A Tale of Two Columbia Classes
heterodoxacademy.org
heterodoxacademy.org
One of the interesting things, at least about the graduate program, is that you can take many credits as "R credits", meaning you don't get graded. You have to show up and submit research papers, but they don't get graded. The idea, I think, is to focus on the learning and not focus on getting an A. I think this can also give the students the ability to disagree with vindictive professors without getting their academic career derailed. I think this really works to provide more intellectual freedom to students at Columbia, and my friend had a good experience there.
I went to grad school in English at the University of Arizona and my experience was similar. The same is true of students; people regularly ask me about those crazy students on campus, not realizing that the ones who make the news are the exception: https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe...
Most profs are open minded and fair, but the ones who are't yield the best, juiciest, and most absurd soundbites.
I guess it's always been the case that the Thomas Paines of this world will be dying alone. Dissenting views are still no great virtue in 2018 and can still be met with barbaric behavior just as they were in centuries past. For example, Lil Wayne said he was not a victim of racism and he criticized BLM, and he was shot and then made into a pariah for this.
Speaking of classes on specific ideas, should this be one of the great lessons of history people should be learning of? I mean, the inability to question authority is exactly what tyrants like Hitler and Hirohito wanted. It was the most important thing to them. The only German child Nazis went to the trouble of formally executing (Helmuth Hübener) was the one who just wanted people to hear what British radio broadcasters were saying about the war. Yet who at Columbia learns of him? Perhaps the greatest injustices and most embarassing tragedies of men and women in history are made possible when you make dissent impossible.
> When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
I've noticed this in the work environment lately. It's palpable. People are afraid of saying the wrong thing.
Everyone is basically taking pg's approach, and sitting quietly. It's sad. I don't know what to do about it.
But, man, is it a relief when you're getting a beer with a close friend and can explore some good-natured heterodoxy. That sort of interesting conversation is getting rarer and rarer in public.
When I was young, it was the political right that would shut down heterodox opinions, like flag burning or atheism or same-sex couples on TV. But strangely enough, I feel more free to talk openly around my political right friends today. It's strange that "liberalism" in America today feels so illiberal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evWiz6WRbCA
I think part of it is the fear of becoming e.g. Justine Sacco. It's incredibly easy for something you say to be taken out of context and to become the target of the internet hate machine.
Nuance, complexity, context - whatever you want to call it, it's hard for people to digest. As a result, "celebrities" become either angels or devils.
I don't think this unwillingness to accept complexity is a new facet of society, but it's much easier than ever before to get a mob together for the proverbial witch hunt.
As a result, lots of people (and I'm not claiming to be an exception) are either going over the top to proclaim their piousness lest they be declared witches, or slinking along silently hoping that no one would ever want to accuse them in the first place.
If their message was "there's room for a genuine good-faith discussion about whether this was reasonable or went too far, both of which are reasonable positions to take, and we're all too on edge to have that discussion," I would agree with that. If anything, the fact that a lot of people feel a need to be excessively pious does a disservice to those people who genuinely hold the pious opinion - the excessively pious won't engage in good-faith arguments that they're wrong, because they already know they're wrong, which just ends up hurting the discourse.
Not to be snarky: I thought it was clear that this was/is the intended message. I certainly didn't get the impression that the skit was taking a stance one way or another and indeed it seems like the characters have differing opinions on it (compare Aidy Bryant's comment with Beck Bennett's).
It's incredibly difficult to talk about these things without thinking extremely carefully about how you word your thoughts - hence all the "careful..." comments by the characters in the skit.
> If anything, the fact that a lot of people feel a need to be excessively pious does a disservice to those people who genuinely hold the pious opinion - the excessively pious won't engage in good-faith arguments that they're wrong, because they already know they're wrong, which just ends up hurting the discourse.
This is indeed a fairly common critique of modern-day "SJWs" (or whatever you want to call that group of people) - that the excessively pious ("virtue signaling" is the usual term) are indeed alienating the more rational and causing the discourse to disappear.
(This is also obviously true in the other direction with the "alt-right", though not necessarily relevant to this discussion).
