How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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People may argue from ideology for or against politics like these, but I can think of no clearer indication of these policies' failure than the impoverishing of a country.
Many authoritarian (or especially populist) governments KNOW they will lower the GDP because by limiting low-wage labor immigration or focusing on nurturing a native culture or preserving the environment and not buying into a soulless consumerism/globalization they are creating a GDP cap.
"growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" --edward abbey
(I don't know anything about what's happening in Turkey, I just don't believe in GDP as a metric to chase)
Unadjusted gdp seems like an entirely pointless metric when as you point out you can look at places like the USA where despite having high gdp there's still widespread poverty.
You're on the right track though, at minimum you need to use something like purschasing power parity (PPP) to account for some effects, and wealth distribution to account for others.
Doing these comparisons meaningfully isn't easy to get right.
There may also be GDP growth in a country with bad social policies. I wouldn't expect there to be much GDP shrinkage in a country with smart social policies, though.
Actually # of suicides would be a good metric for a country’s health.
I think this is my favorite new "correlation does not equal causation" example.
More broadly, I think lots of nations today could maintain healthy economies with flat or shrinking national GDP, but those are countries which have little reason to expect 'natural' GDP increase without a growth ideology. Most obviously, post-industrial nations which can't rely on growing populations or rapid labor productivity boosts from urbanization and infrastructure investment: Sweden or the UK could plausibly operate at near-constant GDP, and Japan could even grow per capita GDP while shrinking national GDP. More subtly, nations which actively avoid pursuing the common arc of demographic transition, urbanization, and industrialization: Mongolia or Bhutan might try to take an entirely different path. And crucially, any of these nations would need to plan for the outcome: if Sweden 0% GDP growth without intending to, it would point to serious economic problems.
Given all of that, Turkey seems like a singularly bad candidate for falling total GDP. The population is still growing at 1.5% and labor productivity at 2%-3%, while experiencing urbanization and major infrastructure expansion. Crudely put, 1.015*1.025 ought to net Turkey 4% GDP growth without considering anything any other factors at all, so a substantial decline points to something going badly wrong.
That's a very extreme position. People desire more than what can be bought at the market.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...
Do you realise that Erdogan has been in power since 2001? So if economic downturn is his achievement, then the economic growth is his achievement, too.
That I know, too. And that happened (as in many authoritarian states) so that he could maintain the illusion of legitimacy: "hey look, I'm not a prime-minister forever, I am now president".
But do give Erdogan some credit. He is not stupid. And it's disingenuous and deeply simplistic to paint what happened in Turkey as "Erdogan became President in 2013, look Turkey immediately slid into recession because of that". "Checks and balances" alone cannot explain Turkey's growth prior to 2013.
His son-in-law has become the finance minister and furthered the disruption.
In 2014, Erdogan was elected as President. In 2017, Turkey went through a constitutional referendum that made the President head of the executive branch.
I'm noting this because much of Erdogan's popularity is rooted in Turkey's GDP growth between 2003-2013.
Your currency tanking is worse than having the GDP going down.
edit: I mean that as a genuine, serious question, how is that worse?
- greek debt crisis
- brexit
- recent market turmoil
- syrian conflict
all of which have huge impact to Turkish economy as well.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/20/reuters-america-update-1-erd...
In the not-so-distant-past, a dictator purging academics would be clearly and universally acknowledged as bad.
Somehow it's now twisted around to claim that critics of _supporters_ of a regime are actually the real "oppressors".
Interesting times.
Honestly, I'm not so sure that's true. That's still a consensus view for people without a stake in what's happening, and it never has been clear and universal for those close to the topic. (Who, as here, generally accept the principle but reject the accuracy of both 'dictator' and 'purge'.)
It's not hard to find people, even in the US, who in their own time excused (or praised) each of fascist crackdowns on historians, Soviet enforcement of Lysenkoism, Pinochet's 'disappearing' of artists, Maoist 'reeducation', or even the Khmer Rouge's outright mass murder of educated people. Mostly, those purges have only been near-universally reviled in hindsight.
