First, just to define my terms, what are the humanities? Broadly, they are the disciplines that study human society (that is, that are concerned with humanity): language study, literature, philosophy, history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and so on. It is necessarily a bit of a fuzzy set. But what I think defines the humanities more than subject matter is method; the humanities study things which (we argue) cannot be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method or strictly mathematical approaches. You cannot perform a controlled trial in beauty, mathematical certainty in history is almost always impossible, and there is no way to know much stress a society can bear except to see it fail. Some things cannot be reduced to numbers, at least not by the powers of the technology-aided human mind.
By way of example, that methodological difference is why there’s a division between political science and history, despite the two disciplines historically being concerned with many of the same subjects and the same questions (to the point that Thucydides is sometimes produced as the founder of both): they use different methods. History is a humanities discipline through and through, whereas political science attempts to hybridize humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approaches; that’s not to say historians never use statistical approaches (I do, actually, quite a lot) but that there are very real differences in methodology. As you might imagine, that difference leads to some competition and conflict between the disciplines as to whose methodology best answers those key questions or equips students to think about them. Given that I have a doctorate in history and self-identify as a historian, you will have no trouble guessing which side of this I come down on, although that might be a bit self-interested on my part.
So if the STEM fields are, at some level, fundamentally about numbers, the humanities are fundamentally about language. The universe may be made of numbers, but the human mind and human societies are constructed out of language. Unlike computers, we do not think in numbers, but in words and consequently, the study of humans as thinking creatures is mostly about those words (yes, yes, I see you there, economics and psychology; there are edge cases, of course). Our laws are written in words because our thoughts form in our heads as words; we naturally reason with words and we even feel with words. Humans are linguistic creations in a mathematical universe; consequently, while the study of the universe is mediated through math, the study of humans and human minds is fundamentally linguistic in nature.
Thus, the humanities.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-03.
March 1, 2023
QotD: What do we mean by “the humanities”?
February 23, 2023
QotD: Academic types
You do acknowledge, of course, that it’s in the nature of math that 50% of the population are below average?
Our default “solution” for university shooters […] is psychiatry. More access to better “mental health care”, we say, would’ve prevented this. Maybe, maybe not, but at least it’s something. The problem, though, is that the only diagnostic criterion you can realistically use is “So-and-So is a twitchy, weird loner”, which — trust me — exactly describes 99% of grad students and 100% of professors. Do we force feed all of them powerful prescription psychotropics on the off-chance?
Before you jump to agree — and yes, I fully acknowledge how awesome that would be, if you put it on Pay-per-View I’d be the first to sign up […] I’d ask you to consider two things:
First, it’s the government doing this. The same stupid motherfuckers who can’t manage to rig a poll where only a handful of addled old farmers vote. Do you really want to bet America’s future social stability on them loading the right drug into the sprayers? Given the federal bureaucracy’s sterling reputation for basic competence, they’d probably crop-dust the ‘hood with meth.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 21, 2023
Smart people are at least as likely to fall for false beliefs as anyone else
Gurwinder explains why people well above average intelligence are actually more likely to adopt irrational ideas:
What causes delusion?
The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. This may be true in some cases, but just as often the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.
In 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of intelligence on ideological bias. In one study he scored people on intelligence using the “cognitive reflection test”, a task to measure a person’s reasoning ability. He found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly equally on average, but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements.
In a further study (replicated here), Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as data regarding a polarizing subject — gun control — those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.
[…]
Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).
By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”.
What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.
This tendency is troublesome in individuals, but in groups it can prove disastrous, affecting the very structure and trajectory of society.
For centuries, elite academic institutions like Oxford and Harvard have been training their students to win arguments but not to discern truth, and in so doing, they’ve created a class of people highly skilled at motivated reasoning. The master-debaters that emerge from these institutions go on to become tomorrow’s elites — politicians, entertainers, and intellectuals.
Master-debaters are naturally drawn to areas where arguing well is more important than being correct — law, politics, media, and academia — and in these industries of pure theory, secluded from the real world, they use their powerful rhetorical skills to convince each other of FIBs. During their master-debatery circlejerks, the most fashionable delusions gradually spread from individuals to departments to institutions to societies.
Some of these FIBs can now be found everywhere. A particularly prominent example is wokeism, a popularized academic worldview that combines elements of conspiracy theory and moral panic. Wokeism seeks to portray racism, sexism, and transphobia as endemic to Western society, and to scapegoat these forms of discrimination on white people generally and straight white men specifically, who are believed to be secretly trying to enforce such bigotries to maintain their place at the top of a social hierarchy.
