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Softpanorama
(slightly skeptical)
Open Source Software Educational Society |
May the
source be with you,
but remember the KISS principle ;-)
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The image reproduced from the paper "Cheating
nature?"by Economist
Science, PseudoScience and Society
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It's not easy to write about pseudo science. The problem has to do with the fluid
nature of the concept. It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement
about its constituent elements. It involved subjugation of scientific aims to political
and deliberate attempt in deception and subsequent cover up. But recently almost
all science became political and all politics involved deception: to say that a
politic is not lying is the same as to say that an alcoholic is not drinking. Still
there are different degrees of lies with Lysenkoism probably representing one of
the most extreme cases.
One of the most dangerous is those deception schemes use by pseudoscience is
one that trades the independence for political influence, the power grab.
The scientific community is generally
held together and all its affairs are peacefully managed through its joint acceptance
of the same fundamental scientific beliefs.Science is best
practiced in a voluntary, peaceful and free atmosphere. What really matters
as far as politics and science is concerned is what type of environment the individual
scientists have to work in and what degree of freedom they can enjoy. As
by Frederick Seitz noted in his
The
Present Danger To Science and Society
Everyone knows that the scientific community
faces financial problems at the present time. If that were its only problem,
some form of restructuring and allocation of funds, perhaps along lines well
tested in Europe and modified in characteristic American ways, might provide
solutions that would lead to stability and balance well into the next century.
Unfortunately, the situation is more complex, made so by the fact that
the scientific establishment has become the object of controversy from both
outside and inside its special domain. The most important aspects of
the controversy are of a new kind and direct attention away from matters that
are sufficiently urgent to be the focus of a great deal of the community's attention.
The assaults on science from the outside arise
from such movements as the ugly form of "political correctness" that has taken
root in important portions of our academic community. There are to be found,
in addition, certain tendencies toward a home-grown variant of the anti-intellectual
Lysenkoism that afflicted science in the Stalinist Soviet Union. So-called fraud
cases are being dealt with in new, bureaucratic ways that cut across the traditional
methods of arriving at truth in science. From inside the scientific community,
meanwhile, there are challenges that go far beyond those that arise from the
intense competition for the limited funds that are available to nourish the
country's scientific endeavor.
The critical issue of arriving at a balanced
approach to funding for science is being subordinated to issues made to seem
urgent by unhealthy alliances of scientists and bureaucrats. Science
and the integrity of its practitioners are under attack and, increasingly, legislators
and bureaucrats shape the decisions that determine which paths scientific research
should take. There is, in addition, a sinister tendency, especially in
environmental affairs, toward considering the undertaking of expensive projects
that are proposed by some scientists to remedy worst-case formulations of problems
before the radical and expensive remedies are proven to be needed. They
are viewed seriously though they are based on the advice of opportunistic alarmists
in science who leap ahead of what is learned from solid research to encourage
support for the expensive remedies they perceive to be necessary. The potential
for very great damage to science and society is real.
The rise of 'Lysenkoism' in the Soviet Union in the late 40th of the twentieth
century is one of the most tragic pages of the history of science. Trofim
Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, came to prominence as the proponent of a theory of
heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism. The details of this theory
need not concern us, except to note that it was 'Larmarckist' in its contention
that it is possible for organisms to inherit acquired characteristics. This
was wrong and the principles of Mendelianism - the theory of heredity - were well
understood by then. But Lysenko theory fitted nicely with the Soviet ideology. Particularly,
the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited held out the promise of
the perfectibility of mankind. So the state intervened in the scientific struggle
and the consequences, certainly for many of the scientists involved and arguably
also for the USSR agriculture, were disastrous. The power of state was used to suppress
dissidents. Many scientists were exiled; some killed.
Unfortunately we cannot dismiss
the obviously pernicious use of ideology by Lysenko and his supporters simply as
an aberration of the era that is often brushed aside as 'the cult of personality'
(with or without naming the personality in question). This proved to be much more
dangerous and at the same time remarkably resilient phenomenon that survived the
dissolution of the USSR. Do not fool yourself that it somehow was connected with
communist ideology. The link was poorly accidental. In reality Lysenkoism emerged
as a new religious of control freaks with high position in government. Moreover
a lot of administrators in academic institutions belong to the category of
micromanagers and as such they are naturally predisposed to Lysenkoism.
In general "Lysenkovisation of science" occurs when the state tries to
control both the methodologies and goals of scientific activity. For example in
the USSR huge bureaucratic institutions such as VASKhNIL and VIEM had been set up
to control resources and, especially, scientific press. Part of the reason
that Lysenkoism gained official support in the Soviet Union was because the Mendelian
approach to genetics contradicted official ideology, in particular to Engels's dialectical
materialism. In early 50th just before his death Stalin began to sense that Lysenkoism
can hinder practical science by interfering with the academic atmosphere of toleration
of dissent most conducive to scientific accomplishment. He even went as far as to
declare that “no science can develop and
proper without the clash of opinions, without freedom of criticism.”
But it was too late...