But Twitter is not a bar, or a group SMS. It is a platform on which you can instantaneously broadcast something to an entire world. The world does not know you, and it's presumptuous to think that hundreds of millions of people should have known who you were. Again, this doesn't justify the hatemob -- I'm just saying that Sacco's situation was less an issue of society becoming too sensitive, and more an issue of tech amplifying our reach far beyond what we comprehend.
Indeed, and you can see that I agree with you:
> I don't think this unwillingness to accept complexity is a new facet of society, but it's much easier than ever before to get a mob together for the proverbial witch hunt.
I do wonder if it's as simple as you having drifted relatively towards the right (which may not be you drifting at all in an absolute sense; it may just be that the world around you drifted towards the left). There are extremely few people I feel comfortable expressing opinions like "The entire modern system of policing is fundamentally corrupt and unsalvageable" or "Borders are fundamentally immoral and we should figure out how to get rid of them" or "Bernie wasn't left-wing enough and I didn't trust him" around - perhaps one or two of my close friends, but certainly not among people I know from work etc.
And it's certainly not hard to find people on the right who think Trump can do no wrong and who will go through some exquisite mental gymnastics to maintain that illusion - there's a rather large subreddit devoted to it, in fact.
I mean look at all her other positions. She was supposedly for the Iraq war until she was against it. Against marijuana legalization until she was for it. For building a wall with Mexico until Trump supported it. For single payer healthcare until Bernie supported it. And so on.
It's normal for people to change their minds as they learn more about things. It's not normal for people to change their minds on every single political issue in lockstep with internal polling. In the same way that things like Benford's Law can be used to detect fraud, she seems to fail some fundamental test of being a real human.
Your analogy would work if you said liberals give Clinton a pass for flip-flopping while hating Trump for flip-flopping on abortion. AFAIK, liberals hate Trump for his current stance and actions on abortion rights, not for being a flip-flop (i.e. they'd be fine if the flip-flop happened in the other direction)
I mean that may be true in some sort of epistemological sense, but pragmatically both are equally ridiculous. The fact that something could be true doesn't make it any less false.
I'm talking specifically though about HRC believing all of HRC's stated positions, not about a random person changing their opinions over the course of time. The probability calculus there is very different. E.g. the Clintons literally hire people to survey the public to tell them what policies to campaign on, that's how they came up with the idea of adding v-chips to TVs or whatever. The Adam Curtis documentary Century of the Self goes into this in depth.
edit:
> I'm saying if you were to do some sort of bayesian analysis, I think you'd find the probabilities of each to be approximately equal. (E.g. within 5%.)
What would be the dataset and the priors for this Bayesian analysis? Which presidents haven't changed in response to events and changing beliefs and political realities?
(And I think both of these, the "overprepared" thing and the general insinuation that Hillary isn't human, are subtle propaganda points from the Republican strategists. So it's funny to see it in a thread about how the left wing makes right wing ideas unthinkable when literally the opposite has happened. Here's my controversial opinion that will get yelled at by most people: Hillary is a genuine and kindhearted person who deeply cares about making America better, and she was the best candidate for president from any party for decades—certainly far better than Bernie.)
Stealing the questions from the moderator (and still losing) is now being described as overprepared?
There was some amount of controversy over one such comment, by Chuck Todd (of NBC).
You're confusing two separate incidents, Donna Brazile giving one question from the primary debate to the Hillary campaign in March 2016, and Chuck Todd analyzing the first general debate in September 2016 and calling her "over-prepared". So, no.
Again, it's extremely funny how much false right-wing propaganda you're attempting to use in defense of the assertion that the left wing prefers orthodoxy to truth.
I mean it's literally just what happened. Donna Brazille even said the reason she did it was because she didn't think Clinton was smart enough to be President on her own, and that she would be 'blindsided' by basic questions.
Again, what do you have that's as concrete or tangible as the inauguration attendance count (or State of the Union ratings) to show that Clinton's support of gay marriage (or for any of her other purported stances) is in contradiction to reality? I'm not arguing that you should approve of Clinton's flaws more than Trump's, just that the ones you cite are categorically different.
Your argument would be stronger if you cited the times that Clinton said things that were shown to be objectively and observably false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...
