is creating two major problems: self-censorship and a resistance to asking meaningful questions.

“There’s a lot of self-censoring. And certainly you see it among young people in the university. So young people in the university self-censor a lot. Now they are afraid to talk. That’s no way to advance our understanding of the world.

“As a scientist, our job is to think about how nature works, ask questions, and find answers without prejudice. We cannot do that anymore. We cannot ask how humans work, and how science and nature work, because the woke are interfering with us and saying, ‘You can’t ask those questions. You’re a racist. You’re a sexist. You’re a homophobe. You’re a colonialist. You’re a something.’ There’s some way in which the woke are trying to get people (so they’re) no longer asking meaningful questions.

“People are afraid to think. People are afraid to say what they think.”

Kambhampati said woke ideology had accelerated in the last several years. “And now it’s the prevailing culture” but he believes “it’s 90 per cent of the normal people against 10 per cent of the vocal minority that has shamed everyone into self-censorship.”

Kambhampati said that as a child his mentors were “old, white World War Two vets” who taught him how to build radio-controlled airplanes. “And that’s what led me to build lasers 30 years later.”

Now, as a mentor himself, Kambhampati said he has helped men and women of different cultures and religions.

“I’ve actually made a huge effort to provide outreach to different types of people because that seems to be the humane thing to do. Not because I’m being ordered to do it.

“I’ve mentored minorities. I’ve mentored women. I myself am a Third World minority. And I have mentored people who have catastrophic illnesses. And I have mentored people who are LGBTQ, and not for any reason other than to treat people as equal.

“Some of my group are straight, white men. Am I not to mentor them as equally as the others? That’s what’s implied. I can’t do that in good conscience.”

GIF by just-r-connection

Increasing Politicization and Homogeneity in Scientific Funding: An Analysis of NSF Grants, 1990-2020 - CSPI Center

CSPI Report No. 4   Summary: The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the main governmental scientific grant distributing body in the United

CSPI Center

Richard Feynman introduced a concept he called “cargo cult science” during a commencement speech at Caltech in 1974.1 In the Second World War, Allied and Japanese airbases sprung up on islands in the South Pacific that were home to pre-industrial cultures that previously had little contact with the modern world. The soldiers on many of these bases would trade manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, and other goods with the natives, most of which arrived by airdrop. After the war ended and the soldiers left, the native populations on some of the islands began to create replicas of things like airstrips, airplanes, and flight control towers. They even made mock radios and headphones out of coconuts and straw. The natives believed that by recreating the conditions under which the airplanes came and dropped goods, they could get the airdrops to resume.

There were entire areas of academic study that Feynman called “cargo cult science” – mostly in the fields of social science and education. These areas of inquiry see the success that the scientific method delivers in disciplines like physics, chemistry, and medicine, and produce superficial replicas of scientific practices. They miss something essential, however, and as Feynman says, “the planes never land.” So, what is this missing element in “cargo cult science?” It is “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.” Science requires a willingness to relentlessly assail one’s assumptions and a capacity to bend over backwards to try and disprove ideas even if one passionately wants to believe they are true. I would love to be able to revisit this critique of Feynman’s and have a good laugh at how strange and backwards academic institutions and scientific agencies must have been in the 1970s, but unfortunately, this critique feels as salient today as it must have when Feynman first expressed it almost 60 years ago.

Ideally, the “cargo cult sciences” should start to recede as their practitioners start to notice that “the planes aren’t landing.” What if, however, we have in place institutions that have degraded to a point where they subsidize and reward practices that are not actual science, but a kind of science-like interpretive dance? Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen find that there has been a precipitous increase in the number of science publications, PhD students graduating in STEM fields, and government spending on National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants since the 1960s.2 Their same work, however, shows that when scientists were surveyed about the importance of Nobel Prize winning discoveries between the 1920s and 1980s, results indicated anywhere from a decline to a general stagnation in the impact of science over that time period – nothing anywhere near the output we might expect given the tremendous amount of time and energy now invested. One theory posited by Collison, as well as economist Tyler Cowen and others, is that science might just be getting harder; we have gotten to all the low-hanging fruit and now are in the territory of diminishing returns.

Science may be getting harder, but it seems unlikely that this is the sole, or perhaps even largest, cause of decreasing productivity. In addition to the previously mentioned increase in funding to scientific research, the costs of many of the important inputs to research – such as computing power, gene sequencing, and various types of lab equipment – have been declining exponentially. With a rise in funding and a decline in the costs of many inputs, we might expect to be able to generate increased scientific output despite potentially increasing difficulty.

Although a fuller explanation for technological and scientific stagnation is beyond the scope of this work, here I analyze the abstracts of successful NSF applications and find two reasons to believe that something has gone wrong with the culture of science, particularly in the last few decades. The first of these is increasing politicization. If paying lip service to fashionable political ideas becomes an important criterion for successful grant applications, this will certainly detract from the importance of other more vital criteria – namely those related to the quality and importance of the proposed research. When the process of deciding what research projects get funded comes to be based on a political litmus test, the scientific endeavor suffers. Additionally, the more that scientific institutions come to be viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues. We may be starting to see the harmful effects of this process in the current epistemic crisis regarding public health. The growing view of science as a vehicle for activism detracts from its more vital role of being a dispassionate referee that adjudicates the validity of empirical claims.

