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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected.

The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.

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In my 10+ years in academia, i‘ve seen only a few STEM people in university politics. From what I have read over the years, it’s the same in ‘real’ politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’. This leads to different values and different politics.

> I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’

This is such an important point that it needs to be emphasized. Large chunks of the humanities and social sciences operate under a completely different epistemology. This epistemology rejects reason. And I don't mean that as a jab, I mean it literally rejects the philosophical concept of Reason itself.

Everything is about ideology. It has at it's core the notion that there is no objective truth, and that any assertion of truth is merely the application of power of one group over another. Under this epistemology, lying, contradiction, hypocrisy, fallacy, and rhetoric are all acceptable and even encouraged.

Dig a little in to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction and so much of the Social Justice movement will make sense. You'll start to find very little about Social Justice is about social justice.

I had previously associated that with the right wing partisan media like Fox News and infowars. Surprised to hear that this may be relevant in academic social sciences as well

I'd say they are a little different. Infowars et al are basically just running their mouths for tabloid headlines. Academics adopting this "alternative epistemology" is more concerning. Stupid blowhards will be stupid blowhards, but the should-be bastions of clarity and reason doing this based on a rejection of all Western philosophy is concerning.

I'm not an expert but I think this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents, sort of like quoting "I think therefore I am" and going about telling people that Descartes was purely a solipsist. There's something to it, but it's not the whole truth, and in a sometimes-violent climate of name-calling (and worse) I think it can be damaging when misinformation is wielded as a club against political opponents like this.

> gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents

Could you please explain? I don't think I misrepresented anything, but I'm open to correction. I'm no expert either, but I have explored these ideas and I feel like I gave fair summary.

> but it's not the whole truth

True, it was a summary of what I felt were the relevant points.

> misinformation

I don't think what I said is even particularly controversial, least of all misinformation. It's just not well known. Most of what I said is explicitly stated by the people who hold those beliefs.

Explain, then, the epistemology that leads someone with a degree in international relations and economics to say that being morally right is more important than being factually correct?

I agree that misinformation can be wielded like a club; I disagree that GP is the one doing so.

Isn't that a false dichotomy?

If you're going to throw quotes or references to news in to conversations out of nowhere at least source them.

For those playing at home: he's quoting stripped of context Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Watch the video here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/06/ocasio-cor...

What about that context contradicts torstenvl's interpretation?

It seems to me that saying that Washington Post fact-checkers are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" is one step away from saying they are morally wrong, an example of the "post-fact" attitude that holding the right position is more important than reality.

I suppose it was inevitable that when fact-checkers became inconvenient for politicians, politicians would attack them. How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?

People who still care about facts need to stand up to those who don't, lest facts cease to matter entirely.

Edit:

In response to the claim that the WaPo is being "pedantic" and "petty", I should include their response:

> The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.

...

> What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/07/alexandri...

>> How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?

Perhaps journalists have "facts", but, in the sciences, we don't have anything of the sort. We have evidence, and theories that attempt to interpret the evidence. Scientists are often accused of equivocating about the significance of their results, and changing their minds every few years, because the public expects "facts" and absolute scientific truth where all we have is best-guesses given the data, and uncertainty. And this is an expectation bred by the reporting of scientific results in the lay press.

The comment you quote above seems to be about WP fact-checkers; not scientists. I don't see why you have to go from that, to a crisis in scientific credibility. Journalists can be expected to have much less rigorous research processes than scientists. In that light, the comment you quote, that being morally right is more important than being factually correct makes sense: journalistic "fact-checking" is not going to be very accurate at all. So why not make sure it's at least ethical?

In any case, I don't see any, well, evidence of the kind of crisis you're talking about.

What is "evidence" if not "facts"?

Theory is always changing and improving, as it should, but facts are the foundation for sound theory.

AOC is arguing that what's important is that the theory be appealing, whether or not it fits the facts.

If STEM operated that way nothing would work.

The point she is making is that playing 'gotcha!' with relatively minor errors (in this case misinterpreting 21 trillion dollars worth of unaccounted for income AND expenditure as merely 21 trillion dollars of cash unaccounted for) misses the greater conversation about huge military spending vs civilian spending.

Sure you can spend your life being pedantic about things and us nerds commonly fall in to that trap, but it doesn't engage the conversation in a meaningful way and is very petty.

The reason I linked it is because the larger back-and-forth with Cooper where she admits facts are important and talks about when she makes mistakes provides colour that is missing from the misleading snipped quote "being morally right is more important than facts".

It's perfectly reasonable to debate whether we should spend money on the military or on healthcare, but that's not what she said.

Instead, she suggested we could pay for Medicare for All just by improving Pentagon accounting, without making sacrifices, which is false. Pointing out the difference is neither petty nor pedantic.

