291–300 of 807 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tenure is also a blessing and a curse. It ensures academic freedom. But it also ensures someone has limited checks on their bullshit, until they retire.
Isn't mortality supposed to be check-and-balance on the bullshit in science?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no such a thing as cultural Marxism. That's a conspiracy theory the nazis first created. There is such a thing as "cultural Marxism", and it is not a conspiracy theory invented by the Nazis or anyone else. Consider for example the 1981 book by academic Richard Weiner, "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" [0] – it discusses "cultural Marxism" as a real thing, in a positive light, and it is a real acad…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Did you bother to look at the sources? https://newrepublic.com/article/144317/trumps-racism-myth-cu...
Good stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there evidence that Americans of different ethnicities interpret user interface features differently? If not, isn’t it concerning that in the year 2024 we casually assume that these sorts of differences exist? Isn’t that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this: https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8
Cultural differences exist. For example, colors have different meanings in different cultures: https://blog.grio.com/2020/06/uxui-design-across-cultures-us... Ethnicity is then being used as a proxy for culture, even though it's a bad one, because it's a visible one. It's basically starting from the premise that cultural diversity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. Whereas…
This is ideological tea-leaf reading.
This is all the administrative class at universitets and government, declaring their raison d'etre and accumulated authority.
They cant really understand science or do much about it, so you cannot base power on that, so they must work hard to construct a vehicle that is untouchable my sciences, that will be feared. Then you can cement your authority on the new construct and keep adding to it, to accumulate more importance and power.
Quicky this vehicle will overtake science in relative importance for various institutions because this is about "justice and doing what is right and decent". Science is mundane and boring.
In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is ther…
There's a pattern that I see come up quite often, and it's really common with any discussion about things that involve diversity and inclusion efforts. I don't know if there's a specific term for it, but it happens roughly like this: First, someone identifies an opportunity to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion in some way. DEI statements in academia, codes of conduct in open source projects, some rules around t…
In the spirit of trying to learn something from the community: while I can certainly understand the rationale and goals behind DEI programs (many of which I agree with, others not), I honestly can't understand these "DEI statements" at all. They always seemed very "1984" to me, and almost designed to engender resentment in a way that would ultimately backfire. So perhaps I'm in a like-minded echo chamber, but is ther…
>but is there anyone that actually defends these DEI statements with a coherent argument, or can you point me to one online There was a recent debate on this[1] and even the debater for the pro DEI statement side (that they could find) admitted that DEI statements that were just ideological pledges were wrong, and he was only in favor of statements about concrete things you did to advance the DEI agenda (eg. "I did a…
Basically, a "aside from your teaching and research ability, what have you done to improve your campus that would make us want to hire you"
It's much more ambiguous, on what is valuable.
(I have no idea what the hiring process is like, just a random thoughts)
One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to remember: A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make. Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all the time. With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to support any viewpoint on any topic. Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's so…
We've seen that even these aren't that hard to fudge. Selection bias, p-hacking, mobbing researchers who publish politically unpopular results as a deterrent, etc.
What you need is basically the opposite of that. Replication of controversial results in preregistered studies by independent researchers trusted to be honest by both sides of the controversy. Refuting results you don't believe to be true using evidence rather than silencing the original authors. A culture of good science.
How to get that is a different question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not find the argument that “newspapers be newspapers” excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very forcefully at that. And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in some form due to humans’s generous nature? Is it due to more people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization…
It doesn't go only one way though. I can count 6+ instances on both the Fox News and MSNBC front pages right now.
I don’t think these things are equal even on the surface. I don’t know how people aren’t asking themselves all the time “Am I even sure I believe in the things I think I do?”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People might be surprised how dumb top universities can be. When everyone is biased to thinking they're the best, it pretty easily creates tunnel vision.
Tenure is also a blessing and a curse. It ensures academic freedom. But it also ensures someone has limited checks on their bullshit, until they retire.
Perhaps it used to, however a tenured professor can easily be "cancelled" today if their academic research or writing strays too far from home base. Frankly, I am not sure it ever did. It seems like it might have always been used more as a threat (by retraction) than anything else.