Other governments are also far from being immune from this kind of tendency to
select between scientific theories on the basis of ideology rather than the balance
of evidence.
More benign variant of Lysenkoism that does not rely on the power of the state
is usually called Cargo Cult Science.
Another related term is
"Mayberry Machiavellis". A long time ago -- well, actually it was just a year,
but it seems like a lot longer than that -- a former Bush advisor John DiIulio
got into quite a bit of trouble for revealing to Esquire that the White House
did not possess, in any conventional definition of the term, a
policy-making process:
...on social policy and related issues, the lack
of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more,
was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid
but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy
pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera.
Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any
need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue...
This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry
Machiavellis—staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted
as if the height of political sophistication consisted
in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption,
then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.
Dan Gardner - Senior Writer for The Ottawa Citizen writes: "Cabinet meetings
were scripted, Mr. O'Neill discovered, by White House staffers who sent advance
notes to cabinet secretaries telling them when they were 'supposed to speak, about
what, and for how long.'" Is this the shadow of Politburo or what?
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov
Notes:
- Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a
native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors
should be expected.
- This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It
cannot replace the best teachers and
the
best books.
- The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a
living tree... Some links on older pages
are broken. Please
try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link
(see
HOWTO search the WEB for details).
We would appreciate if you can
mail us a correct link.
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If history repeats itself...how incapable must Man be of learning from
experienceGeorge Bernard Shaw
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4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural
selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact. It
is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically or
morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions for how we
should behave. I have many times written (for example in the first chapter
of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate Darwinian when it
comes to the science of how life has actually evolved, but a passionate
ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how humans ought to behave.
I have several times said that a society based on Darwinian principles would
be a very unpleasant society in which to live. I have several times said,
starting at the beginning of my very first book, The Selfish Gene,
that we should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose
any tendency to apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same
thing, in various different ways. So did his great friend and champion
Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary. It
is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is about
natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle of The
Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle
for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very different sense
from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the title to the book
itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like 'that set of individuals
who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation" (although Darwin would not
have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a
genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one single,
solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters of this long and
tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly influenced by
Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny mention in his
book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some of Darwin's ideas,
without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand Darwin's ideas, as
some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists such as Herbert
Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly be described as a Social
Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost literally without exception,
have been vocal in their condemnation of Social Darwinism. This of course
includes Michael Shermer and me and PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary
scientists whom Ben Stein and his team tricked into taking part in his film
by lying to us about their true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes
misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But
this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed
out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of
domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realise that the
same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of
the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival of the fittest".
Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more
ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidiently is. Hitler tried to
apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically
Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers,
gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for
centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and
Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of
NATURAL selection; and Hitler's eugenic policies had nothing to do with
natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous
colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and
potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and
wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely
and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can
read about all over the Internet, persuade me that
they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception.
You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's
falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to
make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even
you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I
urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben
Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.
Daniel Dickson-LaPrade says:
one BIG difference is that Lysenkoism was very top-down.
Darwinist biologists were imprisoned, exiled, killed, or
pressured to emigrate so that the glorious forward march
of Soviet agriculture could continue untrammeled by the
crypto-capitalism of Darwinist stooges (LOL).
Luckily, the ID movement and other astroturf evolution
denialist movements have had no luck whatsoever gaining
any respect either within the scientific community or
(for the most part) in the highest levels of government.
Jeff Williams says:
Agree that there were obvious
political differences as DDL points
out.
But its clear was thread runs
through both movements...the
rejection of a system of thought
known as the scientific method to
obtain political or social ends,
primarily because the "offending"
system ran counter to achieving
those political ends.
Different ends...same means. Reject
fact, reject the scientific process
and twist the "facts" and the
"system" to fit within a failed
political/social agenda.
I’d never heard of the series The Ascent of Man before, but this
clip captures perfectly why the current administration’s claim to absolute
certainty is to be feared.
Amazon.com INTELLIGENT DESIGN Hypothesis+Prediction+Mechanism+Experiment =
SCIENCE - science Discussion Forum
A relevant critique of the concept of "detecting
design": http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Positive_Case_for_Design
The concept of "irreducible complexity" is likewise
deeply flawed.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
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Looks like there is a rich bolshevism tradition in certain parts of the USA
media ;-)
Mark, you hit the nail on the head. You see
anti-intellectualism spewing from the mouths of cable
pundits, ironically many Harvard-educated, who hold out
the "average-joe" - the
uneducated, blue collar worker, as the heart and soul of
America, a noble savage that can spot an "elitist" a
mile away, especially in the presidential race.
According to these pundits, the people do not want too
smart a president; rather, they want a president with
whom they can envision downing a cold beer. So, If I
understand it, these average joes want their own kids to
go to the best college possible but they want their
president to be an average-IQ good ol' boy.
From the redoubtable Dr. Dawkins in The God Delusion:
Mensa meta analysis indicates religiosity is inversely
correlated with education, interest in science, and IQ.
Guess we should not be surprised. Sorry, I strayed a bit
off topic, but then again these noble savages are the
ones who think dinosaurs perished a few days ago.
