Comment on Gender differences in spatial reasoning appear to be nurture

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 21:04:46 GMT

The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard?

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.

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