And indeed, in the US there were things like the Madison Square pro-nazi rally in 1939. And just as there were pro-democracy denunciations of Pinochet that Nixon et co ignored, so too today there is denunciation of appalling autocratic behavior that will be ignored and will need to be watered down to justify to the public. Perhaps in the past too there were arguments of the form "thousands of political firings do not constitute a purge because the New York Times is X"
I am accustomed to solution oriented discussions on these topics. So while interesting from an anthropological point of view, defense and praise of autocratic behavior is a breaking distraction from finding solutions.
Sztoptanski called that Dictatorship of Dishrags. Generally the best weapon against such times is irony and a sense of humor and grotesque.
But it was all happening with two hundred thousand Soviet soldiers stationed in the country. The communist government wouldn't have lasted a month without the Soviet support. The situation is different because China is not being occupied by a foreign power. Neither is Turkey.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia...
I'm always thankful to the Polish because they sparked the 1989 revolutions with Lech Wałęsa's Solidarność movement.
That this type of behavior has been recently normalized, encouraged, and incentivized by both the far right and far left in the USA is a very disturbing trend. Historically this has never worked out well, so let's hope it all stops sooner than later.
This is a role whereby he lives in close proximity to students, acts as an mentor and helps students with all sorts of things, like for example if a student was sexually assaulted - their dean is supposed to be on their side.
Students are right to question if he takes sexual assault seriously if he represents Weinstein. There are many other fine lawyers, and this was a totally voluntary job he took on.
His real job, which it certainly appears like he shirked, is to be the best advocate for his students, to help them navigate college, which is often a difficult time.
It's easy to say that his voluntary role in the defense of Weinstein has no merit or conflict with his job. But is that really true? You can say "students should grow up" or toughen up or something, but is that the kind of advice you'd offer to your own child?
I think not.
The appearance of conflict of interest is enough. That his students express discomfort and feelings of unsafe _in their own home_ was easily dismissed by this professor is additional evidence that he doesn't treat his job of dean to a residence seriously enough. "You should reason yourself so my volunteer role and job are not in conflict" is not good enough - he's putting all the effort on the weak and less powerful. And that's not right.
Ultimately the story he spins in that article is that Harvard "capitulated to a mob", but my spin is this: Harvard did the right thing by protecting the less powerful from the more powerful. And there is no disputing a tenured Harvard law professor, with tons of connections, a guaranteed for life salary, etc, is the more powerful person.
Goodhart's law is a big mechanic purging intellectual discussion.
If you're in a right leaning, 'non political' forum and you post about potential impacts of climate change, you'll almost certainly be put on blast.
If you're in a left leaning, 'non political' forum and someone posts 'climate change is going to turn Earth to Venus and we're all going to die choking' and you respond "that seems like unrealistic histrionics" you will almost certainly be put on blast.
There is verdant field of potential discussion between those two posts and it's very difficult to play there. You can, in certain sanctuaries.. but in public, 90% of the gradient causes someone to foam at the mouth if they suspect your political alignment is opposite theirs.
You should just come right out and say it, I think.
I stand by my handwaving as relevant, common experience that indicates an erosion of intellectual discourse. It should be patently obvious that I didn't have any sources for what I said specifically. There's no parenthetical or APA formatted links anywhere!
Edit: Okay, I'll go run an experiment and come back with the data. Maybe that's a compromise.
Well, you made a claim, and people asked you to prove that claim. I think it is quite reasonable to expect you to carry that burden regardless of medium. Otherwise, you should retract the original claim.
Incidentally, what you said about "people just [stating] what they are thinking" and then not backing that up with evidence is a huge problem in today's public discourse. If we don't hold those people accountable, then what we have is not a discourse, but a cacophony of random voices.
While there is some silencing of people and view points, I don't think it is not fair to those in Turkey to consider it on the same level as their purge. Outside of a few areas dealing with the social sciences, the worst an expert in their field is going to have to deal with is government funding cuts.
I can point out some problems with the way we currently do science, including funding issues, replication issues, unfair amounts of criticism based on how socially agreeable a finding is, and in very rare cases people's employment being at risk for 'wrongthink', but even the worst cases of these barely even compare and no one is ending up being imprisoned over it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/george-...
By that logic, limiting the influence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute is also anti-democratic.
Source?