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Greg Janzen -- "Religion, as usual, is the source of the
problem."
I'm not trying to exonerate religion, but my point is
that it's a bit deeper than that. Religion is the
vehicle (or excuse, or label), but anti-intellectualism
was also rampant in Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's China,
to well-known effect. The first thing Pol Pot did was
shoot the intellectuals, going so far as to simply kill
everyone wearing glasses.
Where religion already has a foothold (and is already
leaning towards to anti-intellectualism) then that's the
form it takes, but God is not the entirety of the
problem. I know many evangelicals who, if they abandoned
their faith tomorrow, would just flip over to belonging
to the atheist "club," with t-shirts, bumper stickers,
and thoe whole "part of something" thing they like but
which is so inimical to critical thinking.
3 of 4 people think this post adds to the discussion.
Interesting. But it's been argued (by serious historians
and not just by popular commentators like Hitchens), and
I tend to agree, that
regimes like Pol Pot's, Mao's, Stalin's, etc. were
effectively religious regimes. E.g., all
of them encouraged submission to an all-powerful
dictator, a quintessentially religious practice. So one
wonders if it isn't a confluence of religious elements
that ultimately led to the anti-intellectualism of those
regimes.
But your claim regarding the evangelicals seems true. I,
too, know evangelicals who would take up crystal gazing,
astrology, or some other bunkum if they lost their faith
in god. I don't know if this is a symptom of the whole
"part of something" thing, but it's a complete
abandonment of the intellect. They seem positively
intent on avoiding anything that might require them to
use their noggins
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Greg,
Did you see this article about a recent poll taken in
the UK?
A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight slavery
and the opium trade has identified a new social evil of
the 21st century - religion.
A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a
widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme
form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify
persecution. Pollsters asked 3,500 people in Britain
what they considered to be the worst blights on modern
society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker,
104 years ago.
The responses may well have dismayed him. The
researchers found that the "dominant opinion" was that
religion was a "social evil".
Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled
intolerance and spawned "irrational" educational and
other policies.
One said: "Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires
hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is
commonly used as justification for persecution of women,
gays and people who do not have faith."
Many respondents called for state funding of church
schools to be ended.
The findings contrast with Rowntree's "scourges of
humanity", which included poverty, war, slavery,
intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling.
Poverty and drugs remained on the list, but are joined
by issues such as family breakdown, young people's
behaviour and fears over immigration.
Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, rejected the poll's
indictment of faith. He said: "People meeting together,
week after week, for worship, support and education in
church, synagogue, temple, gurdwara and mosque can not
only help people build local community but can teach
children to become good citizens."
However, Terry Sanderson, president of the National
Secular Society, said he was "extremely pleased".
"Britain has had it with religion," he said.
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TD -- so what? dinos & people co-existed & cuz eve ate
an apple - plant eating kitty cats (and other
carnivores) started eating (*gasp*) other animals. every
culture has their weird beliefs -- why should we be
immune? let people believe whatever nonsense they like
-- it might make them happier. but here is where i get
controversial...I think,
before people *vote* they have to demonstrate
*competency* on several levels. qualifying exams on key
issues, that's all i ask.
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TD & Elliot,
I first read about the report in U.K Times Online (when
I found the link again it would not open) Evidently, the
published news article was somewhat controversial in
that the hard data wasn't included. I found the actual
Rowntree Foundation report in pdf form - http://www.socialevils.org.uk/documents/social-evils-report.pdf
Evidently, they didn't publish the actual number of
respondents who felt religion was a "social evil"
either. (Knowing that percentage seems to be at the
center of the dispute between secularists and theists)
What the report said - "There was disagreement among
participants around the issue of religion. Some
identified the decline of religion in society as a
social evil.
A more dominant opinion, however, stood in stark
contrast to this: some people identified religion itself
as a social evil. This group generally focused on one of
three issues: the "erosion of secularism"; religion as
cause of intolerance and conflict; and religion as a
source of irrationality."
So we're left to ask what number out of 3500 constitutes
the "dominant opinion" and, of course, in the highly
religious USA, the results would be significantly
different.
Best Regards
Steve
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After the accounting scandals of 2002, where Skilling and other Harvard MBAs
played high-profile roles, the school studied what it could do to improve the
conduct of its graduates. It concluded that students' ethical compasses were
set before they got there, which one could view either as accurate or a way
of punting.
Comments
- Richard Kline said...
- While this is cross-grain to the purpose of your
post, Yves, I just can't put out of my mind the question of who Dubya Bush
_paid_ to do his course work for that diploma. I cannot, CANNOT, believe
that a man as fundamentally stupid, unlearned, and incapbable of extracting
any real content even from the few books he mentions in passing that he
currently has read could have mustered a passing grade at a competitive
graduate program, let alone one heavy on the math side like an MBA. Who'd
he pay, 'cause it's a no-brainer he couldn't cut this course?
- First, a lot of people who graduate from HBS aren't
the brightest bulbs. Only a fairly low percentage (under 10%) is either
flunked out or drops the program. And you get a long way in that program
by stating the obvious, with conviction.