February 11, 2023
QotD: “The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are”
And Plato’s actually pretty clear, as philosophers go. You’d really get into trouble with a muddled writer … or a much clearer one. A thinker like Nietzsche, for example, who’s such a lapidary stylist that you get lost in his prose, not realizing that he’s often saying the exact opposite of what he seems to be saying. To briefly mention the most famous example: “God is dead” isn’t the barbaric yawp of atheism triumphant. The rest of the paragraph is important, too, especially the next few words: “and we have killed him.” Nietzsche, supposedly the greatest nihilist, is raging against nihilism.
[…]
So here’s what I’d do, if I were designing a from-scratch college reading list. I’d go to the “for Dummies” versions, but only after clearly articulating the why of my reading list. I’d assign Plato, for example, as one of the earliest and best examples of one of mankind’s most pernicious traits: Utopianism. The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are. The most famous of these being Marxism, of course, and you’d get much further into the Marxist mindset by studying The Republic than you would by actually reading all 50-odd volumes of Marx. “What is Justice?” Plato famously asks in this work; the answer, as it turns out, is pretty much straight Stalinism.
How does he arrive at this extraordinary, counter-intuitive(-seeming) conclusion? The Cliff’s Notes will walk you through it. Check them out, then go back and read the real thing if the spirit moves you.
Articulating the “why” saves you all kinds of other headaches, too. Why should you read Hegel, for example? Because you can’t understand Marx without him … but trust me, if you can read The Republic for Dummies, you sure as hell don’t have to wade through Das Kapital. Marxism was a militantly proselytizing faith; they churned out umpteen thousand catechisms spelling it all out … and because they did, there are equally umpteen many anti-Marxist catechisms. Pick one; you’ll get all the Hegel you’ll ever need just from the context.
Severian, “How to Read ‘The Classics'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-13.
February 9, 2023
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” … but sometimes it’s almost prophetic
Once again, Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker Substack has something interesting I’d like to share with you (I wouldn’t blame you at all for cutting out the middleman and just subscribing for yourself):
Today I want to focus on a single paragraph published in 1960.
You’re asking yourself: How much can a single paragraph matter — especially if it was written 63 years ago? But read it first and judge for yourself.
It’s a chilling paragraph.
[…]
By any measure, [Paul Goodman] was one of the most eccentric thinkers of the era. Yet he anticipated our current situation with more insight than any of his peers.
Let’s look at this one paragraph from the Preface to Growing Up Absurd. It’s a long paragraph — it takes up most of two pages. So we will break it down into pieces.
Goodman begins with a puzzle he needs to solve — society is stagnating everywhere, and we all can see it. But there’s no action plan to fix it. There’s a lot of huffing and puffing and finger-pointing everywhere, but nobody has even started on developing a practical agenda.
According to Goodman, this is because people “have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives”. Everybody accepts that the current system “is the only possibility of society, for nothing else is thinkable”.
Now comes his analysis, and — to my surprise — Goodman begins by talking about music. This was the last thing I expected in a social critique, but for Goodman the manufacturing of hit songs is a metaphor for everything else that’s wrong in a stagnant society.
He writes:
Let me give a couple of examples of how this [inability to imagine healthy alternatives] works. Suppose (as is the case) that a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semi-monopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners in order to get them; and the broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the public wants the drivel that they give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother?
When I first read this, I was dumbstruck. Goodman wrote this during the winter of 1959 and 1960, when radio stations were independent and freewheeling. Back in my teen years, a single business was only allowed to control one AM station and one FM station. In 1985 this was increased to 12 stations on each band. And in 1994 this was raised again, this time to 20 AM stations and 20 FM stations.
But then all hell broke lose when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed in the Senate by a 91 to 5 margin and was signed into law. Now the sky was the limit — and all the airwaves it contained.
Soon Clear Channel Communications owned more than 1,200 radio stations in some 300 cities. The company began the process of standardizing and homogenizing our musical culture. We still suffer from that today.
Even after radio started losing influence in the Internet Age, huge streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) ensured that access to the ears of America would be controlled by a tiny number of huge corporations. A musical culture that was once local, indie, and flexible has become centralized, corporatized, and stagnant.
How could Paul Goodman even dream of such a scenario back in 1960? That future was decades away at the time.
