The Assault on Empiricism

Post by JPKab » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #7

Considering he's been so much about getting number right, he got several things quite wrong himself. He says: "Virtually all metrics measuring life expectancy, IQ, governmental corruption, poverty, racism, and women’s rights have been improving for decades—but no one seems to know it." According to the US census bureau poverty rates in the US have pretty much remained the same over the last 50 years [1]. While life e…

Life expectancy in the US has a massive drag due to the bottom decile (unlike in other countries) having garbage health care and eating habits. Also, the opioid epidemic (again, something limited to the US) dragged down life expectancy gains BIG TIME.

But fair points.

Post by JPKab » Wed, Sep 01, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

sealeck wrote: post #4

I mean given all this talk about "truth" this author might want to have a look, in a proper library, as to what Critical Race Theory entails. I'm sure much interesting empirical evidence can be found in the work of e.g. Crenshaw.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not?

Crenshaw and others never claimed that CRT and other variants of Conflict Theory were empirical in nature.

In the early 2000s, while pursuing my engineering and applied economics degrees, I focused most of my electives in the social sciences, and actually had several courses in classes where various flavors of Conflict Theory were explored. Essentially, Marx was a Conflict Theorist who focused on class divisions while deconstructing the rather miserable conditions of living in the height of Europe's industrial revolution.

Kim Crenshaw's work was always presented as a lens in which to deconstruct and then analyze various societal conditions.

What I can definitely attest to is that Conflict Theory and it's offshoots are strongly post-modernist in flavor, in the sense where they view attempts at quantifying and measuring to be so strongly biased by the dominant groups of a given culture as to be useless at best and tools of oppression at worst. It's not that they aren't empirical, it's that they are actively hostile to empiricism and reject it.

One of my sociology professors (a true statistically literate prof who specialized in poverty dynamics) used to joke that the CT and CRT folks didn't do research, they just wrote essays that referenced essays that referenced essays.

Re: The Assault on Empiricism

Re: The Assault on Empiricism