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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Of course bias can vary, but I think most of the professors you ask would say they are being unbiased, or they are calibrating their bias to counteract their typical student's previous educational bias. After all, you were taught history through high school, but in a state-approved curriculum taught by overworked teachers.
As far as critical tools, which ones are you thinking of? Are you thinking of traditionally-leftist tools like investigations into power relationships? What do you think of as a value-neutral critical tool?
You seem to have an idea of what differentiated the good classes from the bad. I'm not disagreeing that some classes are bad, I'm focusing on the value the good ones can give. A bad engineering class, by analogy, teaches about a subject of little practical interest AND teaches it at a slow pace. Bad classes happen across disciplines.
And I admit I am probably speaking from a lot of hindsight. I took a couple good classes in college, and since then have read a ton of academic's blogs and semi-popular articles, and it has taken a while for things to "click" and for me to be able to say I can clearly analyze/criticize an editorial about history at a direct and meta-level the way I'm saying this education helps one do.
You're right, for instance, that in college you probably won't get an aggressive defense of imperialism to contrast with its criticisms, even though that might be useful to understanding it. But that's because an overwhelming majority of academics consider it to be such a clearly wretched, even evil, that they see no value in teaching it. It's just how we rarely see a serious analysis of abolition vs. slavery, because come on right?
On slavery, academia and the mainstream are clearly in sync. On Imperialism? Maybe not as much, especially given the blurry question of "what is modern imperialism?" (is it the IMF; is it NAFTA; is it Iraq?). But many academics are striving to make their classes the antidote to a naive narrative of American history that goes: "Columbus discovered America, immigrants came and civilized the Indians, won the southwest in glorious battle against corrupt Mexico, then their nation reluctantly accepted the role of world peacekeeper ushering in our golden age, and triumphed over communism".
I mentioned critical theory elsewhere in these comments. There's also gender theory, Marxian theory, postcolonial theory... basically, if it comes out of the social sciences and has "theory" in its name, it's probably value-loaded.
These are frameworks rather than critical tools per se, but that's really what I was getting at: in the social sciences, you generally don't get the tools outside an ideological framework, and academics of a given camp generally stick to their own camp's tools and expect you to do the same in the work you submit to them. Pointing to value-neutral critical tools is harder for the same reason, but like I said earlier I think linguistics does an outstanding job with its methodology, so that could be a good place to start looking. Data science in general could be one, but in the social sciences it tends to get used in a supporting rather than a foundational role. Ditto cognitive science, except that that hardly ever gets used at all.
This in itself is a problem. If you start with a group of students that have been exposed to a biased perspective, you don't make them less biased by exposing them to a perspective that's equally biased but in another direction. We've all read the cog-sci paper measuring strength of identification through that sort of situation, but I expect this sort of thing is especially acute for your average college freshman: that's an age when distrust of authority and the fear of being bullshitted is particularly strong.
(The naive narrative wasn't taught in my high school, incidentally, but I'm Californian. I expect a Texan would say something different.)
But these frameworks/theories are pretty damn established, as far as academics are concerned. Postcolonial theory and gender theory make a hell-of-a-lot of sense. They're crowning accomplishments of their fields, or define fields. They're worth having a class about them. Most academics would also say that they consider distinctly right-wing theories intellectually weak, or simply invalid; they'd no more teach them than a bio professor would teach creationism.
If you strongly feel all of mainstream academia is biased, then pick a school known for being right-wing. Academia's culture is an issue worthy of discussion, but well outside the scope of "should history be in core curriculums".
Maybe things like game-theoretic explanations of power dynamics, or something like discussion of the sociology of in-groups and out-groups when discussing nationalism, or something similar, are neglected in these classes. If you think that, I wouldn't disagree. I guess most professors would probably say "leave the sociology to the sociologists; my class on the industrial revolution doesn't have room to teach about thermodynamics of steam engines either".
I don't know much about linguistics, except that Chomsky is a Linguist and that some people like him and some people don't.
I do know it is on the harder end of the social sciences. The softer social sciences and humanities simply won't be able to use a lot of nice, rigorous tools.
I think good teachers, even ones with a strong perspective, approach things so that the student will feel engaged in a dialogue. They will make the student feel challenged, not defensive. More of my teachers achieved this than otherwise. Bad teachers and teaching practices that fail to do this should be pushed against, but I don't think the academic frameworks are the main culprit.
