Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production

I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, publish or perish, etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".

The rise of social justice is the evolution of our society from red/orange through high orange to a green society on the Spiral Dynamics model of psychological / spiritual evolution.

We're seeing the limits and the ugliness of unhealthy/low orange in the environment, politics, culture, et al.

The transition to green will be painful and violently resisted by orange/red portions of our society, but it is necessary for our survival and for rescuing the ecology of the Earth from the excesses of unbridled stage orange capitalism.

I'm so curious what our economic systems and culture will look like in stage green, but it'll likely not happen in my lifetime, which I just have to accept ...

The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.

It's always interesting to see Hayek's words, followed by a timestamp. Similar, although less recent at nearly 25 years ago, is this Peter Thiel video discussing the illusion of multiculturalism in 1996 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722.

The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework.

The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."

That is an awful lot of words for "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy". Put aside the possibility that the reason elites disagree is because they know something that the author doesn't. Even if one disagrees with a prevailing philosophy or even if it is objectively wrong but the idea catches on doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.

That a rant from the 70s sounds like one today says more about the source than it does the target really - given ongoing processes one would expect the complaints to differ more substantially as the changes either "succeed" and are embraced as the norm or "fail" and are discredited. I use quotes because it is a matter of perception more than if they are actually good ideas.

To be frank it seems to be pure projection of the "eauality feels like oppression to the privledged" sort.