And its wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_University) states: "A central tenet of the university's philosophy is the promotion of open societies."
It cites https://www.ceu.edu/rethinking-open-society, which supports that statement.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/25/trump-...
Not saying that every pseudo-dictator is going to end up like pol pot, but it's good to see the warning flags.
One of the three greatest cities in human history, and so many signs of "almost making it back". But now, everything has the stench of moving into the wrong direction. Seriously, you can feel it in the people, the shops, the buildings.
It makes me really sad never to have been there in its prime.
Turkey was never not a troubled country, but Turkish friends tell me Erdogan has sucked the optimism out of the intellectuals and academics that prevailed in years prior. What is left now is the typical Turkish melancholic nostalgia. It seeps through the streets of the city nowadays.
Tragic.
Narrowly missed it by ~six centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople :)
I have seen that assertion frequently made, and even have attended multiple seminars on the topic (I have some friends very worried about this issue) as well as some FIRE meetings and fundraisers.
Yet I typically see the same few examples repeated and amplified. FIRE loves to talk about the cases it has challenged under Title IX -- and it always wins, because the law considers this an important issue! (https://www.thefire.org/issues/title-ix/)
Look at the recent (past couple of days) kerfuffle about Prof Wax, whose statements I consider abhorrent. Based on past practice I am pretty sure she'll keep her job.
There are issues around groups peripheral to universes (non-sponsored student groups and the like) but they pretty much by definition aren't part of universities.
1. There have been protests about conservative speakers at campuses and universities whom have pulled shady stuff on trying to prevent the speakers from coming. (there was a Dave Rubin one where he was magically moved from a theater to a hockey arena). Substantially high costs on security. (Also video cases of where the security isn't actually enforced [Milo at the Depaul thing.. ]
2. There have been punishments against professors who question the progressive/extreme-left movement. (losing tenure, being brought up that they're "violence-inciting", etc)
3. A Portland professor being brought up on disciplinary actions for doing a POC on how you can get a paper with outrageously false claims published without question. (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent... This was a team of three that was involved one in the UK)
4. "Diversity offices" - I don't know direct examples here, but from what I've heard they've created trouble.
A few things:
- Protests are valid free speech expressions.
- Holding an entire protest as invalid due to a small number of individual's actions is unfair.
- Many of those conservative speakers aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent). While perhaps being protected by the 1st amendment, that's academic dishonesty. And we should not accept prima facie the arguments they're being oppressed.
- The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics. We're going to need better evidence not to take the disciplinary board at face value.
Basically "I hear about this frequently" and "there have been..." is pretty weak evidence. It's mainly relying upon the recency bias, availability cascade, base rate neglect, and our inability to assess large events.
For example, the Berkeley campus protest is constantly referred to. The problem is this is a splashy example which distorts people's thinking. People rarely talk about the thousands and thousands of conservative speakers that hold events without a hitch. We cannot talk about a systematic risk by only referring to events that are so rare that we keep on referring to the same one for the last several years! That is _by definition_ the opposite of a systematic bias/risk.
Basically I call serious BS. Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again while appealing to the impression that there should be more events like this, when there are not, is garbage.
Playing off of outrage is heavily rewarded by our current societal systems. It happens at all points of the political spectrum, but happens more at the extremes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics
It's a hoax. It's a time honored means of expression, particularly when the subject heavily deserves ridicule.
Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again
There's a list of well over 600 incidents of violence, vandalism, and threats, instigated by the far left. If you do some searching, you'll find over a hundred with just a bit of sincere effort, and in pretty short order. There's also the father and son republicans who were chased down by black block demonstrators. There's the time when a mob was calling for Tim Pool to be chased down and beaten. There's the Florida local news video crew attacked, his smartphone knocked out of his hand. The bike lock professor. That's all just off the top of my head. True, such things are also done by elements of the far right. All of it is bad.
In any case, it's certainly not the case that there are only a few cherry picked examples from the Far Left. There's an epidemic of political harassment and assault in 2019, and a majority of the incidents up to the level of vandalism and minor assault comes from the Left. If anything, there's a bias against talking about that in the media.
For what I meant by right-wing, I meant the popular definition that is used today: Anything right of extreme left.
