Regarding the authors’ attempts to get papers published in these journals, the review doesn’t make it seem like the book relies on that experiment being valid (and the review itself does not) - it just talks about various features of these fields and theorizes about their causes and effects. I also don’t think that their experiment was ‘bad science’ in the sense of being uninformative. If ‘grievance studies’ journals are willing to publish bad papers, that does tell you something about those journals, even if ‘hard science’ journals are also willing to publish bad papers (which we know, thanks to the replication crisis and bloggers like Andrew Gelman, that they are). Also, Wikipedia says “By the time of the reveal, 4 of their 20 papers had been published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review.”. It seems unfair to include the papers that were under review in the denominator, since their efforts ended early, so I’d evaluate their success rate at 1 in 2, rather than 1 in 3, which isn’t so bad.
The line of arguments that critical studies are illiberal because they remove the focus from the individuals, their personal choices and responsibilities to structural and systemic tendencies seems to prove too much.
This is really not what the review portrays the arguments to be, so I’m having difficulty engaging with this paragraph. Could you perhaps quote an example of that argument in the book or in the review that you think is invalid?
But a more important point is that in this methaphor wokeness and social justice are our immune system against fashism.
I’d say that liberalism is a sufficient immune system—altho I’m obviously interested in ways that it isn’t.
I don’t see how creating a rallying flag for liberals to stand against social justice in a culture war is going to help. On the contrary, this leads to evaporation of group beliefs and more radicalisation of the left due to toxoplasma of rage.
I think the idea is to give a certain strain of thinking a name, and analyse what its like, to make it easier for people to figure out if that strand of thinking is somehow bad and avoid it if it is. Presumably you’re sometimes in favour of this kind of thing, so I’d like to know what you think makes this effort different
I don’t think you can make a case against default ideology in science from the liberal position.
I think liberalism allows the idea that many people can have a wrong worldview!
Regarding how the ‘second secularism’ deals with issues like de facto segregation in the US: I agree that that’s the sort of thing that critical social justice cares about, but it’s also something that liberalism can discuss and grapple with. As you mention, in order to understand the problem you probably also need to understand racism, but that doesn’t automatically mean that things other than critical social justice can’t deal with the problem, or that critical social justice frames are going to be successful (e.g. it might make you think that people only bring up house values as a pretext for racism, when it seems pretty intuitive to me that people actually do care about how much money they have).
A final note: I get the sense that you maybe think I wrote this review. I actually didn’t, but I mostly liked it, somewhat mooting the point.
Regarding the authors’ attempts to get papers published in these journals, the review doesn’t make it seem like the book relies on that experiment being valid (and the review itself does not) - it just talks about various features of these fields and theorizes about their causes and effects. I also don’t think that their experiment was ‘bad science’ in the sense of being uninformative. If ‘grievance studies’ journals are willing to publish bad papers, that does tell you something about those journals, even if ‘hard science’ journals are also willing to publish bad papers (which we know, thanks to the replication crisis and bloggers like Andrew Gelman, that they are). Also, Wikipedia says “By the time of the reveal, 4 of their 20 papers had been published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review.”. It seems unfair to include the papers that were under review in the denominator, since their efforts ended early, so I’d evaluate their success rate at 1 in 2, rather than 1 in 3, which isn’t so bad.
This is really not what the review portrays the arguments to be, so I’m having difficulty engaging with this paragraph. Could you perhaps quote an example of that argument in the book or in the review that you think is invalid?
I’d say that liberalism is a sufficient immune system—altho I’m obviously interested in ways that it isn’t.
I think the idea is to give a certain strain of thinking a name, and analyse what its like, to make it easier for people to figure out if that strand of thinking is somehow bad and avoid it if it is. Presumably you’re sometimes in favour of this kind of thing, so I’d like to know what you think makes this effort different
I think liberalism allows the idea that many people can have a wrong worldview!
Regarding how the ‘second secularism’ deals with issues like de facto segregation in the US: I agree that that’s the sort of thing that critical social justice cares about, but it’s also something that liberalism can discuss and grapple with. As you mention, in order to understand the problem you probably also need to understand racism, but that doesn’t automatically mean that things other than critical social justice can’t deal with the problem, or that critical social justice frames are going to be successful (e.g. it might make you think that people only bring up house values as a pretext for racism, when it seems pretty intuitive to me that people actually do care about how much money they have).
A final note: I get the sense that you maybe think I wrote this review. I actually didn’t, but I mostly liked it, somewhat mooting the point.