Sociobiology suggests that a male will support his own offspring twice as much as he will support his nieces and nephews, and four times as much as he will support his half sister’s children, thus the alleged observation is surprising.
Folk anecdote is that the flow of support is pretty much proportional to paternal certainty. In those societies with low paternal certainty, for which we have observations that are not filtered through tenured observers, women and children support adult males, not the other way around.
If a man is supporting his sister, which is to say his sister’s children, rather than his own, this suggests an environment of low paternal certainty. In an environment of low paternal certainty, there is also a high probability that a sister is in fact a half sister, reducing the male propensity to support women and children to insignificant levels, resulting in the observed behavior that in such societies, successful men predate on women and children, and unsuccessful men are ignored by women and men alike—observed, that is by poor ignorant racist people, whose observations are apt to be curiously different from those of highly intelligent tenured people.
It seems that common folk observe people acting as biology predicts, and the tenured folk observe something different.
Sociobiology suggests that a male will support his own offspring twice as much as he will support his nieces and nephews, and four times as much as he will support his half sister’s children, thus the alleged observation is surprising.
None of the reporting I’ve seen claims that the men with their own children are giving their resources to their sisters. But I haven’t read the research article itself, which is behind a paywall, so I’m open to correction. Does the article say that married men are giving their resources to their sisters (rather than to their wives)? If not, your objection is irrelevant.
In general, your appeal to “folk anecdote” and sociobiology can at best show that such societies should be rare. To show that none at all exist is to incur a heavier burden of evidence than you have borne.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) predicts that men who are exclusively homosexual are rare. And indeed they are. But EP is not falsified by the existence of a minority of men who are exclusively homosexual, because EP does not place a fatally large amount of probability mass on there being no exclusively homosexual men. Similarly, even if EP (plus induction from folk anecdote) predicted that societies are overwhelmingly likely to be set up along the lines that you describe, that would not suffice to make it extremely unlikely for a few societies to deviate far from your description.
(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.)
(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.)
On a tangential note, it is my impression (admittedly based on relatively little evidence and perhaps biased) that getting tenure nowadays involves severe enough scrutiny that it really is extremely hard for anyone who harbors disreputable beliefs to get through the process, even if he tries to hide them. I can think of some examples of people who got tenure two, three, or more decades ago doing uncontroversial work and then proceeded to voice disreputable beliefs once shielded by it, to the great frustration and anger of their academic colleagues. However, I can’t think of any more recent examples.
If this is true, then it might be that aside from these old exceptions who are nearing retirement or already retired, it is more probable to see a disreputable belief expressed as a self-destructive act of an untenured academic than by a tenured academic who takes advantage of the privilege to speak his mind—since the latter is practically guaranteed to be rigorously selected for sincere belief in the respectable consensus.
Also, tenured academics still have huge incentives to fall in line with the respectable consensus. Unlike the untenured ones, for them it’s more about carrots than sticks, but the incentives are still there.
On the big issues, race differences, gender differences, sexual preferences, anti communism and islamophobia, the official truth held by the tenured is complex, subtle, and nuanced. They are both permitted and forbidden to acknowledge statistical differences between groups, permitted to acknowledge these differences in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to make deductions from statistical differences to particular cases in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to acknowledge and forbidden to admit various topics
Thus a high IQ tenured individual with a deep knowledge of what is acceptable can steer quite close to the truth on these topics, though the closer he gets, the cleverer and more knowledgeable he has to be, and and on the margins, barely permitted truth has sometimes rather suddenly become forbidden truth, causing some tenured academics to abruptly recant of previously uncontroversial peer reviewed publications.
On the big issues, official truth tends to be sophisticated and subtle: It is on the minor and obscure issues that the official truth tends to be simplistic, rigid, and absurd, and it is on these obscure issues, not the big issues, where one will see O’Brien hold up four fingers and every high IQ person with tenure swears he is holding up five fingers because the party declares it to be so..
There’s no question but that tenured academics are subject to status-seeking incentives that aren’t truth-tracking. Nonetheless, their assertions are entangled with the truth. The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard? The incentive of scholars outside of academia to pander to their audience seems at least as large. And non-scholars might not be biased by status-seeking, but they also have less exposure to the evidence.
The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard?
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead’s Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson’s infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O’Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those “old Reagan speeches” depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my positio
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position.
And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s real GNP versus the US’s real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that “doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed”. Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link?
You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they’re talking about.)
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today—but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
I did not criticize your example of a lie. I let that characterization stand unchallenged.
