(I’m afraid that your focus on the untrustworthiness of tenured scholars makes no sense to me. If anything, it is the untenured scholars, whether inside or outside academia, whose job security depends on pandering to their audience.)
Here is an experiment: Try it on any tenured scholar who will play.
History gets revised with alarming frequency. But since the history of science is the history of what scientists actually wrote, science being a communal endeavor carried out on the permanent record, for science history we can check official history against the actual record. Revisions of science history are markedly less credible than other revisions of history.
We cannot really know to what extent males really support females in that matrilineal tribe, but we can really know what Lamarck wrote, Galileo wrote, Darwin wrote, and so on and so forth.
Taunt a tenured academic, any tenured academic, with such a revision of history, any such revision. He will weasel and wobble, and try to sound as if he is agreeing with the true version without quite disagreeing with the official version, but if pinned, will in the end piously assure us the latest version of history is true, and all earlier versions false, irrespective of whether his field of expertise has anything to do with science, history, or science history, even if you quote him chapter and verse of the latest version of history and also the writings of the original scientists that contradict it. Like Winston Smith after the interrogation, he will assure you that black is white and up is down.
Perhaps to get tenure, you need to pass a test similar to that given to Winston Smith.
The inferential distance between us on the reliability of contemporary academics is too large to cross in a comment thread. So let it simply be taken as read that you do not accept that the assertions of contemporary academics are evidence for what they assert.
This brings us back to the main point of my previous comment. By restricting what you accept as evidence, you make it harder to gather your probability mass into a small region of the space of possibilities.
Let an HGL society be a society in which “[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family.” (HGL are the initials of the authors of the study in the OP.) You have claimed that the observation of an HGL society would be “surprising”.
The percentage of societies that are HGL societies is something between 0% and 100% (inclusive). Your evidence justifies placing a certain probability distribution over the interval from 0% to 100% for the percentage of societies that are HGL societies. Even though you have restricted the kind of evidence that you will accept, sociobiology and anecdote are still powerful evidence, so it is plausible that they could justify heaping most of your probability mass over the left end of the interval — i.e., over the lower percentages.
But you claim to do more than that. You aren’t just claiming to be able to push most of your probability mass towards the left end of the interval. You say that you can heap most of your mass directly over 0.00% (which is what you must have if observing even one HGL society would be “surprising”). Sociobiology is still, to a large extent, a qualitative science. You undertake a heavy burden if you want to argue that such a qualitative science justifies concentrating so much of your probability mass over such a small region in the space of possibilities. Remember, this is a field where we can’t even predict with confidence that the percentage of exclusively homosexual males is 0.00%. It isn’t plausible that such a theory can justify the high confidence that you claim for such a precise prediction.
This brings us back to the main point of my previous comment. By restricting what you accept as evidence, you make it harder to gather your probability mass into a small region of the space of possibilities.
Yet oddly, before the Soviet Union fell, my predictions for its future were spot on, while the CIA and academia were completely wrong.
From 1980 onwards there was a vast amount of evidence that the Soviet Union was in a state of rapid collapse—which evidence anyone who paid attention to academia rejected because it was incompatible root and branch with the world view of academia and with modern twentieth century history taught in Academia.
By taking academics seriously, people rejected evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with academic worldview.
On a very wide range of topics, there is a great deal of evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with the academic world view, much of it coming from low status people, such as white refugees. (Brown refugees have slightly higher status, though still not enough to overcome the presumption of academic truthfulness) You ignore that evidence, because you have to say “Either academics are uniformly lying, or these ignorant white trash folks are repeating baseless rumors”.
If it does not fit in with the official line, and comes from a low status source, you ignore it. Since I assume that the official line is worthless, I don’t ignore it.
Sociobiology is still, to a large extent, a qualitative science. You undertake a heavy burden if you want to argue that such a qualitative science justifies concentrating so much of your probability mass over such a small region in the space of possibilities
What justifies my position is that for another supposedly matrilineal society that academics love as absolutely wonderful and highly functional, the Mosuo, folk wisdom is that it is composed of whores and pimps, similar to the culture celebrated in rap music and game blogs, where there is no significant transfer of consumables to women and children, and large transfer from women and children to a minority of men. Thus in addition to sociobiology, I have folk evidence, evidence from low status people, that academics are making stuff up.
Which is what I had in the 1980s for the Soviet Union.
From 1980 onwards there was a vast amount of evidence that the Soviet Union was in a state of rapid collapse—which evidence anyone who paid attention to academia rejected because it was incompatible root and branch with the world view of academia and with modern twentieth century history taught in Academia.
(Emphasis added.)
You are correct in saying that the conventional wisdom among academics was that the Soviet Union was not about to collapse. However, there were academics in academia and government who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union at least as precisely as Reagan did. And I see no evidence that anyone ever failed a course for predicting a rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.
Observe that Robert Gates furtively concealed the fact that it was he himself that was making the prediction, which suggests that making such a prediction might have bad consequences for one who made it.
Observe that Robert Gates furtively concealed the fact that it was he himself that was making the prediction
You seem to have misread the article.