Second, in the runup to the 2004 election, someone sent me a video of Bush
giving a speech and taking questions when he was campaigning for Texas governor.
The difference was stunning. He could handle multisyllabic words and complex
sentence structures with confidence, and could field questions with answers
that appeared nuanced. So the intervening years of hard drinking killed
more brain cells than most of us realize.
... ... ...
- Yeah, well, I do know that few graduate programs
wash out their aceptees, especially at the masters' level: it reflects poorly
on the _program_. And these MBS barns are tremendous cash cows for their
institutions, so I guess.
And I agree with the very first observation regarding the impact on attendees
ethics by these programs, that the ethical perspective of those individuals
is largely set before they ever arrive. Whether or not these programs should
teach ethics, they will have little impact on the actual morals or lack
thereof of those whom they instruct.
And Dubya, hard-drinkin' _since_ he got elected in Texas? I mean, I really
don't keep up on his personal timeline, but doesn't this go back on, y'know,
his pact with God?? . . . Could it be blow, maybe??? The man sure does _not_
seem to function congnitively.
- I have found Harvard MBAs to be unambiguously afflicted
with excessive hubris, compulsive salesmanship, mediocre intellect, and
unimpressive analytical skills - in other words, quite well positioned to
assume leadership roles in business.
- One of the problems with business school in general
is that it teaches that management's role is to serve shareholder interests
and that shareholder interests are best served by maximizing profit.
According to Wikipedia
"Shleifer's involvement in Russia was investigated by David McClintick, a Harvard
alumnus and journalist for
Institutional Investor Magazine. His 30-page January 2006 article claims to
show that "economics professor Andrei Shleifer, in the mid-1990s, led a Harvard
advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace."
March 25, 2006 |
The Boston Globe
WHEN LAWRENCE Summers resigned the Harvard University presidency
last month, his action was attributed in large part to difficulty in human relations.
Whatever the true reason, when Summers's legacy is examined, he should be held
to account for his role in a scandal with which he was intimately involved,
both as a Treasury official and at Harvard. Yet the strange saga of Harvard's
involvement in US aid to Russia in the 1990s is more than a scandal about Summers
and Harvard. The case illustrates the overall failure of the US accountability
system.
Ten years ago my article about the role of the US-funded Harvard advisers
in Russia's economic reforms exposed their maze of networks. I analyzed the
web of interconnections that enabled Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, a friend
of then Treasury official Lawrence Summers, and a close-knit group of Russians
and Americans to largely shape US economic aid policy and Russian economic ''reforms"
while managing virtually the entire nearly $400 million US flagship economic
aid project. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard
gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly
unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials.
This maze of networks guaranteed the Harvard players their success in the
1990s. It also enfeebled the multiple investigations of their activities during
the same period. Although the US Justice Department filed suit in 2000 (following
a three-year investigation), alleging that Shleifer and Harvard had conspired
to defraud the US government, the case came to a head only last summer with
a negotiated settlement that required the university to pay $26.5 million in
fines and Shleifer to pay $2 million. And despite being versed in Summers's
entanglements, in 2001, the Harvard Corporation, with sole authority to hire
and fire the Harvard president, appointed him the university's president.
The Harvard case points to the failure of modern democracy to adapt its monitoring
and accountability systems to a new breed of players
exemplified by Shleifer. These peripatetic players have gained
influence in the reorganizing, networked world in which authority has been diffused
by the profusion of government outsourcing contracts and the end of the Cold
War.
The result is that accountability has been undercut by relationships between
governments and contractors that are too tenuous, flexible, and ambiguous to
be genuinely monitored. Shleifer, for example, played sometimes indistinct and
overlapping roles as he lobbied in favor of his projects and advised both the
United States and Russia while making investments for his own personal gain,
all the while presenting himself as independent analyst and author. The endowment
funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through
networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments
in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum
companies, real estate, and mutual funds -- many of the same areas in which
he was being paid to provide impartial advice.
Shleifer's defense in the Justice Department's
lawsuit is revealing: Although US prosecutors charged that his investments violated
federal conflict-of-interest regulations, defense lawyers maintained that he
was a ''mere consultant," and thus not subject to these rules. Yet as director
of the project, the buck stopped with him.
The system is virtually incapable of dealing with such players' infractions
and lack of transparency in a timely fashion. It is not for lack of inquiries,
including a 1996 Government Accountability Office investigation and a lawsuit
brought by a US mutual funds firm working in Russia, which was settled out of
court in 2002.
Traditional accountability frameworks are no match for the ways in which
today's diffused authority provides new opportunities for players to brandish
influence, evade culpability, and gain deniability, while writing the new rules
of the game. While Shleifer must pay a settlement
and legal fees, it is too late for the Russian people, who, instead of wise
guidance, got corruption and a system wide open to looting. Until
the United States devises better ways to track the networks and activities of
these new players, it is destined to have an ever more untransparent and unaccountable
system, with grave implications for democracy.