It's also dangerous (but all too common) for her to suggest that her position is "morally right" and anyone who questions it, anyone who supports the military, is "morally wrong" without even considering what happens to the world if Pax Americana ends.

It is not a minor error. It's not pedantic. It's not petty. She claimed the DoD lost more money than it has ever had, cumulatively, in its entire history, including when it was the Department of War.

If you want to have a conversation about military spending vs. civilian spending, fine. Let's have that conversation. But it's only worth having that conversation with people who will be honest and admit when they're wrong.

Interestingly the field that talks most about epistemology and different epistemologies, is philosophy, which I'm pretty sure is part of the "grievance studies" bloc the authors wish to push a narrative about. It is absolutely the field you'd go into if you wanted to dissect and examine different epistemologies.

> post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction

I've worked in the pre-eminent enemy-of-the-right organisation in Australia, GetUp. I also am/was a postgrad philosopher. I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context.

Additionally, to read these four areas and to then claim that they form the basis of "identity politics" demonstrates a fundamental misreading. Perhaps this misreading is a motivated one.

A couple of questions

1. How big is GetUp here in Australia? How many full time staff?

2. How can you be a postgrad philosopher in both the present and past tense?

1. The information you seek... is found in the first Google result.

2. Counter-question: Is it possible to simultaneously hold a post-graduate degree, and be studying one?

1. I would prefer to hear the answer from someone with personal knowledge as not everything you read on Google is true.

2. Yes, but that was not my question.

Ok, and ok.

"I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context."

I've mostly heard these things discussed on Reddit and YouTube because of Jordan Peterson. I've heard postmodernism discussed by a professional counseller but nobody else I've ever talked to. I find it intriguing the intensity which people fight beliefs that seemingly few people believe or have even heard of.

I do find epistemology a very interesting subject in the modern day though. I've heard arguments in Canada about how traditional native forms of knowledge should be acknowledged to be as legitimate as science. People aren't proposing this merely as a thought experiment they want things like oral tradition to hold weight in the court system. They feel that a lack of scientific evidence about possible harms from say natural resource development is being used as grounds to harm the ecology of areas in spite of the warnings and precautions of oral traditions. Epistemology is becoming very relevant politically here in these parts yet it seems to be a subject that both myself and the public at large is uneducated about.

I'd be interested to hear more about this - but in the past its certainly true that indigenous myths were seen as useless to science. There are several examples of natural events and disasters being correlated with myths retold in indigenous oral histories.

You're right to point to Mr. Peterson regarding these postmodernism complaints. A succinct summary is that he claims in a movement called "postmodern neo-marxism". Marxism is a modernism movement, the phrase itself is already a contradiction. And yeah, almost no activists even know about postmodernism.

I can't find the resources I was looking at but here's one paper on the subject

https://cirl.ca/files/cirl/david_laidlaw-en.pdf

Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge DOES have weight in the Canadian legal system just not very much especially in the lower courts. A point bought up in the context of using it in the courts is - isn't oral tradition fundamentally built on hearsay?

It is a super interesting jurisprudential question, because legal systems are typically objective in part, but also rely on some idea of what a "reasonable person" would consider factual or reasonable. It stands to reason then, that under a native epistemology, it is reasonable for oral tradition aka hearsay to be given legal weight - when under the modern tradition we wouldn't. It is probably worth wondering if we'd consider aboriginals to have no knowledge if we took a hardline view that all hearsay was not knowledge. I think that's a pretty counterintuitive conclusion, so I think there must be some credit given to knowledge in a system with no written record. And, the next question that comes to my mind anyhow is what would it be like if nothing was considered knowledge unless it was written down? This isn't even currently the case in our modern tradition, given that witnesses and memories are still considered to have at least some weight.

That is the whole point of 'STEM' it is to separate technical from humanities. Otherwise you would just call engineering, or biology, or math. Someone knew exactly what they were doing when they invented the word 'STEM'.

>> As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected.

Traditionally, if you think a scientific field is a bunch of nonsense, you have two options: a) ignore it, and, b) change it from within, by publishing better work yourself, etc.

But, to mobilise some kind of research police to tell other academics what to research and how to research it? I don't think so. Academics should be free to study whatever they like. If this ends up producing a load of garbage like gender studies, then so be it. They can study their irrelevant and useless subjects, so that I can study my all-important subject (AI; and I'm being sarcastic- of course my own field looks more important to me).

In any case, it's really not the job of STEM researchers, or any researchers, to police other fields. I don't see any sort of justification in what you describe.

I agree in principle and I think most researchers do, which is why grievance studies have been allowed to do whatever they wanted for so long, but grievance studies have taken it upon themselves to police other fields. "Policing" that is only self-defense at this point.

By "policing other fields" I assume you mean papers that are critical of STEM research?