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie. Until you provide that, your example is not a special case of your general claim that “[academics] engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed.” (Emphasis added.)
(Providing a single example won’t suffice to prove the general claim, of course. But an inability to provide such an example would be telling.)
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie.
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
As someone who’s taken the SAT twice in recent months (and half a dozen more as practice), this is simply false.
The SAT’s questions for the essays are constructed to be as vague as possible, requiring no knowledge of history, current events, or literature; usually they are things like “Do we value only what we struggle for? ” or “Is it always essential to tell the truth, or are there circumstances in which it is better to lie? ” or “What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? ”. It’s possible that a question in the reading section would have a passage from a literary critic espousing the greatness of Steinbeck, followed by a question along the lines of “Why does the author of Passage A argue that Steinbeck was the conscience of America?”, but I’ve never seen a question even this political.
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
I thought that you insisted on talking about issues that weren’t “still today holy.” Why have you changed your mind?
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
Do you mean for that to be an example of a question on an SAT exam, together with an answer that would be scored low because of its political content?
I believe that if such an answer were given in a well-organized and technically well-written essay, it would receive a high score. Obviously you would have to explain why Steinbeck became the “the conscience of America” while the many other people employed by Stalin didn’t. So you would have to refer at some point to the content of what he wrote or said in some detail. But if you did this in a way that demonstrated a familiarity with the material, and your argument were well-structured in a technical sense, then I think that you would pass just fine.
Do you have an example of someone who took the SAT and got poor scores for well-written answers because of the views expressed in those answers?
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
So, I took you at your word on this in my previous comment. But now I’m curious — What was the nature of this employment? A quick Google search didn’t turn up any claims that Steinbeck received money from Stalin. Or were you using “employed” only in the sense of “used as a tool”, without meaning to imply that Steinbeck was compensated?
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn’t mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960.
What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It’s very likely that some American academic after 1960 “retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960” for political reasons. Why do unnecessary harm to your credibility by mischaracterizing your citations?
In short: Samuelson’s readers were told in 1961 (and shown in a graph) that the economy of the Soviet Union was growing, and would continue to grow, significantly faster than the American
economy. Nine years later, readers were told the very same thing – even though, according to Samuelson’s own 1970 graph, the ratio of Soviet GNP to U.S. GNP in 1970 was the same as it was in 1961.
Which 1970 graph implies the 1960s and before went backward between 1960 and 1970. The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
In 1910, the Russian Tsardom was a great power. In order to supposedly have rapid Soviet growth, and yet the Soviets are somehow still not yet surpassing the USA, it was necessary to retroactively deindustrialize the Russian Tsardom, and every year, retroactively deindustrialize it more and more.
Samuelson’s graph was one example of many of this retroactive deindustrialization, which sticks out more than most because occurring between two editions of his book—the Soviet implied starting point being worse in his 1970 graph than his 1960 graph.
The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
Why? Nothing implying that is stated in your link. The 1970 graph certainly implies that things didn’t go as rosely for the USSR during the 60′s as the 1961 graph predicted. But your link doesn’t explain the derivation of the two graphs in enough detail for us to see that they imply different conditions in the USSR prior to 1960.
Again, you could probably find an example of someone doing what you claim (an American academic after 1960 retroactively adjusting pre-1960 Soviet history for political reasons). I acknowledge that that probably happened more than once.
But what you seem to think is documentation of such an event, just isn’t. Furthermore, you never provided any documentation for your claim that doubting such assertions would get a student failed. This leads me to believe that you have a very skewed notion of how often such events happened, which gives me less confidence in your general conclusions about the attitude of academia at the time.
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
In any case, what I find really scary is the anti-epistemology that makes people believe that these numbers have any sensible meaning in the first place.
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
Fair enough. My point is only that, until we know more information than sam0345′s link provides, we cannot give a confident answer to this question. (Namely, we need to know the method by which Samuelson converted data into graphs.)
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted.
The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead’s Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results.
We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead’s anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union’s enlightened penal system.
You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to −10, and thus disappeared from sight.
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of −10, but I think he isn’t exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I’m a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I’ve run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren’t publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean. The only solution that I can think of is to continue the conversation via private messages. I publicly promise to keep the contents of such a conversation private. (I also extend this offer to sam0345.)
ETA: My impression of you from reading your comments leads me to expect that such a conversation would be dispassionate and to-the-point.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean.
There are lots of areas where I can give examples of stuff that used to be unmentionable in academia, such as the frequent revisions of the history of the Soviet Union.
