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Comment by brodo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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'.

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