In particular, she's a United Methodist (as am I; I go to an ELCA congregation these days but the two denominations are in full communion), and the United Methodist Church still teaches that homosexuality is contrary to Christianity and does not officiate same-sex marriages. (Yes, the ELCA does do same-sex marriages, and no, I cannot explain how this interacts with full communion.) Going from "my religion teaches that it's wrong" to "... but that's just my religion, and the government should give same-sex couples the same rights, but the word 'marriage' is about religion and tradition" to "I support it" is a journey that lots of non-right-wing religious folks in the US, myself included, have gone through in approximately the same time frame as when Hillary did. I think Occam's razor should push us in the direction of believing that she's genuine, or we would otherwise need a reason why she's fake but lots of people of extremely similar religious and political positions have not been fake about the exact same thing.
Going a bit more broadly, I would argue that it is common for people to change their minds on political issues in lockstep with the median of people of similar political and cultural leanings, sort of by definition.
Like, I have strongly-held beliefs that span "both sides." But (as an example) I'm much more comfortable talking with a conservative about why I think the death penalty is wrong than I am with a liberal about why I think abortion is wrong.
From my perspective, many younger (or newer, basically under-30) conservatives have been moderating* some of their views, particularly social views like reforming the justice system, race relations, etc. (I mean, just the other night my SO and I were talking about how a significant number of the College Republican state chairs were openly gay. That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago!) And with this exploration comes the welcoming of different viewpoints.
Unfortunately, I see the reverse with liberals of the same age group. And, sure, generalizations suck because everybody will say, "That doesn't apply to my group of friends!" But, I do want to put up a W in the "openness" column for liberals. It's just difficult to do when talking about certain subjects feels like dancing across a minefield.
*: Yes, the alt-right has been steadily moving in the opposite direction, but they're a very vocal minority that have been steadily fading.
I don't think that's a good comparison for weighing the relative intolerance of a political group.
Support of the death penalty is not as uniform among conservatives as abortion is for liberals. Nor does it have as strong of legal support -- states can outright ban the death penalty, they can't ban abortions and have difficulty not having restrictions overturned by the Supreme Court. Most importantly, the death penalty is an administrative action, whereas abortions are seen as personal health decisions.
If you argue to someone that abortion is wrong, that person is likely to see that an attack on abortion as a personal right. Whose personal right do you threaten when you argue against the death penalty?
Not everything "needs" to be said to everyone at all times.
I think things about (some of) my co-worker I'd never say aloud to them - very impolite things. I say "ok" and then bitch to my husband later. And I think things about my customers I never would say to them, but I bitch to my coworker about it later.
I know that the office isn't the place for certain discussions, I save those discussions for the bar. I know my coworker don't want to hear my options about their religion (for example), so I don't give them. I think their fad diet of the week is fucking stupid, but I don't dare say it.
And that's perfectly ok. It's how this thing called "society" operates. People are polite to each other when they need to be and boundaries are healthy and vary with the nature of the relationship. Showing restraint at work is called "being professional."
Indiscriminately running your mouth is not a virtue. It's a good thing people think twice before needlessly upsetting their colleagues, we are living in a more diverse world now. Forced into being cordial and polite with your colleagues and customers should strengthen your outside friendships, as you can trust your friends enough to "tell it how it really is."
It's a good thing that the GP is realizing there's a time and place for certain discussions, it's a sign of maturity.
The news media seem to cast conservatives and liberals as each having highly homogeneous views over a very large number of topics. But when I talk with people face-to-face, I haven't sensed such a strong, consistent clustering of beliefs within those two groups.
But how was that different than 10-20 years ago? It seemed back then, people were just as afraid of saying wrong things, especially when the boss was around. Perhaps what has changed is that there are more wrong things to say, but that might be correlated with the fact that our society (from an American perspective) has gotten less homogenous.
20 years ago, calling people "gay" or "faggy" or "homo" wasn't a big deal because homosexuals weren't recognized as human beings. Now they are, and it is not strange to have bosses/colleagues who are openly gay -- but it sure would be if an anti-homosexuality culture was allowed for good times sake.
I know you're not arguing for the right to yell hostile slurs. But, ignoring the point that anti-gay slurs weren't seen as particularly offensive, just pointing out that being ostracized for being different was plenty pervasive back then, but it didn't feel that way if you weren't in a disenfranchised group.