But we are only at the start of this visionary paragraph. Goodman now explains that the same thing will happen in universities.
Colleges and schools were small and non-bureaucratic back in 1960. Yet Goodman sees a crisis looming. On the next page Goodman warns against “the topsy-turvy situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather than to doing his job, and a universally admired teacher is fired for disobeying an administrative order that would hinder teaching”.
Administration at US colleges has grown exponentially in the last two decades and has turned almost every academic institution into a plodding bureaucracy — but how in the world did Goodman anticipate this in 1960?
Now let’s return to our chilling paragraph. Immediately after discussing radio stations, Goodman adds a gargantuan sentence. It jumps all over the place but hits the target at every twist and turn:
Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents, and these faculties give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and research is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but those they choose, to have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired teacher is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction of science; that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed — as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools — that only 15 per cent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught hard subjects.
Here in a nutshell is the credentialing crisis of our times. Learning is replaced by exclusionary certification programs that limit career opportunities — unless you take out loans and “purchase” the necessary credential from these academic gatekeepers.
This has become so destructive in our own time that many are crushed by student loans, and others seek ingenious ways of bypassing college entirely. There’s no way that Goodman could have grasped this in 1960 — when only 7.7 percent of Americans had college degrees.
Nor could he have known about the replicability crisis in science or the destructive games now played in awarding of scientific grants. Those are the problems of our times — not his.
But somehow Paul Goodman saw it coming.
February 7, 2023
QotD: The misery of certainty
So why are they always so fucking miserable?
Let’s stipulate, for instance, that gender really is just a social construction. Even if it’s not, you’re dogmatically certain of this. Crucially, everyone else in your world is equally dogmatically certain, so even if it’s not, it is. Shouldn’t you be much, much, much happier? So you’re really a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin. Cool. Everyone else is 100% on board with this. You should be the happiest wingless golden-skinned dragonkin on earth … but you’re not. You’re miserable, and you do your damnedest to make every single other person you come in contact with miserable, too.
As a wise man once put it, if you run into an asshole in the morning, well, you just ran into an asshole. If you run into nothing but assholes all day, then you’re the asshole.
Same question to atheists. I can understand nonbelievers being tormented by their uncertainty, but an atheist is dogmatically certain there’s no god … so why aren’t y’all happier? Why, exactly, does the kid with cancer make you mad? The universe, you’re sure, is nothing but the random collision of atoms. It sucks for the kid that those atoms collided in that particular way, but why are you mad? More to the point, why are you mad? It’s like getting mad at gravity for that apple bonking you on the head. There’s no cosmic injustice without cosmic justice. I’d expect a zenlike calm, but instead, every time I write something about atheism (which I really don’t very often), I get a whole bunch of sour, bitter, angry atheists dropping in to tell me that I’m the asshole.
Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.
January 31, 2023
“Thorstein Veblen’s famous ‘leisure class’ has evolved into the ‘luxury belief class'”
Rob Henderson had a particularly difficult childhood, but thanks to his own efforts ended up going to Yale after leaving the military. He discovered a very different world when he began his studies:
I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn’t surprising given my unusual background. When I was three years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in multiple foster homes, was then adopted into a series of broken homes, and then experienced a series of family tragedies. Later, after a few years in the military, I went to Yale on the GI Bill. On campus, I realized that luxury beliefs have become fashionable status symbols. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.
In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.
[…]
You might think that rich students at elite universities would be happy because they are in the top 1% of income earners. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1%. Their social circle, their Dunbar number, consists of 150 baby millionaires. Jordan Peterson has discussed this phenomenon. Citing figures from his experience teaching at Harvard in the 1990s, Peterson noted that a substantial proportion of Ivy League graduates go on to obtain a net worth of a million dollars or more by age 40. And yet this isn’t enough for them. Not only do top university graduates want to be millionaires-in-the-making, they also want the image of moral righteousness. Elite graduates desire high status not only financially, but morally as well.
For our affluent social strivers, luxury beliefs offer them a new way to gain status.
Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, made his observations about social class in the late nineteenth century. He compiled his observations in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. These include goods such as delicate and restrictive clothing, like tuxedos and evening gowns, or expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. Such goods and leisurely activities could only be purchased or performed by those who did not live the life of a manual laborer and could spend time learning something with no practical utility. Veblen even goes so far as to say, “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, butlers are status symbols, too.
