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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture - Less Wrong
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This sounds good as rhetoric. And it's not rhetoric to which I am entirely unsympathetic. But its relevance to the current discussion doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Of the society in the OP, it is alleged that "money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister". That is not true of the society that rap songs depict.
Very true, the society of the OP appears to be different. The society of the underclass is a society where men use money to buy status symbols that help them build coalitions among men and gain success among women. Their women often give them gifts of great value or support them.
But it is in a sense very similar to the kind of societies often associated with tropical agriculture in some parts of the world, where women provide and work supporting their men, while men work less and not so much to support anyone but to obtain high status trophies from hunting or war which boosts their reproductive success (rape as a result of violence/warfare is also a significant contribution).
Its actually a very neat adaptation. Additional resources beyond a certain level hit diminishing returns for female reproductive success faster than for male reproductive success. So if women are the ones with the material resources it seems a good idea for sisters and mothers to use part of their surplus to boost the social standing of their sons and brothers. Also females might benefit genetically (in the form of sexier sons more likley to spread genes) by trying to use resources to catch a male's attention. And from the male's perspective a female that supports you or provides gifts can boost you success with other females as well. So you might want to take a loot at her even if she's less attractive than your norm. Since you aren't expected to support your offspring your fidelity isn't that vital either, since your children won't get much resources directly from you in any case, thus "bastards" aren't really as problematic to women here as they are to women in patriarchal monogamous society (where they are potentially "stealing" resources from her offspring that need as much investment from the father as they can get).
This all sounds pretty plausible to me. I certainly wouldn't expect that the society in the OP is some kind of Angel One-style matriarchal utopia.
Well that is what people with tenure tell us.
Sociobiology suggests that a male will support his own offspring twice as much as he will support his nieces and nephews, and four times as much as he will support his half sister's children, thus the alleged observation is surprising.
Folk anecdote is that the flow of support is pretty much proportional to paternal certainty. In those societies with low paternal certainty, for which we have observations that are not filtered through tenured observers, women and children support adult males, not the other way around.
If a man is supporting his sister, which is to say his sister's children, rather than his own, this suggests an environment of low paternal certainty. In an environment of low paternal certainty, there is also a high probability that a sister is in fact a half sister, reducing the male propensity to support women and children to insignificant levels, resulting in the observed behavior that in such societies, successful men predate on women and children, and unsuccessful men are ignored by women and men alike - observed, that is by poor ignorant racist people, whose observations are apt to be curiously different from those of highly intelligent tenured people.
It seems that common folk observe people acting as biology predicts, and the tenured folk observe something different.
None of the reporting I've seen claims that the men with their own children are giving their resources to their sisters. But I haven't read the research article itself, which is behind a paywall, so I'm open to correction. Does the article say that married men are giving their resources to their sisters (rather than to their wives)? If not, your objection is irrelevant.
In general, your appeal to "folk anecdote" and sociobiology can at best show that such societies should be rare. To show that none at all exist is to incur a heavier burden of evidence than you have borne.
Evolutionary psychology (EP) predicts that men who are exclusively homosexual are rare. And indeed they are. But EP is not falsified by the existence of a minority of men who are exclusively homosexual, because EP does not place a fatally large amount of probability mass on there being no exclusively homosexual men. Similarly, even if EP (plus induction from folk anecdote) predicted that societies are overwhelmingly likely to be set up along the lines that you describe, that would not suffice to make it extremely unlikely for a few societies to deviate far from your description.
(I'm afraid that your focus on the untrustworthiness of tenured scholars makes no sense to me. If anything, it is the untenured scholars, whether inside or outside academia, whose job security depends on pandering to their audience.)
On a tangential note, it is my impression (admittedly based on relatively little evidence and perhaps biased) that getting tenure nowadays involves severe enough scrutiny that it really is extremely hard for anyone who harbors disreputable beliefs to get through the process, even if he tries to hide them. I can think of some examples of people who got tenure two, three, or more decades ago doing uncontroversial work and then proceeded to voice disreputable beliefs once shielded by it, to the great frustration and anger of their academic colleagues. However, I can't think of any more recent examples.
If this is true, then it might be that aside from these old exceptions who are nearing retirement or already retired, it is more probable to see a disreputable belief expressed as a self-destructive act of an untenured academic than by a tenured academic who takes advantage of the privilege to speak his mind -- since the latter is practically guaranteed to be rigorously selected for sincere belief in the respectable consensus.
Also, tenured academics still have huge incentives to fall in line with the respectable consensus. Unlike the untenured ones, for them it's more about carrots than sticks, but the incentives are still there.
On the big issues, race differences, gender differences, sexual preferences, anti communism and islamophobia, the official truth held by the tenured is complex, subtle, and nuanced. They are both permitted and forbidden to acknowledge statistical differences between groups, permitted to acknowledge these differences in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to make deductions from statistical differences to particular cases in some ways and some circumstances and not in other ways and other circumstances, permitted to acknowledge and forbidden to admit various topics
Thus a high IQ tenured individual with a deep knowledge of what is acceptable can steer quite close to the truth on these topics, though the closer he gets, the cleverer and more knowledgeable he has to be, and and on the margins, barely permitted truth has sometimes rather suddenly become forbidden truth, causing some tenured academics to abruptly recant of previously uncontroversial peer reviewed publications.
On the big issues, official truth tends to be sophisticated and subtle: It is on the minor and obscure issues that the official truth tends to be simplistic, rigid, and absurd, and it is on these obscure issues, not the big issues, where one will see O'Brien hold up four fingers and every high IQ person with tenure swears he is holding up five fingers because the party declares it to be so..