> not today
Lol. Good luck with trying to suppress others based on their beliefs or opinions.
Winning often comes at a cost and just merely having to defend oneself causes enough damage to be considered a form of punishment regardless of the lack of an official classification as one.
While it isn't nearly the same level as losing your job and being blacklisted, I also don't think it should be counted as the same as someone who does not have to go through a similar process.
It's not a lie. Liberals own academia. 39% of colleges have no Republican professors. In many majors, the ratio is between 15 and 20 to one Democrats per Republican.
There is no world where ratios like that exist and discrimination doesn't occur.
This article says nothing about persecution from the academic establishment to which you refer.
The article talks about academics being persecuted.
In Turkey the state took jobs and freedom of mobility away from those with ideologies that the regime did not favor.
Good point. To look for authoritarianism, look for powerful organizations and people taking away jobs and economic security from "those with ideologies the regime did not favor." It works for more types of organizations than just the state.
That's going to make those people desperate and ready to fight the government. Next step for the government is going to be imprisoning lots of people and manufacturing consent and all that.
That's another good heuristic. Look for those who manufacture consent, and try to suppress dissent.
It's a good list. At the risk of courting Godwin I'd suggest that 'concentration camps' would be a good 15th point but I guess it's covered more generally.
[1] https://kottke.org/16/11/the-14-features-of-eternal-fascism
Fascism itself was also very modernist in many ways, such as the obsession with industry and technology, the aspiration to innovate "beyond" liberalism and Marxism, and even the artistic and architectural styles it adopted.
Another heuristic: Look out for people who would "argue" purely from resemblances. (And primarily by tarring.)
[citation needed]
I'm not out to marginalize academia in general. My wife is a former college professor, and a Stanford PhD. However, I would like to call out those in academia who would marginalize others in academia purely for their opinions. If anything, the threat to academic freedom is even more potent, when it comes from within.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism_in_Turkey
what has happened is a shift in who is being suppressed, rather than the ab-initio creation of suppression. This is hinted at but not actually elucidated in the article:
This measure was both practical and symbolic:
The decaying Ottoman Empire had given way to a
rebellious new nation that required statesmen (like
himself) who were dedicated to secularism, modernity
and nationalism.
the omission is unsurprising, since previous suppression fits secularist editorial bias of NYT, whereas current suppression does not.
this is neither to say that I am in favor of either, nor that there was/was not intellectual freedom under ottoman times.
And I have a problem with this story about its portrayal of Turk-Kurd relation. Turkey is an extension of a multi-national empire. For most people living there, Turkish is not an ethnicity. Most of Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and more identify themselves as Turks. Portraying Demirtas as a charismatic Kurdish rights activist that wants to unite everyone with peace is despicable journalism. Demirtas is a proud terrorist supporter, he has stated his love and respect for Abdullah Ocalan repeatedly. Abdullah Ocalan is/was the leader of P.K.K., a group that is seen as a terrorist organization by every major intelligence agency of world, he is responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, children.
My prediction is that we will be seeing more and more mainstream-media pieces like this in the near future, with a healthy sprinkling of words such as "regime", "dictatorship" and “fascism”, and featuring characters like Demirtas as protagonists of the story. They will undoubtedly be portrayed as freedom-fighters leading the fight against oppression.
Manufacturing Consent was truly prophetic.
Likewise, Turkey's increasing moves away from NATO towards Russia were always going to reach a threshold where some steplike point was crossed (the F-35 vs S-400 thing) and some public consequences happened.
I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
I'm basically of the opinion that it is pretty clear Turkey is heading in the wrong direction, and the powers that be in the west have no reason to manufacture that story.
However if you look at the history of NYT articles on Turkey and Erdogan going back years [1], there are scant few articles that are critical of Turkey or Erdogan in the way this and other articles in the past weeks and months have been (beginning from the time Turkey began to drift away from its traditional allies). Recent articles have directly called into question the legitimacy of the AKP and Erdogan himself who was elected through a democratic process.
> I would've thought if this particular timing was a case of "Manufacturing Consent" rather than just a coincidence, it would've happened earlier.