Converging on these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays because they are so costly. The most famous example is the peacock’s tail. Only a healthy bird is capable of growing such plumage while managing to evade predators. This idea might extend to humans, too. More recently, the anthropologist and historian Jared Diamond has suggested that one reason why humans engage in displays such as drinking, smoking, drug use, and other physically costly behaviors, is because they serve as fitness indicators. The message is “I’m so healthy that I can afford to poison my body and continue to function.” Get hammered while playing a round of golf with your butler, and you will be the highest status person around.
January 30, 2023
QotD: Teaching … back in the day
Of course, this was so long ago that students used to be unsure how to address me. Most professors had gone “hip” and had students call them by first name, but there were enough crusty old codgers around who insisted on “Dr. So-and-So” that they didn’t assume. After which I started telling them “you can call me whatever you want, but as a general rule life runs smoother if we respect each other’s station. If you know someone has a title, it’s best to use it unless they specifically tell you otherwise, and it’s always good to respect the social distance between yourself and someone who has something you want. So, choose accordingly.” 20 years ago, most of them got it, and addressed me by my title. 15 years ago, I started getting lots of puzzled puppy dog looks (“what’s a ‘social station’?”). 10 years ago, they all just assumed first names were fine, and before I retired I counted myself lucky if I got so much as a “hey dude”.
Meanwhile, as far as the students were concerned, my job went from “trying to teach them something” to “the annoying meat puppet whose presence we have to tolerate until he puts the A+ in the gradebook for record-keeping purposes”.
Severian, responding to a comment on “Movies Made On Mars”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-04.
January 20, 2023
QotD: Michael Ignatieff
Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.
What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.
Dominic Sandbrook, “Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever”, UnHerd, 2022-10-17.
January 14, 2023
QotD: What would it be like to always believe you’re right?
This is not because I’m such a humble guy. If anything, it’s the reverse — it’s because “being right” is such an important part of my self-concept that if I’m going to put my reputation on the line, I need to really BE right. And as we all know, 99% of being right comes from acknowledging all the times you were wrong. Admitting I don’t know when I really don’t know is painless. Admitting I was wrong when I thought I was right stings, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my own inner self-knowledge of being wrong. That really stings, and so I’d rather take the pain of admitting I was wrong any number of times to the much greater pain of actually being wrong on something fundamental.
To the Leftist, none of that computes. They’re always right. About everything. They literally can’t be wrong. And if what they were right about yesterday is 180 degrees from what they’re right about today, well, that’s just Reality reconfiguring itself. The Earth is stable; it’s the sun and stars that are moving around it. And if that leaves you with deferents and epicycles and retrograde motion and all that, well, so be it. See above, re: the physical impossibility of them being wrong …
… at least as individuals. But get them in a group, and all of a sudden a whole roomful of sort-of-Gods turns into a persecuted minority, even when everyone in the group agrees with everyone else. Even when the group, collectively, controls everything. If you think it’s bad in politics, y’all, go to a faculty meeting at the nearest college. To hear them tell it, the wolf is always at the door. Donald Trump and his jackbooted stormtroopers really are lurking behind every bush, waiting to jump out and pour bleach on them while yelling “This is MAGA country, bitch!” They’re afraid of their own students, because they just know those kids are out there thinking Unapproved Thoughts, and somehow those Unapproved Thoughts can physically harm them … even though they control the grade book, and can — and of course do — punish Unapproved Thought with extreme prejudice.
[…]
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the answer might be as simple as: They can’t abstract, so they’re literally physically incapable of Reality-testing their heuristics. The Experts have given them the TORAH (that’s The One Right Answer, H8rz!), and since they can only evaluate individual cases as they come into view — they can only micro-focus on each parked car in the lot, to return to the earlier metaphor — they can’t draw the really-obvious-to-non-autists conclusion that they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact control everything.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
January 13, 2023
“Forced teaming”
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay provides us with our new term of the week:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
I learned a new term this week: “Forced teaming“. It describes what happens when a group of people — say, gay men and lesbian women — are forbidden from breaking ranks with some larger constituency, such as (in this case) the LGBT movement.