The way the internet has become intricately intertwined with our lives has made the repercussions to become a bit more severe than they used to be.
Whereas before an event like "donglegate" might've blown over relatively quickly 15 years ago, technology fomented the masses and multiple people lost their jobs over a relatively harmless situation (Adria Richards was still unemployed last I checked).
I don't think it's unfair to say that without the global reach of a mass communication platform like twitter, that situation would've been resolved quite differently (probably a scolding by the conference organizers to the two men) and probably to the satisfaction of everyone involved, instead of how it actually resolved to no one's satisfaction (other than the mob seeking blood).
Relatively minor transgressions (like mis-using the word "dongle") become major blowups when people get to dehumanize the parties involved using technology.
I don't think people are arguing that you should be able to use slurs with no consequences, more that it's incredibly easy to take something minor out of context and turn it into a massive blowup using the internet.
Basically: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged"
Those aren't real intellectual disciplines, so naturally the professor discourages debate.
I think we should distinguish a topic from those paid to teach about it.
It seems to me that regardless of how silly we consider a particular set of beliefs to be, we might gain useful knowledge by studying (with intellectual rigour) why people hold those beliefs, how societies react to the ideas, etc.
But I'm sure it's equally possible for some areas of study to attract foolish or undisciplined professors, and for that pattern to become self-sustaining.
Perhaps the question is: should we?
> She went on to swear at us in this guilt-inducing way a couple more times before the semester’s end.
Why is that ever ok? Why is the professor still teaching there? What if they have tenure. What does a professor have to do then to be kicked out. It would seem like swearing at students in class would be a good reason.
> As hyperbolic as this might sound, voicing a strong pushback against any idea that the Professor favored was nearly unthinkable.
It suddenly dawned on me, as I was typing this, that it's actually a useful class! It does teach a modern approach to discourse. That's exactly what is popular and so it makes sense to teach it that way - shutting off debate and discussion, swearing at people, demoralizing them, making them feel guilty, punishing if they don't appear guilty enough, etc.
Looking back, I am sure this student would find this class was more memorable and useful than the other one. They'll forget about Thomas Nagel but never forget how they could not discuss Focault.
... and people across the philosophical and political spectrum, especially feminists, have critiques of Foucault. It seems irresponsible and deeply insulting to treat a philosopher as beyond questioning.
Just earlier tonight, I was chatting with a 35 year old former marine from Mississippi who just completed his undergrad at Columbia and is running the Columbia Republican Club (CUCR). Columbia has always given them the opportunity to have speakers (Charles Murray, Mike Cernovich, Dinesh D'Souza spoke last year, Scaramucci and Jordan Peterson are on deck this semester). Security is always made available to them, and protestors, while permitted, are not allowed to prevent the guest from speaking (unlike Middlebury or Berkley). The events that I've attended are civil and the audience generally acts according to what you would expect from an academic institution.
Haven’t we all experienced a professor who was good in their field but couldn’t teach well, or was too much of a hardass?
Faculty ratings and ratemyprofessor are there for a reason.
It's the inevitable reaction to extremism. I accept the existence of privilege but I believe that militancy about it is counterproductive.
Using the state of black people in America as an example, certainly they have higher poverty rates than whites because of slavery and continued discrimination, but there are problems within the black community that must be addressed by the community itself. Broken homes are a huge problem which perpetuate poverty but within the privilege centric framework it's racist to even mention this.
Of course slavery is ultimately to blame for all of this, but focusing on it will not undo it.
If you want to give all your money to the poor, great, don't let me stop you. If you want to improve Western civilization and make life better for the poor (and the rich too, perhaps), also great, don't let me stop you either. If you want to improve Western civilization for people who look like you but not for others, well, at least stop for a second and realize that's what you're doing before you do it. (And if you continue nonetheless, there's probably room for criticism, but that criticism is not fundamentally about how you merely have privilege.)
My problem is that people that say, "check your privilege" use it to shut down dialogue. We're getting into identity politics. This never, ever ends well for anyone.