From my point of view, this article and others like it could be interpreted as a very early precursor to forced regime change in Turkey. Time will tell if I am correct. Turkey switching sides presents an existential threat to NATO and the balance of power in region, especially considering the power of Turkey's military and Erdogan's stance on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
To me, they could be seen as examples of the mainstream media laying the groundwork -building popular support- for some kind of future, punitive military or economic action. They look suspiciously like the articles printed in the lead-up to the disasters of Libya, Iraq, Syria. Of course, this is all just speculation, based on how the informal American propaganda apparatus (described by Chomsky) has operated in the past.
There are many, many problems with Turkey and Erdogan and there is much to answer for, but I'm of the opinion that U.S style regime change is not the solution. I think it behooves us to be extremely critical and even suspicious of any source of information that was designed for mass dissemination and consumption.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=erdogan&sort=newest
Maybe, but it seems a bit much for them to even entertain that one - they (whoever they actually is) haven't had any luck with Iran or North Korea where whipping up some sort of frenzy or story about a direct threat would seem much easier.
Getting Turkey to that position of threat seems like pushing shit uphill.
My point is that once you're aware of Manufactured Consent being a thing that has happened, it can be easy to see it everywhere even when it isn't necessarily there. Overdoing it can be a little hard to distinguish from deepstate/illuminati conspiracy theorists. Edit - definitely not implying this here.
Just want to point out that the situation in NK is different than Turkey because, as we all know, it's a nuclear power in close proximity to a treaty ally.
With Iran... well, we can see the ridiculous predicament that we are in today because of the unilateral actions of one party over a treaty agreed to by 7 signatories. I would not rule out direct military intervention and regime change in the near future there just yet (at massive cost of human life). The world has seen one too many times what happens when nations disobey the global hegemon.
It may indeed seem silly and tin-foil hat-ish, but there are many ways of forcing regime change without overtly declaring war. Coup d'états, spontaneously occurring uprisings, etc.
Not to indulge in the paranoia of world leaders too much, but Erdogan famously survived his 2016 coup which he claims to have been backed by the CIA [1]. The Philippines' Duterte has mentioned in several interviews (in a non-sarcastic way) his fear of being assassinated by the CIA after his pivot towards China [2]. The truth is that geopolitics is probably simultaneously more boring and more full of intrigue than we can imagine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Reminds me of pre-war Germany's educational system once the nazis took over. Curiously enough, Erdogan may agree -
"Erdoğan cites Hitler's Germany as example of effective government":
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/01/turkish-presid...
People like Trump use Mexican as an insult, that doesn’t change the fact that there are tons of people with Mexican roots that identify as American and are well respected by the non-racist majority of the nation.
I don’t see how PKK is anything like American revolution. PKK isn’t representing any form of official group, they aren’t acting in favor of any specific agenda. There is no ‘real unsolved problem still present in Turkey’ that can justify suicide bombing civilians. They are indirectly funded by USA through military aids to PKKs extension PYD. If you asked what does PKK want to Turkish people, there would be no clear answer, as all PKK ever accomplished was stirring the political climate every single time there was a possibility of political stability in the area.
PKK and Kurds want to have their own country, that's natural, every nation wants that, and if history have taken a bit different path Turks could be in the same situation. If there was free speech in Turkey and non-racists were really the overwhelming majority, then the people who go into PKK would simply try to hold a referendum for independence (like people in Scotland), and most likely would not get the majority vote (again like Scotland), but unfortunately Turkey still has a long way to go to get there.
In this day and age, seperatist referandums are just dreams. Kurdistan Kurds had a referandum to declare complete independence from Iraq with 90%+ in favor of independance but they couldn’t make that recognized by international parties, even with Iraq having no practical government. And we saw what happened when Catalans attempted the same thing.
Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
You are correct that existing states are very reluctant to recognize new countries, but my point is that a mere glimmer of hope is enough so significantly reduce terrorism like it with Basque country for instance.
> Though considering the elections in April Erdogans party got more votes in south eastern Turkey than pro PKK HDP. It is very easy to see that Kurds prefer Erdogan over PKK.
That or maybe people with guns supporting Erdoghans party were effective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Turkish_local_elections#V...
The word you are looking for is murdered.