The second major result in this work is the constriction of the space of ideas within NSF award abstracts. The number of NSF awards given and the total amount of taxpayer money spent by the NSF have increased consistently since 1990, and yet this work provides evidence suggesting that the breadth of ideas within NSF award abstracts has been contracting. In different contexts, bureaucracies can become positive feedback chambers reinforcing and amplifying favored ideas while excluding others. Recent work by Johan Chu and James Evans supports this view by showing that the larger a scientific field becomes, the more it tends to stagnate, with more reliance on established works in citation patterns and fewer fundamental breakthroughs.3 The NSF is ostensibly an organization meant to stimulate scientific progress for the benefit of the nation, but the way in which it has become entangled with academia and established institutions may make it seem more like a professional guild representing the interests of its members. Such factors could explain the stagnation we see in the ability of the NSF to identify and support novelty.

Activism Has No Place In Science

Activists are hijacking science to push through their idiocy.

sjoerd.substack.com|Sjoerd Bekius

Activists are hijacking science to push through their idiocy. The trust we have in science causes people to believe the idiocy because “research” and “new peer-reviewed studies” say it is true.

While society is plummeting into the abyss, another problem occurs. For the society that is smart enough to stop the nonsense when seeing, over and over again, that the idiocy does not work with reality, the trust in science will be gone. For it was science who pushed society into the abyss.

In this essay I explain why science and activism do not go together well, and how their feeble marriage will cause a messy divorce in which all parties will be damaged.

Activism vs. Scientific Method

Activists and movements have agendas. The truth does not. Whatever you think is true does not matter if it is not actually true. If you think it is true you can survive falling from the Empire State Building, good luck.

The mixing of activism and science will always lead to a situation where the truth is not useful to the narrative of the activist movement. At that point, the truth has to be discarded, or the movement has to stop. Since it is a rare movement that cancels itself due to being contradicted by the truth, it is usually the truth that gets the short end of the stick. As Gad Saad wrote in Parasitic Mind,

“If the truth hurts, it must be suppressed for the sake of diversity, inclusion, equity, and of course community cohesion.”

This would not be very problematic if the truth loses out to conviction at your local pub. It is also not super-problematic at Christmas dinners, although it can be annoying. However, when the truth loses out at institutions that exist to find out the truth, it becomes a problem.

In the essay “Microaggressions, Questionable Science, and Free Speech,” Edward Cantu and Lee Jussim describe how this works. They write, about the bogus research about microaggressions,

“Rather, one could fairly suspect that the CMC represents an activism of sort, wherein the problem – widespread subtle racism – is assumed, such that reinforcement of an activist narrative is the pre-ordained conclusion.”

This exactly shows the problem. When an activist movement assumes a problem, it needs to substantiate its existence with evidence, either fabricated or real. There is no way for activism to survive if it would accept the truth when it contradicts the assumed world-view. The truth will suffer.

Attack on Trust

As I mentioned before, it is not highly problematic if the truth suffers at Christmas dinners or local pubs. However, when it starts losing out in the very institutions that we trust to tell us what is true, we have a major problem.

Recently, I wrote an essay about Trust Capital. I wrote that Critical Theory damages the trustworthiness of any individual or institution it touches, because it forces them to defend lies. Once the lies are found to be lies, the people who defended them will lose trust.

The problem with mixing activism and science is that the activists are spending the trust capital of universities in massive amounts in order to push through their lies. The universities, at some point, will run out of trust.

In the essay by Cantu and Jussim, they also write,

“Idea laundering refers to a process that may be growing more common in academic publishing. It involves the capture of peer review processes by activists to create the false impression that certain ideologically and rhetorically useful claims have scientific credibility, even when, by conventional scientific standards of rigor, logic, and strong evidence, the claims command no credence.”

“In the total absence of validity evidence, new researchers can then further cite one another’s peer reviewed publications to support the claim.”

What they say is that activists use the trust that people have in science to push through ideas that do not hold up when using the scientific method correctly. Obviously, at some point, the truth will catch up and people will lose trust in science because it told them lies.

Therefore, if these institutions do not stand up for truth, they will go down. If they allow activists to abuse science and turn it into something worthless, people will lose trust in it. If the term science is abused so much that people lose trust in the scientific method, that would be very problematic, for it would rob a society of a useful way to find the truth.

Conclusion

Mixing activism and science is bad, because activists are not interested in the truth, but science is. Activists are now pushing through their idiocy under the guise of science, which will cause science to lose trust. This is unfortunate for any society interested in finding out what is true, because science is the way to do that.

I want to end with a quote from the aforementioned book Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad.

“Activate your sense of personal responsibility. You have agency. Participate. Do not be a bystander as truth, reason, and logic call out for your help.”

If you defend what is true, it is hard to be wrong.