Which examples imply that there is lots of stuff that is still unmentionable in academia—and what is unmentionable in academia is for the most part unmentionable on LW.
(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?
Well that is what people with tenure tell us.
Sociobiology suggests that a male will support his own offspring twice as much as he will support his nieces and nephews, and four times as much as he will support his half sister’s children, thus the alleged observation is surprising.
Folk anecdote is that the flow of support is pretty much proportional to paternal certainty. In those societies with low paternal certainty, for which we have observations that are not filtered through tenured observers, women and children support adult males, not the other way around.
If a man is supporting his sister, which is to say his sister’s children, rather than his own, this suggests an environment of low paternal certainty. In an environment of low paternal certainty, there is also a high probability that a sister is in fact a half sister, reducing the male propensity to support women and children to insignificant levels, resulting in the observed behavior that in such societies, successful men predate on women and children, and unsuccessful men are ignored by women and men alike—observed, that is by poor ignorant racist people, whose observations are apt to be curiously different from those of highly intelligent tenured people.
It seems that common folk observe people acting as biology predicts, and the tenured folk observe something different.
None of the reporting I’ve seen claims that the men with their own children are giving their resources to their sisters. But I haven’t read the research article itself, which is behind a paywall, so I’m open to correction. Does the article say that married men are giving their resources to their sisters (rather than to their wives)? If not, your objection is irrelevant.
In general, your appeal to “folk anecdote” and sociobiology can at best show that such societies should be rare. To show that none at all exist is to incur a heavier burden of evidence than you have borne.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) predicts that men who are exclusively homosexual are rare. And indeed they are. But EP is not falsified by the existence of a minority of men who are exclusively homosexual, because EP does not place a fatally large amount of probability mass on there being no exclusively homosexual men. Similarly, even if EP (plus induction from folk anecdote) predicted that societies are overwhelmingly likely to be set up along the lines that you describe, that would not suffice to make it extremely unlikely for a few societies to deviate far from your description.
(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.)
On a tangential note, it is my impression (admittedly based on relatively little evidence and perhaps biased) that getting tenure nowadays involves severe enough scrutiny that it really is extremely hard for anyone who harbors disreputable beliefs to get through the process, even if he tries to hide them. I can think of some examples of people who got tenure two, three, or more decades ago doing uncontroversial work and then proceeded to voice disreputable beliefs once shielded by it, to the great frustration and anger of their academic colleagues. However, I can’t think of any more recent examples.
If this is true, then it might be that aside from these old exceptions who are nearing retirement or already retired, it is more probable to see a disreputable belief expressed as a self-destructive act of an untenured academic than by a tenured academic who takes advantage of the privilege to speak his mind—since the latter is practically guaranteed to be rigorously selected for sincere belief in the respectable consensus.
Also, tenured academics still have huge incentives to fall in line with the respectable consensus. Unlike the untenured ones, for them it’s more about carrots than sticks, but the incentives are still there.
On the big issues, race differences, gender differences, sexual preferences, anti communism and islamophobia, the official truth held by the tenured is complex, subtle, and nuanced. They are both permitted and forbidden to acknowledge statistical differences between groups, permitted to acknowledge these differences in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to make deductions from statistical differences to particular cases in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to acknowledge and forbidden to admit various topics
Thus a high IQ tenured individual with a deep knowledge of what is acceptable can steer quite close to the truth on these topics, though the closer he gets, the cleverer and more knowledgeable he has to be, and and on the margins, barely permitted truth has sometimes rather suddenly become forbidden truth, causing some tenured academics to abruptly recant of previously uncontroversial peer reviewed publications.
On the big issues, official truth tends to be sophisticated and subtle: It is on the minor and obscure issues that the official truth tends to be simplistic, rigid, and absurd, and it is on these obscure issues, not the big issues, where one will see O’Brien hold up four fingers and every high IQ person with tenure swears he is holding up five fingers because the party declares it to be so..
There’s no question but that tenured academics are subject to status-seeking incentives that aren’t truth-tracking. Nonetheless, their assertions are entangled with the truth. The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard? The incentive of scholars outside of academia to pander to their audience seems at least as large. And non-scholars might not be biased by status-seeking, but they also have less exposure to the evidence.
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead’s Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson’s infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O’Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those “old Reagan speeches” depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position.
And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s real GNP versus the US’s real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that “doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed”. Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link?
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they’re talking about.)
You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today—but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
I did not criticize your example of a lie. I let that characterization stand unchallenged.