If you could tell your perspective on the issue, of why what i say is baseless and funny, I would be grateful.
[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-sh...
"These ideas won, because, clearly, they are the best."
"These people are successful, because, clearly, they are the best."
People believing an idea doesn't add to its merit.
but most terrifying thing is rising popularity of the populist leaders in the west.
I can't blame anybody who fled in such a climate, especially in a nation which has it's unprocessed genocides not to far in the past. The border between what we call civilization and pure, stupid, evil fascism is extremely thin and given the right conditions the transition can be so incredibly fast, when the public starts to realize, it will be too late.
God help us
Within the context of Brexit, the leavers had their own group of "experts" i.e. the ERG but any attempt at economic prediction was clearly shunned on the grounds of it being "Project Fear" despite no specific biases being demonstrated. Because that's the only way, along with blatant lies, to get people believe that leaving the largest trading block - possibly even with no replacement deal with anyone - could possibly be a good thing (At all costs being the current mantra i.e. No Deal)
It's not the lack of listening to certain experts that bothers me, it's them clearing playing the card. Gove, and most of the others on the leave side, is very well educated and damn well knows that careful thought ("expert"ism) is important.
It's very interesting to me, cause I observe experts in expertise everywhere in Russian media, and have been feeling lately, that they'll close themselves in no time, if they proceed that way, or turn into buzzfeeds.
Btw, I think this is equally true of research outside the social sciences...but there is just far more scope to engage in puffery within the social sciences and, unfortunately, people are often far too lazy to counteract it.
It isn't even about data or the distinction between hard and soft...if you can make a solid argument that is justified and you have no data (which is sometimes the case) then fine. The issue is that, in most areas, the evidence doesn't justify any clear conclusion. Again, you see this in harder sciences where the title is eye-catching, the data less so (often in proportion to the nonsense in the title).
Areas like "peace building" and "conflict resolution", mentioned in the article, are deeply political areas. In my opinion, they rarely do much to advance human knowledge. For example, as the article inadvertently shows, peace building is explicitly based on the idea that democracies are best because they don't attack each other. Sounds great...but there is no data to support this conclusion.
Note well: This does not excuse purging intellectuals, in Turkey or anywhere else. Intellectuals aren't gods, but they aren't vermin, either.
Speaking of which, I recently saw a petition which was sold along the lines of "100s of scientists sign petition condemning 5G", where the vast majority of signatories were either scientists not working in a related field or physicians (Who are not scientists at all).
This doesn't really happen much. First off, only a tiny percentage of people are thinking about this critically and independently. So it's more like "People are told X is bullshit, and choose to believe it". That holds regardless of the truth value of X, and has more to do with the intentional undermining of science as a source of finding truth.
So yes, we should listen to the scientists. Not the people trying to spin what they say, but the scientists. And not individual scientists, but disciplines as a whole. We should be able to understand when there is meaningful consensus and when there is not. How confident the community is in quality of the work. What ways there would be to interrogate it better. We should be funding competent and trained scientific journalists to synthesize and present this things in as objective a way as they can, instead of listening to PR hacks and politicians spin a random paper they found to support the conclusion they want.
Absolutely there are problems in science, and to some degree we have caused them by creating poor incentive structures. So lets fix that. We should probably be focusing more on evidence-base policy, and creating oversight structures that keep it working well.
After all, for the questions that science is capable of addressing, it is far and away the most effective approach humans have ever come up with. And as recent history shows us yet again, if you throw out those voices they will most likely be replaced by blind true-believers and opportunistic mountebanks. You can't honestly believe this will improve things, can you?
Of course, we shouldn't only listen to the scientists. But these day's we've swung too far in the other direction.
It's still not necessarily true, but by taking just part of that quote is misrepresenting what he said.
Just thought that'd be good to keep in mind next time you might consider digging it up.
I'll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt just for the sake of argument, but I have my doubt most people voting for folks decrying "experts" or "the establishment" have paid the least bit attention to what experts actually say.
The end results seems to be the same sort of "oh man those jokers" argument in favor of ... some folks who seem like bigger jokes / less knowledgeable.
Or
"People have had enough of experts, (who are consistently getting it wrong)."