The example I’m discussing here is one that Quillette writers have been exploring for several years now. As author Allan Stratton noted last year, the central ideological fixation of many transgender-rights activists is the negation of biological sex as a meaningful marker of human identity. The true source of sexual attraction, they will insist, isn’t the reality of sexed male and female bodies; but rather an abstract gender spirit lodged within our souls, which somehow broadcasts itself in a way that prospective romantic partners are able to sense and interpret. As Stratton notes, this mythology isn’t just flagrantly wrong. It’s also homophobic to such extent that it denies the sexually defined nature of gay identity. Moreover, this homophobic element can’t be excised from gender ideology without fatally undercutting the (typically unspoken) mission of many biologically male trans activists, since giving up this claim “would be to admit that a lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to a male body, no matter how many times she is assured that the body in question belongs to someone who identifies as a woman.”
On Wednesday, Montreal-based Substacker Eliza Mondegreen provided an eyewitness report that helps illustrate what the “forced teaming” of ideologically non-compliant LGB men and women now looks like. The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) at McGill University had planned to host a January 9th talk about the tension between sex and gender identity, to be delivered by Robert Wintemute, a professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London. According to the event page, he was to discuss “whether or not the law should be changed to make it easier for a transgender individual to change their legal sex from their birth sex, and about exceptional situations, such as women-only spaces and sports, in which the individual’s birth sex should take priority over their gender identity, regardless of their legal sex.”
Though Wintemute seems the furthest thing from a bigot (or even a conservative), he is loathed by many trans activists due to what they see as an act of unforgivable apostasy. In 2006, Wintemute co-authored something called the “Yogyakarta Principles“, an international manifesto demanding that unfettered self-identification be recognized as the one and only means of distinguishing men from women. But he later recanted, declaring that “a key factor in my change of opinion has been listening to women”. Needless to say, many of Wintemute’s former activist friends then began treating him like Lord Voldemort. And Montreal’s Gazette newspaper, echoing such denunciations, darkly warned readers that the visiting human-rights professor had “ties to LGB Alliance, an advocacy group described by various LGBTQ2+ organizations and activists as a transphobic hate group”. (In truth, the LGB Alliance is simply a British charity that, as its name suggests, signal-boosts lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who believe that the interests of L, G, and B are now sometimes at cross-purposes with T.)
British feminists, who by now are well used to progressive mobs shutting down speaking events in the name of trans solidarity, may guess the rough contours of what happened next. A self-described “transfeminist sapphic activist” named Celeste Trianon compared Wintemute to a “cannibal”, and announced a protest, suggesting that followers should “bring out the pitchforks”.
January 11, 2023
“[T]o the ordinary American, those values [diversity, equity, and inclusion] sound virtuous and unobjectionable”
John Sailer writes in The Free Press on the rapid rise of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy in American higher education:
Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.
But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.
In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing — Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.
More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching”. Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative”, several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.”
DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education”. These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.
Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences.
The Invention of DEI
How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.
For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions — in other words, affirmative action — could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.
By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging”. Around 2013, the University of California system — which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities — began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university.
Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.
White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans.
All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme — like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory — became widespread.
January 2, 2023
QotD: Academic incentives and the Bobo lifestyle
[…]
Here again, academia provides the answer. But first, let’s talk about David Brooks, the “conservative” infamously aroused by Obama’s perfectly creased pants. There are few sillier people than David Brooks, but “take wisdom where you find it” is my motto (well, that and “mihi dare vinum“), and he really knocked it out of the park with Bobos in Paradise. No, seriously. […] A Bobo, in other words, is a Gen Xer who could compete with the Boomers on their turf … but since he also took the Boomers at their word when they went on (and on and on and on and on) about Sticking It to the Man (an all too common generational failing), the Bobo sees the Boomer’s luxury car / vacation home / trophy wife conspicuous consumption as unbearably gauche. So instead, the Bobo spends $500 on a can opener because it’s good for the environment or is handcrafted by paraplegic Brazilian Eskimos or something, anything, so long as it a) obviously costs a shitload, and b) has some kind of Save-the-World rationale attached to it.
Academia reinforces this. Lots of Gen Xers went into the ivory tower for precisely that reason. Y’all know that the average professor hauls in nearly $200 large, right? The median income for an American worker in 2019 was approximately $46,800. I was in History, not math, but even I can see that the eggheads take home over four times what the average Joe makes. Which sets up another lifestyle contest. When you’re a) richer than sin, b) surrounded by a caste on slave wages, and c) ideologically committed to seeing yourself as The People’s Champion, the only way out is to live Bobo-style. Sure, sure, I have a $500 can opener … but Maricela the cook is really empowered by using it, because it was made by transgendered aborigines Of Color.