There's no question but that tenured academics are subject to status-seeking incentives that aren't truth-tracking. Nonetheless, their assertions are entangled with the truth. The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard? The incentive of scholars outside of academia to pander to their audience seems at least as large. And non-scholars might not be biased by status-seeking, but they also have less exposure to the evidence.
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead's Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson's infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O'Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those "old Reagan speeches" depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position.
And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a "massive flagrant barefaced lie" was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR's real GNP versus the US's real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that "doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed". Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link?
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they're talking about.)
You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today - but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted.
The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead's Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results.
We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead's anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union's enlightened penal system.
You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to -10, and thus disappeared from sight.
Do you mean to say that you have evidence for your claim that you decline to present for fear of being downvoted?
Or have you already presented (or pointed towards) all your evidence for your claim?
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of -10, but I think he isn't exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I'm a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I've run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren't publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
Here is an experiment: Try it on any tenured scholar who will play.
History gets revised with alarming frequency. But since the history of science is the history of what scientists actually wrote, science being a communal endeavor carried out on the permanent record, for science history we can check official history against the actual record. Revisions of science history are markedly less credible than other revisions of history.
We cannot really know to what extent males really support females in that matrilineal tribe, but we can really know what Lamarck wrote, Galileo wrote, Darwin wrote, and so on and so forth.
Taunt a tenured academic, any tenured academic, with such a revision of history, any such revision. He will weasel and wobble, and try to sound as if he is agreeing with the true version without quite disagreeing with the official version, but if pinned, will in the end piously assure us the latest version of history is true, and all earlier versions false, irrespective of whether his field of expertise has anything to do with science, history, or science history, even if you quote him chapter and verse of the latest version of history and also the writings of the original scientists that contradict it. Like Winston Smith after the interrogation, he will assure you that black is white and up is down.
Perhaps to get tenure, you need to pass a test similar to that given to Winston Smith.
The inferential distance between us on the reliability of contemporary academics is too large to cross in a comment thread. So let it simply be taken as read that you do not accept that the assertions of contemporary academics are evidence for what they assert.
This brings us back to the main point of my previous comment. By restricting what you accept as evidence, you make it harder to gather your probability mass into a small region of the space of possibilities.
Let an HGL society be a society in which "[m]en are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family." (HGL are the initials of the authors of the study in the OP.) You have claimed that the observation of an HGL society would be "surprising".
The percentage of societies that are HGL societies is something between 0% and 100% (inclusive). Your evidence justifies placing a certain probability distribution over the interval from 0% to 100% for the percentage of societies that are HGL societies. Even though you have restricted the kind of evidence that you will accept, sociobiology and anecdote are still powerful evidence, so it is plausible that they could justify heaping most of your probability mass over the left end of the interval — i.e., over the lower percentages.
But you claim to do more than that. You aren't just claiming to be able to push most of your probability mass towards the left end of the interval. You say that you can heap most of your mass directly over 0.00% (which is what you must have if observing even one HGL society would be "surprising"). Sociobiology is still, to a large extent, a qualitative science. You undertake a heavy burden if you want to argue that such a qualitative science justifies concentrating so much of your probability mass over such a small region in the space of possibilities. Remember, this is a field where we can't even predict with confidence that the percentage of exclusively homosexual males is 0.00%. It isn't plausible that such a theory can justify the high confidence that you claim for such a precise prediction.
Yet oddly, before the Soviet Union fell, my predictions for its future were spot on, while the CIA and academia were completely wrong.
From 1980 onwards there was a vast amount of evidence that the Soviet Union was in a state of rapid collapse - which evidence anyone who paid attention to academia rejected because it was incompatible root and branch with the world view of academia and with modern twentieth century history taught in Academia.
By taking academics seriously, people rejected evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with academic worldview.
On a very wide range of topics, there is a great deal of evidence wildly and radically inconsistent with the academic world view, much of it coming from low status people, such as white refugees. (Brown refugees have slightly higher status, though still not enough to overcome the presumption of academic truthfulness) You ignore that evidence, because you have to say "Either academics are uniformly lying, or these ignorant white trash folks are repeating baseless rumors".
If it does not fit in with the official line, and comes from a low status source, you ignore it. Since I assume that the official line is worthless, I don't ignore it.
What justifies my position is that for another supposedly matrilineal society that academics love as absolutely wonderful and highly functional, the Mosuo, folk wisdom is that it is composed of whores and pimps, similar to the culture celebrated in rap music and game blogs, where there is no significant transfer of consumables to women and children, and large transfer from women and children to a minority of men. Thus in addition to sociobiology, I have folk evidence, evidence from low status people, that academics are making stuff up.
Which is what I had in the 1980s for the Soviet Union.
(Emphasis added.)
You are correct in saying that the conventional wisdom among academics was that the Soviet Union was not about to collapse. However, there were academics in academia and government who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union at least as precisely as Reagan did. And I see no evidence that anyone ever failed a course for predicting a rapid collapse of the Soviet Union.
Observe that Robert Gates furtively concealed the fact that it was he himself that was making the prediction, which suggests that making such a prediction might have bad consequences for one who made it.
You seem to have misread the article.
Gates didn't predict the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was a business partner of Stephen Brand who made the prediction in a presentation that Gates saw. According to the article cited by the Wikipedia entry:
Gates was denying that the Soviet Union would break up, not predicting it. Gates "jumped in" on a presentation by someone else. It was that "someone else" who made the prediction.
What evidence supports your claim that Gates ever predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union?