Though I suspect I have a rather dimmer view of the social sciences' "crowning achievements" than you do, I'm not objecting directly to their political content there. I was mainly trying to point to their structure: each one consists of a set of critical tools and attached narrative and ideology that's relatively self-contained and internally consistent relative to those tools. Soft academia's culture, to me, seems highly concerned with crafting and extending those narratives and distinctly unconcerned with grounding or verifying them; an anthropologist friend of mine, for example, has told me outright that her field's about telling stories as opposed to doing research in the sense that I'm familiar with, STEMlord that I am. The subtext is that anything goes as long as it doesn't vindicate what you've called the naive view of culture.
That's a broader topic than "should history be in core curriculums?", but the relevance should be obvious. The precise form it takes, and the preferred models, do vary by school, but picking a right-wing school would simply replace one narrative with another. (I'd probably also like the students less.)
They don't. That doesn't mean they can't. There's plenty of rigorous analysis of issues involved in social science out there; it's just that most of it doesn't come from social scientists. Some of the best sociology I've ever seen was done by statisticians.
(Chomsky, incidentally, was a brilliant linguist -- if not always one vindicated by later research -- but he's now so well known for his [mostly unrelated] radical politics that focusing on him is likely to give the wrong impression of the field.)
I think this is a problem, BUT it wouldn't be a problem if we had more people willing to pick up the ball and take these narratives as hypotheses and test/ground them. I think there IS a broad but slow movement towards this. I think these narrative-building cultures are fantastic at generating hypotheses, and I am also sympathetic in that it is pretty hard to test many of hypotheses concretely. That said, constant criticism and analysis is a (sub-optimal) form of testing.
Historians tend to be as concrete as they can, even if it's non-quantitatively. If an art historian says one artist influenced another, they will demonstrate stylistic similarities and a possible or verified method of contact between the two artists. That's pretty concrete. It can rely on more abstract theories about what is a "stylistic similarity" though, but that's inevitable.
I also think that the broadest and best theories are the ones you see taught at an undergrad level. The problems you point out are all more pernicious at the higher levels.
Surely true. But I think (from personal discussions with academics) there is a big movement towards quantitative and empirical in social sciences (particularly political science and history), and the qualitative style is still great for hypothesis generation.
I also think our discussion is getting a bit unclear because we've lumped the humanities and social sciences together. That's literally millions of researchers using a vast array of methodologies. Some departments are incredibly focused on being quantitative, some are allergic to numbers.
If left-wing academia is low quality that in no way implies that right-wing academia is high quality. Seeing everything as left vs. right might even be part of the deeper problem plaguing the subject.
On the other hand, if (in someone's opinion) academia as a whole is of low quality on account of a leftward political bias then it seems reasonable for that person to take a look at more right-leaning academic institutions.
Nobody here said that's it's primarily a leftward bias.
A while ago someone tried to understand who controls the majority of companies and found that less than few institutions do control most of the economy.
Did they publish in a economics journal? Probably too political. Instead they publised in Plos One.
I have a German book that makes arguments about how old German accounting standards are much nicer than the Anglo American ones. Politics that makes Anglo-American accounting standards the global default are not well explored by either leftwing or rightwing academic institutions.
Substantial debates about the political implications of accounting standards just aren't a topic that a lot of political academics who focus on left vs. right care about.
A lot of right wing political academia is also funded via think tanks that exist to back certain policies.
True, but the things Nornagest was complaining about could all be at-least-kinda-credibly claimed to have a leftward bias, and could not be at all credibly claimed to have a rightward bias.
Of course, as you say, there's a lot more to politics (and putative biases in academia) than left versus right, but it's a useful approximation.
Lest I be misunderstood, I will add that I too have a leftward bias, and I do not in fact think anyone would get a better education, or find better researchers, by choosing a right-leaning place (except that there are some places that happen both to be good and to have a rightward slant, I think largely by coincidence, and if you pick one of them then you win). And I share (what I take to be) your disapproval of attempts to manipulate public opinion by funding academics with a particular political bent.
I would call that "damning with faint praise" :-D
It's praise sincerely intended. What strikes you as inadequate about, say, feminist theory and related ideas?
Can we do postcolonial theory instead? What kind of falsifiable (in the Popperian sense) claims does it make? Any predictions?
First I'll do a couple examples from feminism, since it is often tarred as academic wankery, and I feel more knowledgeable about it:
Feminist theories say that movies underrepresent women, or represent them in relation to men. A simple count of the number of movies that pass the BechdelTest vs. it's male inverse shows this to be plainly true. In fact, the gap is breathtaking. Not only that, but this gap continues with movies released today, supporting the idea that only direct and conscious intervention can fix the gap and related iniquities in the portrayal of men and women in media.