Regardless, his logic is completely wrong and unfounded but who cares anymore. Who are these experts? No idea. When are they right? Irrelevant. What constitutes being wrong? Doesn't matter.
They clearly decided on the nuclear option, i.e. Campaigning with an incredibly vacuous overly-simplistic divisive message that has broken the United Kingdom. Some of the more abrasive untruths would have made Goebbels proud: Particularly the idea that this was them against the "establishment" e.g. Their mates, or the £350 million affair - Not because of the figure but because of the tax income from doing trade with the EU.
Such predictions have been the subject of academic study. One obtains gold-standard data on the accuracy of short term predictions merely by waiting. The classic book is Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11152.html
His findings sent shocks waves through the intelligence community. What is going to happen next? Answering that question is raison d'être of the intelligence community. They depend on expert political judgment and Tetlock had found that it was rubbish. This prompted the Good Judgment Project https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/newsroom/iarpa-in-the-news/2...
Experts - when we think of them, we think of professionals with experience, people who've done research on the subjects, and in general just people who are better informed than the public.
What I think the people who say things like "enough with the experts", I find it to be entirely within a political/media context - many of whom are paid lobbyists, industry representatives, people with a lot of paper qualifications with their own agenda, etc. AKA, bullshit artists. A call against them is a call against systemic corruption, since they are a primary tool the powerful use to keep the public's consent.
The other side of that is a blanket callout against all experts obviously is just anti-intellectualism. This pessimistic worldview is that well since we can't tell which experts are telling the truth, I'm going to go with what I believe, and not listen to anything to the contrary. This is quite easy to criticize - however I think that those that criticize it aren't always taking into account that they do it as well, even if less often or on a less global scale.
It also seems (again, to me) that there has been a lot more authoritarian beliefs expressed by the comments. Take my opinion and observations for what you will.
I mean, the story looks pretty damning on the face of it, but you have to consider that the last time the same media called a ruler a "bad guy" and people acted on it, it ended up completely wrecking a perfectly fine nation (Libya). Some time before that, the US wrecked another nation (Iraq), justifying it by fabricated stories people bought into at the time. I think you can excuse people for their lack of trust.
Also, the US will need to use Turkey for whatever it plans to do to Iran. So if anything, revealing Erdogan's atrocities is annoying to the current leadership not helping.
> what we're all supposed to believe...growing disillusionment with geopolitics and its reporting in western media
Since we're talking about the NYT, I must say that at this time the US is overwhelmingly controlled by a party that condemns the media and its own free press as a lying enemy of the people. This is why the hated there grew enormously in the last few years. I understand there are similar forces in several other nations.
It does not have to be many people, and it can be only a tiny part of their daily watch on larger media.
Moderators would know better about whether this is true on this particular site, but this happens regularly on mainstream channels.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518872.
What does this mean?
What does that mean?
Some of these high-achieving people couldn't even leave the country even though there were a lot of positions waiting for them. Some people tried to go to Greece on boats which many of them died on the way.
Turkey is not a hellhole. Sure, it is a divided country, but it has a rich history and lots of beauty (I say that not being a Turk, nor being from Istanbul).
Let's remember that the current position as a developing nation is historically rather new. There is a strong sense of nostalgia and, until recently, there was some realistic hope that Turkey would claw its way back.
I'd personally argue there arent many comparable places where you can (or could) indeed live a good academic and intellectual life in a non-western, non-east-asian society.
I know people who were ousted from their jobs, and yes they can all move elsewhere. But that's not the personal tragedies lie.
If you grew up in a city full of thousands of years of history from East and West, it is entirely possible you will never be quite as happy living in sterile, uniform, blocky corporaty cities in the US or Canada.
Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
Obviously, those people thought it was enough of a hellhole that they risked their lives to take boats to Greece, and died!
>Those academics who stayed in Turkey despite their credentials, probably have such a preference.
I'm not talking about anyone who's staying there. I'm talking about people who are actively trying to escape and are risking their lives to get out. Obviously, they're perfectly willing to abandon those cities "full of thousands of years of history". Besides, western Europe is chock full of other cities with thousands of years of history that don't have the problems Turkey has, and that's where these people were headed to, not the US or Canada.