Janine R. Wedel, professor of public policy at George
Mason University, is author of ''Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of
Western Aid to Eastern Europe."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
-
Hardcover: 384 pages
-
Publisher: Pantheon (February 12, 2008)
-
Language: English
-
ISBN-10: 0375423745
Too Long, Thinly Documented and Lacking Recommendations,
February 15, 2008
|
By |
Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist"
(Phoenix, AZ.) |
"The Age of American Unreason" aims to update us (post Richard
Hofstadter's 1963 "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life") on how
American culture devalues knowledge and rationalism. Supporting
material include findings that only about half of Americans read
a book in any year, only 26% accept Darwin's theory of evolution,
and only a minority can name the four gospels or the first book
of the Bible. Jacoby also contends that anti-intellectualism and
knowledge is worse in the U.S. than any other developed economy
- but offers no evidence.
How did we get to this state? McCarthyism, liberal Soviet defenders,
the growth of religious fundamentalism and junk-science, and a celebrity-focused
culture are proffered candidates for blame. Again, however, little
is offered as evidence except in the case of junk science - fomented
by right-wing backers. Regardless, Jacoby also fails to peel back
the onion further - eg. "Why has fundamentalism grown?" Jacoby does
make an important point stating that the impact of anti-intellectualism
is much greater today than the 1800's when science and medicine
had much less to offer.
Other candidates should also be considered for blame - the growth
of particularly strong anti-intellectualism among inner-city African-American
youth, endless self-promoting junk science "research" from other
sources (eg. drug companies, various "diet gurus," many social 'scientists'),
elevation of race- and gender-based courses to major fields of study,
the growth of "political correctness" and cultural relativism, truth-twisting
by politicians, misleading and overly simplistic books and articles
(eg. concluding causation via correlation), weak academic standards,
and media's minimal efforts at investigative journalism.
Jacoby also fails to note that the average citizen's aversion to
knowledge and rationalism can at least be partially explained. After
all, who wants more work after their eight+ hours on the job and
fighting traffic, preparing and eating breakfast and dinner, PLUS
taking care of the children and other family matters? Further, separating
junk science from the real thing requires considerable subject matter
(often deliberately withheld) and statistical background. As for
politics, even some knowledgeable people I know see involvement
as a waste of time - "nothing changes," "they all lie," and "only
big donors have input," while leaders since Harry Truman have bemoaned
economists' inability to come to useful conclusions.
On the other hand, it is troubling to see how readily misinformed
Americans acquiesce to acceptance of non-thinking ideology and major
misdirections in American governance.
Anti-Intellectualism Revisited, March 8, 2008
More damaging and pervasive than fundamentalist religion is our culture of
"infotainment," available everywhere and all the time, promoting junk science,
celebrity culture, youth culture, and mindless music and video segments.
Jacoby argues that what is lost in this type of
media bombardment, which requires only the shortest of attention spans, is the
ability to think at all. She longs for the print culture of earlier
times, when people still had the leisure and the quiet to read the classics.
Those times, however, are gone. Technology is driving today's culture and intellectuals
are adopting to the changes. The distinction between old and new media is already
obselete. Newspapers and books now appear in digital
form giving people have a superabundance of information to sift through. The
question is do we stll have the stamina and discipline to discern what in our
culture is worth keeping?
February 20, 2008 |
charles hugh smith-
Is the U.S. a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-learning culture, and thus a
deeply ignorant one? Every few years comes a book which argues persuasively,
"yes." This year's entry is
The Age of American Unreason
. Longtime correspondent U. Doran alerted me to the book via this story link:
Susan Jacoby:
Bemoaning an America that values stupidity.
A generation ago the book du jour chastising the dumbing down of America
was
The Closing of the American Mind
which judging by sales on amazon.com remains very much in the public consciousness.
The Anatomy of Science
The Anatomy of Pseudoscience and Irrationalism
The Great Plagiarism Witch Hunt
New York Times
...T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review
Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American
history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or
somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism
(the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism
(“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”)
have fused in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural
knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of
18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries
in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23
percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was
sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the
New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue.
The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first
got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and
confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened
to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going
to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that
blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the
Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or
cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer.
But she would like to start a conversation about
why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain
of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment
doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries
consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative
tests.
In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people
are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know
more,” she said.
Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science,
as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want
creationism to be taught along with evolution.
Comments
While a lot of people, particular older people, will make the same charge (full
disclosure, I'm 58, and have both a BA and a MA, and can and do read books)
the fact is that Ms Jacoby would have been better off just looking at Americans
v. Americans.
There are in every culture better educated/worse educated, more intelligent/less
intelligent, more interested/less interested. Comparing across cultures, I have
no doubt that Ms. Jacoby was seduced by the accents and apparently advanced
cultural levels of her correspondents, all of whom, almost by definition, would
be drawn from the "educated elite."
If she wants to get "down and dirty" I suggest she go to the banlieus (suburbs)
of Paris (that supposed center of culture) and interview First Generation children
of Tunisian and Algerian immigrants, many of whom live in appalling poverty,
denied access to higher education and compare them, for example, to the prototypical
"coal miner's daughter" or even more fairly, to first generation American children
of immigrants from ANYWHERE.