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie. Until you provide that, your example is not a special case of your general claim that “[academics] engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed.” (Emphasis added.)
(Providing a single example won’t suffice to prove the general claim, of course. But an inability to provide such an example would be telling.)
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
As someone who’s taken the SAT twice in recent months (and half a dozen more as practice), this is simply false.
The SAT’s questions for the essays are constructed to be as vague as possible, requiring no knowledge of history, current events, or literature; usually they are things like “Do we value only what we struggle for? ” or “Is it always essential to tell the truth, or are there circumstances in which it is better to lie? ” or “What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? ”. It’s possible that a question in the reading section would have a passage from a literary critic espousing the greatness of Steinbeck, followed by a question along the lines of “Why does the author of Passage A argue that Steinbeck was the conscience of America?”, but I’ve never seen a question even this political.
I thought that you insisted on talking about issues that weren’t “still today holy.” Why have you changed your mind?
Do you mean for that to be an example of a question on an SAT exam, together with an answer that would be scored low because of its political content?
I believe that if such an answer were given in a well-organized and technically well-written essay, it would receive a high score. Obviously you would have to explain why Steinbeck became the “the conscience of America” while the many other people employed by Stalin didn’t. So you would have to refer at some point to the content of what he wrote or said in some detail. But if you did this in a way that demonstrated a familiarity with the material, and your argument were well-structured in a technical sense, then I think that you would pass just fine.
Do you have an example of someone who took the SAT and got poor scores for well-written answers because of the views expressed in those answers?
So, I took you at your word on this in my previous comment. But now I’m curious — What was the nature of this employment? A quick Google search didn’t turn up any claims that Steinbeck received money from Stalin. Or were you using “employed” only in the sense of “used as a tool”, without meaning to imply that Steinbeck was compensated?
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn’t mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960.
What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It’s very likely that some American academic after 1960 “retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960” for political reasons. Why do unnecessary harm to your credibility by mischaracterizing your citations?
Quoting from the article:
Which 1970 graph implies the 1960s and before went backward between 1960 and 1970. The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
In 1910, the Russian Tsardom was a great power. In order to supposedly have rapid Soviet growth, and yet the Soviets are somehow still not yet surpassing the USA, it was necessary to retroactively deindustrialize the Russian Tsardom, and every year, retroactively deindustrialize it more and more.
Samuelson’s graph was one example of many of this retroactive deindustrialization, which sticks out more than most because occurring between two editions of his book—the Soviet implied starting point being worse in his 1970 graph than his 1960 graph.
Why? Nothing implying that is stated in your link. The 1970 graph certainly implies that things didn’t go as rosely for the USSR during the 60′s as the 1961 graph predicted. But your link doesn’t explain the derivation of the two graphs in enough detail for us to see that they imply different conditions in the USSR prior to 1960.
Again, you could probably find an example of someone doing what you claim (an American academic after 1960 retroactively adjusting pre-1960 Soviet history for political reasons). I acknowledge that that probably happened more than once.
But what you seem to think is documentation of such an event, just isn’t. Furthermore, you never provided any documentation for your claim that doubting such assertions would get a student failed. This leads me to believe that you have a very skewed notion of how often such events happened, which gives me less confidence in your general conclusions about the attitude of academia at the time.
You can find the graphs from Samuelson’s book along with excerpts from his commentary in this paper (starting on page 8):
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517983
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
In any case, what I find really scary is the anti-epistemology that makes people believe that these numbers have any sensible meaning in the first place.
Fair enough. My point is only that, until we know more information than sam0345′s link provides, we cannot give a confident answer to this question. (Namely, we need to know the method by which Samuelson converted data into graphs.)
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted.
The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead’s Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results.
We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead’s anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union’s enlightened penal system.
You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to −10, and thus disappeared from sight.
Do you mean to say that you have evidence for your claim that you decline to present for fear of being downvoted?
Or have you already presented (or pointed towards) all your evidence for your claim?
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of −10, but I think he isn’t exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I’m a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I’ve run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren’t publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean. The only solution that I can think of is to continue the conversation via private messages. I publicly promise to keep the contents of such a conversation private. (I also extend this offer to sam0345.)
ETA: My impression of you from reading your comments leads me to expect that such a conversation would be dispassionate and to-the-point.
There are lots of areas where I can give examples of stuff that used to be unmentionable in academia, such as the frequent revisions of the history of the Soviet Union.
Which examples imply that there is lots of stuff that is still unmentionable in academia—and what is unmentionable in academia is for the most part unmentionable on LW.
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?