Gates didn’t predict the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was a business partner of Stephen Brand who made the prediction in a presentation that Gates saw. According to the article cited by the Wikipedia entry:
At this point, one of the CIA analysts jumped in. The presentation was fine, he said, but there was no way the Soviet Union was going to break up – not in his lifetime, not in his children’s lifetime.
That analyst’s name, said Brand, was Robert M Gates.
Gates was denying that the Soviet Union would break up, not predicting it. Gates “jumped in” on a presentation by someone else. It was that “someone else” who made the prediction.
What evidence supports your claim that Gates ever predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union?
Here is an experiment: Try it on any tenured scholar who will play.
History gets revised with alarming frequency. But since the history of science is the history of what scientists actually wrote, science being a communal endeavor carried out on the permanent record, for science history we can check official history against the actual record. Revisions of science history are markedly less credible than other revisions of history.
We cannot really know to what extent males really support females in that matrilineal tribe, but we can really know what Lamarck wrote, Galileo wrote, Darwin wrote, and so on and so forth.
Taunt a tenured academic, any tenured academic, with such a revision of history, any such revision. He will weasel and wobble, and try to sound as if he is agreeing with the true version without quite disagreeing with the official version, but if pinned, will in the end piously assure us the latest version of history is true, and all earlier versions false, irrespective of whether his field of expertise has anything to do with science, history, or science history, even if you quote him chapter and verse of the latest version of history and also the writings of the original scientists that contradict it. Like Winston Smith after the interrogation, he will assure you that black is white and up is down.
Perhaps to get tenure, you need to pass a test similar to that given to Winston Smith.
The inferential distance between us on the reliability of contemporary academics is too large to cross in a comment thread. So let it simply be taken as read that you do not accept that the assertions of contemporary academics are evidence for what they assert.
This brings us back to the main point of my previous comment. By restricting what you accept as evidence, you make it harder to gather your probability mass into a small region of the space of possibilities.
Let an HGL society be a society in which “[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family.” (HGL are the initials of the authors of the study in the OP.) You have claimed that the observation of an HGL society would be “surprising”.
The percentage of societies that are HGL societies is something between 0% and 100% (inclusive). Your evidence justifies placing a certain probability distribution over the interval from 0% to 100% for the percentage of societies that are HGL societies. Even though you have restricted the kind of evidence that you will accept, sociobiology and anecdote are still powerful evidence, so it is plausible that they could justify heaping most of your probability mass over the left end of the interval — i.e., over the lower percentages.
But you claim to do more than that. You aren’t just claiming to be able to push most of your probability mass towards the left end of the interval. You say that you can heap most of your mass directly over 0.00% (which is what you must have if observing even one HGL society would be “surprising”). Sociobiology is still, to a large extent, a qualitative science. You undertake a heavy burden if you want to argue that such a qualitative science justifies concentrating so much of your probability mass over such a small region in the space of possibilities. Remember, this is a field where we can’t even predict with confidence that the percentage of exclusively homosexual males is 0.00%. It isn’t plausible that such a theory can justify the high confidence that you claim for such a precise prediction.
Yet oddly, before the Soviet Union fell, my predictions for its future were spot on, while the CIA and academia were completely wrong.
From 1980 onwards there was a vast amount of evidence that the Soviet Union was in a state of rapid collapse—which evidence anyone who paid attention to academia rejected because it was incompatible root and branch with the world view of academia and with modern twentieth century history taught in Academia.
By taking academics seriously, people rejected evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with academic worldview.
On a very wide range of topics, there is a great deal of evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with the academic world view, much of it coming from low status people, such as white refugees. (Brown refugees have slightly higher status, though still not enough to overcome the presumption of academic truthfulness) You ignore that evidence, because you have to say “Either academics are uniformly lying, or these ignorant white trash folks are repeating baseless rumors”.
If it does not fit in with the official line, and comes from a low status source, you ignore it. Since I assume that the official line is worthless, I don’t ignore it.
What justifies my position is that for another supposedly matrilineal society that academics love as absolutely wonderful and highly functional, the Mosuo, folk wisdom is that it is composed of whores and pimps, similar to the culture celebrated in rap music and game blogs, where there is no significant transfer of consumables to women and children, and large transfer from women and children to a minority of men. Thus in addition to sociobiology, I have folk evidence, evidence from low status people, that academics are making stuff up.
Which is what I had in the 1980s for the Soviet Union.
(Emphasis added.)
You are correct in saying that the conventional wisdom among academics was that the Soviet Union was not about to collapse. However, there were academics in academia and government who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union at least as precisely as Reagan did. And I see no evidence that anyone ever failed a course for predicting a rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.
Observe that Robert Gates furtively concealed the fact that it was he himself that was making the prediction, which suggests that making such a prediction might have bad consequences for one who made it.
You seem to have misread the article.
Gates didn’t predict the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was a business partner of Stephen Brand who made the prediction in a presentation that Gates saw. According to the article cited by the Wikipedia entry:
Gates was denying that the Soviet Union would break up, not predicting it. Gates “jumped in” on a presentation by someone else. It was that “someone else” who made the prediction.
What evidence supports your claim that Gates ever predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union?