Here we do provide "free public education" at least for a while, although we
make it increasingly difficult to take advantage of it.
And yes, I'm afraid a lot of people WILL call her a crank, because she is part
of the problem, the "tut-tutting, pooh-phooing, of America" that doesn't do
any thing EXCEPT sell books.
Perhaps in the next administration, when they adjust tax rates, they should
have a special "Jacoby surcharge." Put the funds to public education.
— Judy, Fairfax, VA
====
As an American living in Sweden, I occasionally travel back to the U.S. on
visits. It never fails to astonish me that what passes for news there is mindless,
repetitive and focused primarily on celebrities. When vastly greater swaths
of news time are spent on some celebrity's being sent to jail as opposed to
informing Americans how our Constitution is being undermined and subverted by
the Bush administration, not to mention what's happening of significance elsewhere
in the world, it reveals exactly why too many citizens are ignorant of not only
the rest of the world but of their own country.
With half the people polled in a reputable national poll believing that evolution
and natural selection are myths and that "creationism" is worthy of being taught
in the nation's schools, it's to be expected that America is becoming dumbed-down
under the influence of the irrationality of religion, particularly fundamentalist
religion. It boggles the mind that one of your leading Republican candidates
for the presidency holds blinkered views like this and is a former fundamentalist
preacher in the bargain. Imagine a guy like that in the Oval Office or just
a heartbeat way from the presidency.
So why are so many American actually and properly perceived as being hostile
to global knowledge, indeed, knowledge essential to a nation's survival? Start
by taking an honest look at what purports to be "news" there and at the unhealthy
dominance of religion in American life. More could be said on other malign influences,
but start with those just mentioned. Prediction: if America continues on its
present path, look for it to become a second-or-third rate nation no longer
looked to as worthy of emulation.
— dbsweden, Sweden
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I actually respect Ron Paul and for this candidate arguments by David Frum who
is one of Giuliani's senior policy advisers should be taken with a grain of salt.
Ron Paul recently repeated famous quote ""When fascism comes to this country
it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Sinclair Lewis wrote those
words in 1935 in It Can't Happen Here. You need certain courage
to use them in election campaign...
Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good
thing —and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into
the red zone.
For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle over the nomination
of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court of the United States. Defenders of the
president's under-qualified nominee began attacking the concept of qualification.
One wrote: "The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability
as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court
ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars." Harriet Miers, we were
told, had a good Christian heart. That was enough ... In the end, it was not
quite enough for Ms. Miers. But it may be enough for many voters in 2008.
The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike
Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service
and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax ... Economists
and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable
-- that it is downright absurd.
... Just a little lower down in the polls is a libertarian candidate named
Ron Paul. Paul is best known for his vehemently isolationist foreign policy
views. But his core supporters also thrill to his self-taught monetary views,
which amount to a rejection of everything taught by modern economists from Alfred
Marshall to Milton Friedman.
Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about.
The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone.
The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or
too arrogant to learn.
Fair points all: ..., and Frum's larger worry about anti-intellectualism
in the contemporary Right is one I share
in spades. But if you're going to be hard on the current crop of Republican
candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair
to leave out the candidate given to
running
ads in which he announces: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue.
The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." (They don't believe
it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can't find a serious
conservative economist who thinks it's true.) Or
penning op-eds in which he explains that "the meaning of fiscal conservatism"
includes the principle that "lower taxes can result in higher revenue." Or telling
a GOP debate audience, in response to a question about whether we need to
raise taxes to fix up our nation's transportation infrastructure, that the way
“to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more money.”
Now it’s true that occasionally Rudy Giuliani hedges his bets (“sometimes,”
“can,” and so forth) on this topic, and it’s true as well that he may not actually
believe the extreme supply-side talking points he’s spouting, in the
way that Huckabee presumably believes in the Fair Tax and Paul in the gold standard.
On the other hand, neither of those ideas are likely to serve as the basis for
economic policy in the United States any time soon, and both are marginal even
within the right-wing coalition; the “tax cuts raise revenue” canard that Giuliani
keeps promoting, on the other hand, is a staple of Bush Administration rhetoric
and probably the dominant view among movement conservatives. If you’re looking
for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism
- for cases where, in Frum's words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed
to "study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism" -
Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems
like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are
peddling.
====
In comment to
Economist's View Crazy Views on the Economy Ryberg says...
It is unfortunate that Ron Paul is lumped in with Huckabee and Guiliani.
His economic theory may be self-taught and is not mainstream but it is well-founded
in theory and research. Most accepted economic theory provides a limited
role for total debt/credit. It is easy to accept deficits and monetary easing
as necessary stimulants with no seeming long-term implications. To Ron Paul,
tax cuts imply deficits which imply increased debt which is the long-term
beast that is out of control. But it is hard for anyone, including economists,
to see this problem when we use an elastic yard stick -- fiat currency.
He would have us go to a gold standard because it is a standard. Just because
his policies are not likely to be adopted any time soon, especially by you,
does not make them crazy ideas. He has been generating a broad following
precisely because his ideas are well-founded with more consistency than
the other candidates. It's just that his logical conclusions seem inconsistent
with your a priori assumptions.
