"have seen plenty of examples in my field to provide support for it." Are these examples of where the thesis was politically incorrect?
"Yeah, I hear you about Summers, that was a witch-hunting campaign." Doesn't this provide strong evidence that you can't trust many academics on issues relating to race and gender?
Yup, the examples were where the thesis was politically incorrect. For instance, there were a number of graduate students in Soviet history who made careers claiming that the Soviet Union was more violent than the politically correct, leftist historical mainstream narrative depicted. Similarly, I know a graduate student who made a career out of showing that the Amish were actually much more tolerant and respectful toward women than the historical mainstream narrative depicted.
There's a large gap between saying that the hounding of Summers was a witch-hunti...
Here's my op-ed that uses long-term orientation, probabilistic thinking, numeracy, consider the alternative, reaching our actual goals, avoiding intuitive emotional reactions and attention bias, and other rationality techniques to suggest more rational responses to the Paris attacks and the ISIS threat. It's published in the Sunday edition of The Plain Dealer, a major newspaper (16th in the US). This is part of my broader project, Intentional Insights, of conveying rational thinking, including about politics, to a broad audience to raise the sanity waterline.