And since those Bobos are middle aged now, they’ve indoctrinated two generations of students with this garbage. And those two generations also came up with social media, so now you’ve got the heady combination of lifestyle and persona striving. That’s why the DC crew do what they do. Competitive #wokeness is the only way to go … and since they’ve got their $400-manicured mitts on the levers of power, we all get to be the bit players and stagehands in the big Broadway show that is their special unique wonderfulness.
Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.
December 29, 2022
Selection bias in polling
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander points out that it’s impossible to do any kind of poll without some selection bias, so you can’t automatically dismiss any given poll on that basis. The kind of selection bias, however, may indicate whether the results will have any relationship to reality:
The real studies by professional scientists usually use Psych 101 students at the professional scientists’ university. Or sometimes they will put up a flyer on a bulletin board in town, saying “Earn $10 By Participating In A Study!” in which case their population will be selected for people who want $10 (poor people, bored people, etc). Sometimes the scientists will get really into cross-cultural research, and retest their hypothesis on various primitive tribes — in which case their population will be selected for the primitive tribes that don’t murder scientists who try to study them. As far as I know, nobody in history has ever done a psychology study on a truly representative sample of the world population.
This is fine. Why?
Selection bias is disastrous if you’re trying to do something like a poll or census. That is, if you want to know “What percent of Americans own smartphones?” then any selection at all limits your result. The percent of Psych 101 undergrads who own smartphones is different from the percent of poor people who want $10 who own smartphones, and both are different from the percent of Americans who own smartphones. The same is potentially true about “how many people oppose abortion?” or “what percent of people are color blind?” or anything else trying to find out how common something is in the population. The only good ways to do this are a) use a giant government dataset that literally includes everyone, b) hire a polling company like Gallup which has tried really hard to get a panel that includes the exact right number of Hispanic people and elderly people and homeless people and every other demographic, c) do a lot of statistical adjustments and pray.
Selection bias is fine-ish if you’re trying to do something like test a correlation. Does eating bananas make people smarter because something something potassium? Get a bunch of Psych 101 undergrads, test their IQs, and ask them how many bananas they eat per day (obviously there are many other problems with this study, like establishing causation — let’s ignore those for now). If you find that people who eat more bananas have higher IQ, then fine, that’s a finding. If you’re right about the mechanism (something something potassium), then probably it should generalize to groups other than Psych 101 undergrads. It might not! But it’s okay to publish a paper saying “Study Finds Eating Bananas Raises IQ” with a little asterisk at the bottom saying “like every study ever done, we only tested this in a specific population rather than everyone in the world, and for all we know maybe it isn’t true in other populations, whatever.” If there’s some reason why Psych 101 undergrads are a particularly bad population to test this in, and any other population is better, then you should use a different population. Otherwise, choose your poison.
December 19, 2022
QotD: When reality fails to follow the model, ditch reality
I get that, man. On some fundamental level. But that makes me a generally unhappy guy. So it is, so it has always been.
For whatever reason, the Leftist is able to externalize that. If there are no more worlds to conquer, well, that’s the world’s fault. I remember hanging out with some of the Political Science goofs at Flyover State. For whatever reason, they rank pretty high for Poli Sci — their department developed some measure of whatzit to better analyze the doodad, you know how it goes, the Karl Roves and James Carvilles of the world all use it.
Anyway, this was 2004, when George W. Bush won his reelection campaign against Kerry. Exactly zero of the Flyover State Poli Sci goofs predicted that. They were all certain that Kerry was cruising to victory. When I pointed out that this seems to be a BIG flaw in their precious model — the election wasn’t even particularly close — their response was instructive: It wasn’t the model’s fault. Rather, it’s that the American public chose to throw a temper tantrum.
That’s seriously what they went with. There’s the actual, observed behavior of 70 million people; and there’s your model; and when the one contradicts the other, the only possible explanation is: All those people are idiots.
(One of those grad students I was talking to ended up doing something “unofficial” yet fairly important for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016; if I’d known that, I could’ve called it for Trump at the very start of election and made a fortune on prop bets).
It’s probably genetic for them, too. Which is either hopeful or depressing, depending, but I think it answers the question: Why does society end up being ruled by Very Clever Boys? They just can’t do anything else. They can’t internalize; they have game the system. Have to. A society that wants to survive must find a system for them to game, somewhere far isolated from the real affairs of people.
Severian, “Me vs. The World”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-14.