The comment to which I replied calls for STEM researchers to "do something" - without specifying what. What are you suggesting should be done? Are we talking about writing papers criticising those fields, as they criticise ours, or are we talking about some more radical kind of "self-defense" like making sure their funding is cut and their research and teaching positions cancelled?

I think there's a place for departments that are concerned with ethics and social issues, but such departments are not above reproach either.

It seems sensible, at the very least, to ensure their research meets the highest standards of rationality just as they ensure STEM meets high ethical standards.

I also think it's worthwhile to ensure those departments are completely inclusive and don't exclude Christians, white men, the right wing, etc. A principled, rational approach to inclusion can help ensure that the social departments are truly representative of all the people.

Edit:

This isn't a description of grievance studies as it currently exists, rather it's an answer to the question "what should we do?" - we should advocate and lobby for something like this, I think.

>> It seems sensible, at the very least, to ensure their research meets the highest standards of rationality just as they ensure STEM meets high ethical standards.

Thank you for clarifying. But, why is that anything to do with STEM researchers, or researchers from any other field, than the fields in question? What are we, the guardians of scientific rationality? If a field is full of nonsense, it's up to its community to fix it. If they don't see the problem- well, that, too, is their problem.

You and other commenters here sound like you think a problem in, e.g., gender studies is a problem for all of academia. I really don't see why.

Edit: to clarify- I don't see how the gender studies etc fields "ensure that STEM meets high ethical standards". If such critique is really common among the humanities, at least my field is completely ignoring it. And I don't see how we can be forced to pay attention if we don't really care to.

In short- they can say what they like. Why should I care?

Because reputation spreads. The linguistics department understands that the literature department's behavior does not reflect on the chemistry department, but the electorate seems not to grasp that so easily. Since STEM depends heavily on government to fund basic research, STEM's progress can definitely be impeded by widespread mistrust of academia as a whole.

Not important, but I think you intend en masse when you write on mass (almost the same pronunciation when spoken).

Indeed, the STEM community has recently taken decisive action on mass:

https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhau...

They should also make the decisive step and call it Grave instead of kilogram. It's unfair

Your comments here amount to bitter insulting stereotypes, without any support by evidence or analysis, or any real engagement with the people you disagree with. To an outside bystander with no stake in whatever game you are playing, this kind of uglyness largely discredits whatever point you were trying to make.

I would recommend keeping such rhetoric off of this forum. It doesn’t lead in a direction of productive conversation, and it feeds negative stereotypes about scientists/techies. There are many better venues for venting.

I am not venting at anyone, but expressing my concern over the damage being done to something I love.

I have insulted no person and I have proposed a positive agenda of having the STEM field step in to get rid of these grievance study areas from universities.

The only one insulting anyone personally is you.

“Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.

You have called these scholars unintelligent, an infection, gangrenous, an existential threat to the university, etc. who must be “gotten rid of”.

What is your definition of “insult” if this doesn’t qualify? Or are you maintaining that “no person” is insulted if you aim your vacuous broadsides at a group?

You and others supporting your position here haven’t specified precisely who you are talking about, given any concrete evidence/explanation about what you are so mad about, provided any serious analysis, etc.

It’s pretty much “those Sneetches with no stars on their bellies on them are really terrible. We Sneetches with the stars should make sure to keep them out of our hallowed institutions.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie... (Trigger warning to delicate STEM students: Dr. Seuss with his message of diversity and toleration was a famous “grievance scholar”)

It's about as made up as the validity of studying things like "Contextualizing the Power Relations among Surfers in the Water" https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/108307733196981452...

Someone used their grant to go surfing and concluded it was racist.

I've read non-scholarly writings about surfers including behavior/etiquette in the water and found it interesting. I think it would be a worthwhile subject for research. Examining human behavior in niches can be illuminating to different and broader contexts.

This has no bearing on the parent comment

Neither does this

I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.

If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?

As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed - "in the areas of cultural, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies." [1]

As for engaging with their work I don’t think that it is possible to have a rational discussion with people that think papers like these are worthwhile academic research [1].

Accepted and published

Helen Wilson (pseudonym) (2018). "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon". Gender, Place & Culture: 1–20. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346. (Retracted)

Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding". Fat Studies. 7 (3): i–xiii. doi:10.1080/21604851.2018.1453622. (Retracted)

M. Smith (pseudonym) (2018). "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". Sexuality & Culture. 22 (4): 1542. doi:10.1007/s12119-018-9536-0. (Retracted)

Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant". Sex Roles. 79 (11–12): 762. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0962-0. (Retracted)

Accepted but not yet published

Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire". Hypatia.

Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality". Journal of Poetry Therapy.

Maria Gonzalez, and Lisa A. Jones (pseudonyms). "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism". Affilia.

Revise and resubmit

Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption". Porn Studies.

Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy". Hypatia.

Stephanie Moore (pseudonym). "Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence Safety Research". Feminist Theory.

Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy". Women's Studies International Forum.

Under review

Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Strategies for Dealing with Cisnormative Discursive Aggression in the Workplace: Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion". Gender, Work and Organization.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_Studies_affair

So is a fair summary of your position: “Anyone working in roughly the same field as any journal editor who was taken in by a hoax should be fired from their job and removed from intellectual discourse, and their subjects of study should be blacklisted as inherently illegitimate”?

How far do you cast your net? You seem to want to throw out anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literary criticism, etc. Are you going to scrap history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, religion, design, ... departments too?

Be careful what you wish for: an awful lot of scholarship in lower-tier STEM journals is also garbage, albeit typically a different flavor of garbage: unoriginal, lazy analysis, strong claims unsupported by the evidence, based on incorrect technical premises, making false advertisements of its practical applicability, massaging data in illegitimate ways, etc. (I know this because I spend a lot of time reading math and science papers in my spare time.) Even Nature and Science occasionally need to retract a paper when it turns out the author plagiarized it or falsified the data.

P.S. You didn’t need to copy/paste a wall of hoax paper titles from Wikipedia.

No. I am suggesting that I can't have a rational conversation with anyone who thinks the hoax papers are serious research. Surprisingly that is what I said.

I don't want to throw out any area of research, I want to throw out those that publish papers that pretend to be research.

I am very critical about researchers failings in the natural sciences. I am probably even more critical of bad science because it is so much more damaging.

I think the wall of hoax papers does rather get across the scale of the problem.

> I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.

That's a pretty pompous thing to say...

>> “Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.

> If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?

You're being obtuse. It's obvious to anyone with experience of human society that terms can be made up that have very little utility beyond being insulting to some person or group.

The GP makes a valid point about the use and meaning of those terms. I can admit that even though I'm no fan of many of the ideas and attitudes that are lazily lumped under them.

> As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed

Would you like a system more like the Soviet Union's, where a political authority controls who gets admitted into academia and who gets kept out?

I am suggesting academics do the removal, not some political authority.

"Grievance studies" are all rooted in conflict theory, which was developed by one of sociology's three founding fathers, Karl Marx. They are literally rooted in a single (disproven) theory that all relationships are based on power and dominance. These are the people I believe we are talking about, the ones who speak of power and oppression and some tribe or class that is in control and must be stopped in the name of virtue, subsequently going on a witch hunt finding evidence and evils wherever they look because they have been taught to use post-modern reasoning, a form of irrational reasoning meant to question logic but not be used as logic.

The tactics they use, weaponizing shame and applying post-modern reasoning/critical theory, is a Marxist socialist tactic when combined with his ideology that cuts to the core of the most fundamental human psychological need -- the need for social connection, validation (psychological or scientific), and by using reasoning that cannot be argued with rationally is disarming if not disorienting in a political fight/argument. There's even a word for when they use it against other radical socialist groups -- leapfrog paranoia -- meant to get the different intersectional factions to unite against a common enemy in order to seize power. This is all in their own words.

(sidebar - watch the documentary Hard Times at Douglas High, where an inner city debate team uses critical theory in a debate about anything to make it about racism in order to win. In other words all debates became about their narrative, and these were Baltimore kids in what was the first integrated high school, indoctrinated by their professor back in the 90s).

It's coercive and dishonest, not simply persuasive, and a form of violence. They force people to submit under threat of social disconnection, which research has shown is more brutal than physical violence because it's psychologically traumatic, permanent, and has a biological impact on the individual as well as a sociological impact. Guilt is saying you did something wrong, shame is saying you are something wrong. There is no greater authoritarian or fascist behavior, which needs to be pointed out as distinct from the field of study itself.

So if the words "grievance studies" or "social justice warrior" are offensive, perhaps a better and more historically accurate and verifiable label to apply would be to call them Marxists or conflict theorists? I don't think that would be completely fair because as pointed out, few even know what those words mean let alone the roots and origins of their own beliefs, the nature of the tactics they use, or the nature of reasoning and belief systems themselves. What word wouldn't be offensive that embodies the characteristics that define them to others? The "grievance studies" label seems scientifically accurate and neutral without any attached ideology or behaviors.

If this offends anyone it is not meant to, I take no sides in any of this and seek the value in studying all of it.

Maybe the entire funding schemes need an overhaul? At least in Europe, i think it would be useful and productive to have a realignment of incentives and measures. And perhaps it is worth to explore a more transparent system than the current funding pipeline.

I think the trend is for people to leave academia instead of trying to do politics ; besides , a lot of people went into academia to avoid politics in the first place.

Trying to understand what was written: did you mean "en masse," not "on mass?"

Someone's been out of academic life for a long time. Sign up for the colloquia at your former institution. STEM ain't gonna help you. They're as bad as everyone else.

I hope not as that is too depressing for words if true.

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