I'm all for compassion. I'm not for the hypocrisy of using race and guilt as cudgels against supposed political enemies. I'm not for college campuses insulating themselves with their own group think to the point that it's an arrest-able offense to hand out the Constitution, the very document that defines that we are all equal in the sight of the law, to students on Constitution Day by a student of the college [3]. I absolutely abhor the continued press for ignorance about the very historical facts at hand in which the white man, and only the white man, was to blame or profited from slavery [4].
1 - https://sputniknews.com/europe/201801311061237928-norway-naz... 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tanz1IxVpVA 3 - http://reason.com/blog/2017/01/21/students-arrested-constitu... 4 - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppzevg/hey-v12n5
Ehhhh. I'm of Indian descent, and I am perfectly comfortable with the modern inability to use the swastika in international contexts, where you don't have a culture where people expect the pre-Nazi meaning of the swastika. "They banned an up-arrow" just ... doesn't seem like something worth getting upset about? Presumably if the logo accidentally looked like a penis, they'd change that too, but that's hardly a sign of identity politics or anything.
> You have individuals like Gazi [2] running around saying that white people need to pay reparations even though most white people in the country descend from immigrants that arrived after the civil war therefore they never owned slaves.
I have no idea who this person is, or how genuine they are. Every political viewpoint has extremists and trolls and uninformed folks (I don't know if this person fits in one of these categories, but I certainly don't know that they don't), and many of those people are on YouTube. A much better case for reparations, which includes arguments about why white people who arrived in the US after slavery still benefited unfairly from organized oppression of black people, can be found in, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations:" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
> it's an arrest-able offense to hand out the Constitution, the very document that defines that we are all equal in the sight of the law, to students on Constitution Day by a student of the college [3]
As far as I can tell from the reporting, these students were protesting a "free speech zone" policy on campus, right? I'm certainly not about to endorse "free speech zones," but it seems pretty clear that the motivation for the arrest was not that they were handing out Constitutions, they simply chose to hand out Constitutions because they knew they'd get favorable news headlines like this.
> I absolutely abhor the continued press for ignorance about the very historical facts at hand in which the white man, and only the white man, was to blame or profited from slavery [4].
The fact that your source is from VICE, which is regularly accused (possibly correctly!) of being left-biased, doesn't do much to convince me that these facts are being hidden on the left. Certainly I've never heard anyone on the left make a reasoned argument that only white men were to blame or ever profited from any slavery in history.
It's a sign that they can't make simple distinctions which in itself is sophomoric.
>Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations:"
More than a few people are pointing out that Coates is less a part of the solution and more part of the problem. Here's just one: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-...
How closely did you read that article by Sputnik News? Because I didn't see any mention of "SJW" or the "left". All I read were statements that people were worried the team would be wrongly seen as far-right because one of the symbols on their team sweaters is the same symbol that a neo-Nazi group uses.
This is what it says at the end of the story:
> The decision to dump the design has reportedly induced especially strong criticism among neo-pagans, Viking reenactors and fans of the national ski team for "giving up" the collective ownership of ancestral symbols to a tiny, unrepresentative minority.
So tell me, which of those groups are part of the "regressive left" that you claim are telling "the Norwegians they can't use their own letters"? I guess it would be overkill for me to point out that that graf actually says the exact opposite of what you claim, which is that the "strong criticism" is coming from groups who are mad that the Norwegian team ISN'T using the symbol.
No-one has said they can't use their own letters - they've said "maybe you want to think about using a symbol that was associated with the Third Reich and is currently in use by Nazis in Norway" and that's exactly what people are doing.
Everyone reading this is privileged to some degree (for example I didn’t spend my childhood in war zones as my parents did) and disadvantaged to some degree (there are things I like to do that for health reasons I no longer can). It’s no big deal, moral or otherwise, simply life.
But if you have empathy for others you will perhaps be less likely to say, “well I did it, so why can’t everyone else do it too?”
It's a big deal since people exploit the privilege talk to manipulate you. It usually boils down to getting your money, job position or your vote. See the Healing from Toxic Whiteness webinar and other thinly veiled indulgences sold to nice, gullible men. But they shouldn't be ashamed for their own identity.