====
The Baron says...
Mark, while I will admit that all of the candidates have a depressing
lack of candidness and truthful insight into the major issues, blaming any one
of them on deliberately lying, despite the existence of factual evidence to
the contrary, is missing the point.
Just a few short posts ago, there were defenders of John Edwards who were
saying that his populist approach was what the other Democratic front runners
needed to emulate to win next year's election. Now, here, we have a decrier
of populist rhetoric, just because it happens to be untrue. The unfortunate
truth is that populist, by definition, means, "what the people believe and want
to hear."
Guiliani, and others, are all intelligent people. They know the way to win
elections is to tell the people what they want to hear. When the people (those
unwashed masses, not the refined and erudite members of this forum) want to
hear lies, the person who insists on telling the truth isn't going to get very
far. The story of Cassandra and her fate is very telling.
The anti-intellectualism has been pushed in our public education system,
our entertainment society, and our instant gratification economy for far too
long, and has been driven far too deeply into the public psyche to be discounted
now. It is interesting if you talk to people across many generational ranges,
how the opinion about the well educated changes. I would say that 80% of the
folks I talk to 40 and over, still have respect for people with proven credentials.
As you talk to a younger and younger audience, outside of institutions of higher
education, you get a more and more anti-intellectual response. When I talk to
teens, just about to leave high school, the level of willful ignorance astounds
me. These aren't kids who haven't been taught, or just haven't learned. These
are kids that know they don't know, not everything, but hardly anything, and
not only don't care, they revel in it. My youngest is in high school, and even
he comments on how his friends don't have disagreements about issues or information,
they get upset when anyone tries to bring facts into an argument. If they don't
'feel' that one side is right, well that's enough for them, and facts are "all
just lies and made up stuff anyway."
One of the great truisms of Democracy is that
the people get the government they deserve. As more and more
of our selfish, anti-fact society takes over the voting booth, I am afraid that
we are going to have to suffer through the government that they deserve.
"Presidents at 12 private universities received more than $1 million in the
2005-6 school year, the most recent period for which data on private institutions
is available, up from seven a year earlier, according to an annual survey of
presidential pay to be released today by The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The number of private college presidents earning more than $500,000 reached
81, up from 70 a year earlier and just three a decade ago. The survey also found
that the number of public university presidents making $700,000 or more rose
to eight in 2006-7, the reporting period for public institutions. Only two public
university presidents made $700,000 in the previous period. The survey did not
include E. Gordon Gee, who took over at Ohio State University earlier this year
and whose $1 million pay package, before bonuses, is probably the highest of
any public institution."
"John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association
of University Professors, said rising pay to presidents was consistent with
a “corporate mindset” at colleges."
Sensationalism under disguise of skeptisism... Too broad generalizations...
September 14, 2007; Page B1We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical
scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations,
most published research findings are wrong.
Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University
of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass.
In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands
of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much
less than meets the eye.
These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct,
but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving
data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false
findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research
claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely
to be false than true."
The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should
be viewed skeptically, he determined.
Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women,
depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences
for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer
and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published
research claims concerning gender and genes.
Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.
Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager
researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis
to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. "People are messing around
with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found
something that is new and unusual," Dr. Ioannidis said.
In the U. S., research is a $55-billion-a-year enterprise that stakes its
credibility on the reliability of evidence and the work of Dr. Ioannidis strikes
a raw nerve. In fact, his 2005 essay "Why Most Published Research Findings Are
False" remains the most downloaded technical paper that the journal PLoS Medicine
has ever published.
"He has done systematic looks at the published literature and empirically
shown us what we know deep inside our hearts," said Muin Khoury, director of
the National Office of Public Health Genomics at the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. "We need to pay more attention to the replication of
published scientific results."
Every new fact discovered through experiment represents a foothold in the
unknown. In a wilderness of knowledge, it can be difficult to distinguish error
from fraud, sloppiness from deception, eagerness from greed or, increasingly,
scientific conviction from partisan passion. As scientific findings become fodder
for political policy wars over matters from stem-cell research to global warming,
even trivial errors and corrections can have larger consequences.
Still, other researchers warn not to fear all mistakes. Error is as much
a part of science as discovery. It is the inevitable byproduct of a search for
truth that must proceed by trial and error. "Where you have new areas of knowledge
developing, then the science is going to be disputed, subject to errors arising
from inadequate data or the failure to recognize new matters," said Yale University
science historian Daniel Kevles. Conflicting data and differences of interpretation
are common.
To root out mistakes, scientists rely on each other to be vigilant. Even
so, findings too rarely are checked by others or independently replicated. Retractions,
while more common, are still relatively infrequent. Findings that have been
refuted can linger in the scientific literature for years to be cited unwittingly
by other researchers, compounding the errors.