Feminist theory predicts that issues like female reproductive autonomy, education, and various categories of violence against women are strongly correlated. Statistics appear to show this is true (not indisputable; reporting and confounding factors exist).
As for postcolonialism, I'll give it a shot, though I'm not the best to speak on it:
Postcolonial theory states that most of the institutions of formerly colonial nations (their media, the World Bank, etc.) fetishize the strong nationalist state and a capitalist economy with all the trappings (central banks, urbanization, progression from agrarian to industrial to service economy) that western nations have developed over the past two centuries, and will attempt to impose states where they can. Many argue that Western intervention in the Balkans and in Somalia bear this out.
Postcolonial theory makes many other statements about development, like that postcolonial nations shouldn't try to emulate western paths of development (because they will result in poorer economic growth). Some of them are hotly disputed. However they are empirical.
More broadly, postcolonialism says that for any intervention in a non-western nation, basing this intervention on methodology for western nation will yield worse results than building the approach up based on the ethnographic characteristics of that nation, despite the fact that international institutions seem to favor the former.
That's merely an empirical observation.
That's a normative statement about what should be.
Can you be a bit more precise about these relationships? Also, does the feminist theory predict or does it say that's what it sees?
Off the top of my head I'd say I have at least two issues with feminism. The first is that it loves to tell other people what they should think, feel, and value. Science is not normative and feminism is -- that makes it closer to preaching than to science.
The second is that I am not sure why feminism (as an academic discipline) exists. I understand that historically there was the movement of "these not-quite-yet-dead white men in the social studies departments don't understand us and don't do things we find important, so fuck'em -- we'll set up our own department". That's fine, but first that's not true any more, and second, that's an office-politics argument for the administrative structure of a university, not reason for a whole new science to come into existence. What exactly is feminism doing that's not covered by sociology + political studies + cultural studies?
Again, this is a post-factum empirical observation.
And that doesn't seem to be quite true. Most newly independent countries love state power and often played with some variety of socialism, "third way", etc. Given the context of the Cold War, their political economy generally reflected which superpower they aligned with.
Who will? Impose on whom? I don't quite understand what do you mean here.
An interesting point. The problem with it is that nations which did NOT try to "emulate western paths of development" experienced even more poor economic growth. It is, in fact, an empirical observation that the economic growth in the developing world was, by and large, quite poor. However the conclusion that this is the result of transplanting Western practices to alien soil and home-grown solutions are much better does not seem to be empirically supported.
And another curious statement. You can read it in two ways. Way one is just that bespoke engineering is always better than off-the-shelf parts. True, but trivial. Way two is that the developing countries are special (in some poorly defined, presumably non-racist way :-/) so that the empirically successful practices of Europeans will not work for them. That looks to be highly motivated reasoning to start with, and doesn't have much empirical support either.
In general, postcolonialism seems to be basically anti-capitalist, Marxism warmed over, trying to make it so the developing countries avoid capitalism and follow what's usually called "the third way" (which, in practice, is a mix of crony capitalism and state-dominated economy run for the benefit of the ruling elite). I think this approach failed quite decisively and in that sense postcolonialism is a failed theory, not a crown jewel at all.
I made a mistake trying to defend postcolonial theory here, it's just not my area of expertise. Whether it's valid or not, I can't defend it well. But we do seem to be on the same page that it's falsifiable.
However, I do have a substantial beef with your beefs with feminism.
Come on... Things falling to the ground is an empirical observation, gravity is the theory.
No, it's a prediction. If the gender representation gap spontaneously solved itself without any evident adoption of feminist attitudes that would be a strike against feminism as a theory.
Predicts; It observed it then it continued to be true so it's not overfitting
It has a normative and an empirical element. An organization like GiveWell empirically assesses charities then makes normative recommendations based on a particular version of utilitarianism. Feminism assesses institutions and makes recommendations.
Most of what feminism does in influence other fields. Gender studies departments exist some places and not other, but it's influence is pervasive in academia. I think this is a misinformed criticism.
In another post you called feminism "a project dedicated to changing certain policies and cultural attitudes". I like this definition, it makes a lot of sense to me.
However the implication is that feminism is neither a science nor even a field of study. Recall that the original question was feminism (gender studies) in academia. You said
I'm fine with treating feminism as a socio-cultural movement based on a certain set of values. But then it's not an academic theory which is a crowning accomplishment of a field of study.