My point is that every one of us is born, without our control, with a set of advantages and disadvantages, basically an enormous set of D20-rolls. Nobody has any moral superiority or inferiority based on that set of advantages and disadvantages. But you, and society, derive an ethical benefit when you can dispassionately recognize how your set of advantages/disadvantages helps and hurts you especially when those impacts are implicit.
Here's a trivial example of how this awareness can help you: I can walk around fine so why should I want businesses to take up space with access ramps instead of staircases and street kerbs? Well when I was on crutches I suddenly needed those ramps. If I hadn't been attuned to the invisible advantage I had of being able to walk around I probably wouldn't have supported this kind of upgrade.
Another, more diffuse example: that smart kid in a poor neighborhood, if she has an opportunity to go to a good school might develop the cure for the disease you have. You'll never know either way.
https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-Talk-About-Race/dp/158005677...
Feminism has (relatively) direct political and behavioral consequences, and so the professors who teach it will tend to skew towards people who want those policies and behaviors implemented.
By contrast, what is the agenda of someone who teaches Methods and Problems of Philosophical Thought? Probably that field self-selects for people who don't want, or believe they can, change the world too much in any particular way. Rather, if you asked them why they got into the subject, they would probably say it's inherently interesting, or that they like reading and argument, or have some kind of vague idea about changing the world that lacks much salient political or behavioral implication (e.g., "opening people's minds"). Thus, they will encourage debate and want to make sure the students learn all the ideas correctly (the ideas being what they find beautiful) moreso than actually accept the ideas. After all, who cares if one of your philosophy students goes on to law school thinking it's not impossible he's a brain in a vat?
It would be interesting if the philosophy professors had to swap out who taught what. But this is unlikely because of the division of labor and time required to teach and do research---each would feel frustrated.
In my own field, transportation engineering, many professors often started out like the first type of professor and wound up like the second. They go into the field thinking they're going to help improve transit or get people to stop driving less or design highways better. But after a while they realize the decisions they impact are (i) extremely context-dependent (e.g., bus rapid transit vs light rail), (ii) made by bureaucrats not the public (e.g., diverging diamond interchanges) or (iii) made politically/randomly without any pretense of optimization whatsoever (e.g., Trump's infrastructure plan seems to have been designed partly by an investor, Wilbur Ross, with no prior interest in roads). At that point the professors become more interested than they were in furthering knowledge for its own sake, which is all that's left over to do and is also what will get you tenure. This leads to something of a balancing act when they teach, whereby the professors want to teach the students the big ideas without discouraging their enthusiasm.
I'm a former student at a school functionally identical (and in many, many ways culturally similar) to Columbia. Aside from my professional-focused studies related to topics many HN readers would be familiar with, I'm a serious philosophy student. I've taken classes in both of these academic categories within philosophy that the author seems to be outlining. For what it's worth, I do not fit the political or demographic mold of a person who would stereotypically pursue the "progressive" branches of philosophy being discussed and in many cases criticized here.
There are many classes with different teaching styles. Some present material as dogma without affording critique, as in the feminist theory class the author described. This is bad teaching, it is possibly even more common in classes on feminist and similar theory. It's there in other areas of philosophy, including mind-focused and analytic topics, but harder to encounter until you're already deep in academia. I promise that there are Plato scholars who act just as the professor in the article did.
There are those here that feel feminist, queer, and race-driven theory is not serious "philosophy" or who will reduce it to cultural marxist or similar terms. This is intellectually dishonest, and probably driven by odious people you've met that espouse beliefs along the lines of Foucault or the Frankfurt School. Yes, Foucault's supporters can be extremely annoying and unreasonable. But there are real insights in many progressive philosophical works, some of them evoking striking and existential moments of reflection, and proposing new ways to live and see the world.
I urge readers here to attempt to look past the frustrations they might have with feminists or progressives and try to find something valuable in these works, because it really is there. I.e., when you hear people talk about things like abolishing the police or that all women or people of colour are violently oppressed, try not to react immediately to these phrases and see what is really being said. Philosophy is often about getting to the very root meaning of a term, or making subtle distinctions, or creating technical terms out of everyday language. You may find that the people who have annoyed you have bastardized the philosophers they espouse, or have at least failed to communicate the meat of their work.
What is it like to be a bat? By Thomas Nagel