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Comment by argonaut | Hacker News Reader

> and that margaret mead was basically a fraud? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman

Did you even read your own linked articles?

Generally, Freeman's critique has not been accepted in the anthropological community. Several Samoan scholars who had been discontent with Mead's depiction of them as happy and sexually liberated thought that Freeman erred in the opposite direction [1]

Much like Mead's work, Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa

I don't claim that Margaret Mead was necessarily right. I'm not an anthropologist. But your own sources contradict what you're saying.

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you can see my link above to the NYtimes and the lack of research for the right in academia. there will be 10,000 papers supporting the left position to every 1 paper supporting the right position. they're just forced out of academia. this is a huge blind spot for society and is a little like how wall street wasn't prosecuted after the financial crisis.

that derek freeman was successful in what he did (and he was, mead was dropped from anthropology) was a minor miracle. if you want to learn more, watch this movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyOD-qNaiL0

Okay, it's pretty clear you didn't even read the articles you linked to.

of course i did. the point is that academia doesn't research the opposing viewpoint virtually at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=0

"He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals."

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