Stung by frauds in physics, biology and medicine, research journals recently
adopted more stringent safeguards to protect at least against deliberate fabrication
of data. But it is hard to admit even honest error. Last month, the Chinese
government proposed a new law to allow its scientists to admit failures without
penalty. Next week, the first world conference on research integrity convenes
in Lisbon.
Overall, technical reviewers are hard-pressed to detect every anomaly. On
average, researchers submit about 12,000 papers annually just to the weekly
peer-reviewed journal Science. Last year, four papers in Science were retracted.
A dozen others were corrected.
No one actually knows how many incorrect research reports remain unchallenged.
Earlier this year, informatics expert Murat Cokol and his colleagues at Columbia
University sorted through 9.4 million research papers at the U.S. National Library
of Medicine published from 1950 through 2004 in 4,000 journals. By raw count,
just 596 had been formally retracted, Dr. Cokol reported.
"The correction isn't the ultimate truth either," Prof. Kevles said.
Email me at ScienceJournal@wsj.com.
=====
Slashdot discussion
by Anonymous Coward
After all, studies show that most studies are wrong.Clever.
The fact is, good science is hard work. In fact, it is damn hard
work, requiring not only a supremely keen intellect but a very high
tolerance for tedium, great attention to detail, and usually a big fat
wad of cash. Also, it requires a profound lack of ego (and the ability
to cope with failure and keep trying), given that a trememdous amount
of effort could (and frequently does) wind up being completely discounted
by a peer-review or another study.
The endeavor of scientific research obviously provides us tremendous
benefits, and is furthering the evolution of our species at a blindingly
fast rate (depending on how you look at it, of course). It is very important,
very hard, and very expensive.
There are many, many people who would like to be scientists but really
don't have the brain for it (as I stated above, it isn't just intelligence
that matters). Unfortunately, a lot of them wind up doing research anyway,
and they cause problems. Hopefully there are enough good scientists
with enough funding to clean up their mess.
=====
"We all know..." What are you basing this on??? As a postdoc, I've committed
myself to a massive amount of work and I'm certainly not doing it for pay
(which is meager), but a LITTLE amount of respect would be nice. I've published
a few studies and it was incredibly hard work to do the kind of careful
science that gets published. A small amount of scandals and people like
you who swallow any sensationalist piece of news out there really cast things
in an unfair light. I encourage you to read more scientific literature and
actually try and understand how the scientific process works. Do you really
think we live in the kind of technological age as we do in spite of "a good
portion of all studies" being "bogus" or "based on nothing"? I find this
incredibly insulting.
====
by
everphilski (877346)
It is fairly common knowledge that 3 things factor into tenure (in this
order): (1) being published (2) bringing funding into the university and
(3) teaching.
1. A good number to shoot for is 15 journal articles in your first 6
years. If you don't have tenure in 6 years chances are you are never going
to get it. The point of being published is to get the name of the university
out.
2. Should be self-explanatory. You need to bring in $$$ to the university.
The more you bring, the more profitable you are and the more they need to
keep you around. But publishing is still more important.
3. Teaching, while as students we all feel is important, is actually
the least important thing towards tenure. A mediocre or even bad teacher
who writes papers (that get accepted by excellent journals) at a rapid pace
will get tenure where an excellent teacher who can't write for the life
of him will not. This is why you often see people from industry teaching.
They teach for the love, tenured professors are there for the research and
for the higher level teaching (where it is more a relation of facts, not
an educational process).
The 'sloppy analysis' referred to is not 'fraud' as you cite.
There is a difference between fraud and sloppy analysis. The rush to put
out papers (between 2 and three a year, by this guide, for tenure) causes
some slop to occur. As a reference, I've been working on a paper with my
advisor and a (yet-to-be-tenured) professor for almost a year already, and
we are just submitting it to a major journal. And the paper is based mostly
off of my thesis work completed a year ago! A good paper and good research
takes time. But please, do not mistake sloppy analysis for fraud. Mistakes
are one thing, deception entirely another.
SOURCE: Advice to rocket scientists: A Career Survival Guide for Scientists
and Engineers. Dr. Jim Longuski, published by the AIAA in 2004. But again,
this is fairly common knowlege and can be found anywhere you look. As a
postdoc (I am too) I'm suprised you didn't know
...
===
14 February 2008
It is quite true that most Americans have long been been plagued by parochiality or insularity.
But it is over the top to say that they are "hostile" to global knowledge.
After World War II, the Korean War and VietNam, Americans by and large have been shown windows to the outer world. Thus, they are no longer as parochial or as insular as they were before World War II.
America is the richest and the mightiest nation on our planet. It has arrogated unto itself the unenviable role of policeman of the world.
Under President George W. Bush's leadership, America in fact seems driven by a overarching messianic fixation to remake the world in America's own "democratic" image--by military force if that is what it takes.
America is fighting the "war on terror" in Afghanistan. It is fighting another war--a war of "choice"--in Iraq.
It maintains military bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other places on our globe. It is the leading force in NATO. And it is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations with headquarters in New York City.
Given the present reality of Pax Americana, it is a stretch to say that Americans are hostile to global knowledge.
MarPatalinjug@aol.com
— Mariano Patalinjug, Yonkers, New York