101–110 of 135 posts
>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background. I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
>It should come as no surprise that the professor who made that demand is a white male alumnus of the Ivy League, and the student an immigrant from a working-class background. I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
But it is exceptionally lazy. Rather than making the case they wish to directly, they’re offloading that work onto their audience, many of whom will obviously defer to popular generalizations. The majority of the time I see “privileged white male” shorthand, what the author is talking about is character and behavior, both of which can be warped by one’s environment or social status. But hiding that entire analysis in three words does wrong by the reader and makes it easy to view poor behavior as some kind of essential trait rather than a failure of socialization.
If we’re looking to shift patterns of misbehavior or help people understand them better, that’s a bad way to start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author appears to be talking about comparative literature exclusively. It’s truly a misleading title. Comparative literature (or “critical theory” or “dept of rhetoric” or whatever fanciful name they’re using) is indeed the cultiest field of academia. It’s why they’re so easy to punk. (See: Sokal affairs.)
The sciences haven't done any better at quality control than the humanities. See: Bogdanov affair, "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?", etc.
Nobody was "fooled" by the Bogdanovs -- they were French TV personalities who managed to get a couple of bogus papers published in extremely low impact journals that hardly anyone read. Similarly with "Who's Afraid of Peer Review" -- there are thousands of minor journals out there and some aren't very picky about what they publish. In science, it is important to take note of where something is published as opposed to the mere fact that it is.
I don't know the source but I first read the following useful distinction here in HN: The difference between a cult and a religion: a cult wants it all, a religion just wants its cut.
That's an amusing saying, because it conjures images of a struggle, in which there's somewhere something that is greedy and something that seeks fairness. What is the struggle about, i.e. what is that "all" that the greedy actor wants? I think it doesn't matter, because this saying is just a threatrical way of saying that we define a cult as an organization in the religious world that we find to be uncooperative, aso…
Yes, humanities academia is severely flawed, not only in the ways that the author describes but also in the prevalence of pseudo-intellectual quackery in literature studies, cultural studies and areas of social sciences, philosophy, etc. The newspaper appears to have forgotten to qualify the title to make clear that they were not talking about all academia.
A lot of biomedical science is also barely worth of the name science as it's not reproducible. And I'm sure you could find the same in physics and math too. But it's way easier to look at the humanities, not being able to understand the language used due to not having the required background and go "clearly it's worthless because I, someone with a degree in a completely different field, cannot understand it". And the…
The "Sokal Text" affair tends to overwhelm Sokal's bigger accomplishment, the book "Fashionable Nonsense" (with Jean Bricmont). There he shows how famous scholars like Lacan and Deleuze threw random scientific terms into their works in contexts where nothing scientific is being said as a way to sound "deep".
The reproducibility problem in science is real, but oftentimes people confuse reproducibility (i.e. I give concentration X of compound Y to mice of strain Z, and 50% develop cancer within a month and you do the same and get a similar result) with failure of generalization (You change the concentration or mouse strain and get a different result and write a paper saying I'm wrong).
In my experience there are multiple cutls within academia and they operate at different levels. In finance, for example, there is a cult of "efficient market hypothesis" and another cult of "behavioral finance". The two groups don't appreciate each other much although publicly they love to say how much they respect their colleagues from the other group.
The same thing affecting academia ( mostly humanities ) is the same thing affecting journalism. Instead of being institutions for seeking truth and knowledge, they've become institutions of political advocacy and agenda.
However, lately I've come to wonder if the solution isn't simply to defund all non-STEM academic subjects. It seems likely that subjects that aren't strongly tied down to some sort of objective utility function will always drift towards some sort of strange and extreme agendas.
There is a historical reason for this. Religion is practiced by Doctors of Divinity and science by Doctors of Philosophy. At the time of Newton education or universities were controlled by religious doctors. After Newton Doctors of Philosophy took control of the education. Doctor means someone who is licensed to teach the doctrine. So at the fundamental level religion and academia are organized exactly the same. Only…