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Punoxysm comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think history and the softer social sciences / humanities can, if taught well, definitely improve your ability to understand and analyze present-day media and politics. This can improve your qualitative appreciation of works of art, understand journalistic works on their own terms and context instead of taking them at face value, and read and write better.
They can also provide specific cultural literacy, which is useful for your own qualitative appreciation as well as some status things.
I had a pretty shallow understanding of a lot of political ideas until I took a hybrid history/philosophy course that was really excellently taught. It allowed me to read a lot of poltical articles more deeply and understand their motivations and context and the core academic ideas they built around.
That last part, seeing theses implicitly referenced in popular works, is pretty neat.
I think this is true... but also that "taught well" is a difficult and ideologically fraught criterion. The humanities and most (but not all; linguistics, for example, is a major exception) of the social sciences are not generally taught in a value-neutral way, and subjective quality judgments often have as much to do with finding a curriculum amenable to your values as with the actual quality of the curriculum.
Unfortunately, the fields most relevant to present-day media and politics are also the most value-loaded.
Well, the impossibility of neutrality, except when giving the most mundane recitation of events, when talking about history or the humanities is a pretty vital lesson to understand. The best way to approach this is to present viewpoints then counterpoints, present a thesis then a criticism.
I have had one non-core course that was pretty much purely one perspective (left-radical tradition), but this is still a tradition opposed to and critical of even mainstream-leftist history and politics. What I mean to say is I don't think it was a great class, but I still learned plenty when I thought critically about it on my own time.
If you have a certain amount of foundation (which I got through a much more responsibly-taught class pretty much following the traditional western philosophical canon), in other words, you should still learn plenty from a curriculum that is not amenable to your values, if you put in an effort.
But I think most core history and philosophy courses at liberal arts colleges stick to a pretty mainstream view and present a decent range of criticisms, achieving the ends I talked about. If you really want far-left or right-wing or classical liberal views, there are certainly colleges built around those.
The thing that bothers me is that (at least at my university, which was to be fair a school that leaned pretty far to the left) neutrality seems to have been thrown out not only as a practical objective but also as an optimization objective. You're never going to manage to produce a perfectly unbiased narrative of events; we're not wired that way. But narratives are grounded in something; some renditions are more biased than others; and that's a fact that was not emphasized.
In a good class (though I didn't take many good classes) you'll be exposed to more than one perspective, yes. But the classes I took, even the good ones, were rather poor at grounding these views in anything outside themselves or at providing value-neutral tools for discriminating between them. (Emphasis on "value-neutral": we were certainly taught critical tools, but the ones we were taught tended to have ideology baked into them. If you asked one of my professors they'd likely tell you that this is true of all critical tools, but I don't really buy that.)
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.
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?
I can see your point about social sciences, but I would think this doesn't apply to most of the humanities. How is a creative writing, theatre, or communications course fraught by ideological criterion?
In a word: theory. I didn't take as many of those classes in college as I did social science, so I'm speaking with a little less authority here, but the impression I got is that the framework underpinning creative writing etc. draws heavily on critical theory, which is about as value-loaded as it gets in academia.
The implementation part, of course, isn't nearly as much so.
How do you know that you understand motivations of political articles better? Are you able to predict anything politically relevant that you couldn't have predicted beforehand?
Concretely, I can often tell if the article writer is coming from a particular school of thought or referencing a specific thesis, then interpret jargon, fill in unstated assumptions, see where they're deviating or conforming to that overarching school of thought. This directly enhances my ability to extrapolate to what other political views they might have and understand what they are attempting to write, and who their intended audience is.
As far as predicting the real world, that's tough. These frameworks of thought are in constant competition with one another. They are more about making normative judgments than predictive ones. The political theories that I believe have the most concrete usefulness are probably those that analyze world affairs in terms of neocolonialism, in part because those theories directly influence a ton of intellectuals but also in part because they provide a coherent explanation of how the US has managed its global influence in the past and (I predict) how it will do so in the future.
I can also do things like more fully analyze the factors behind US police and African-American relations, or how a film will influence a young girl.
That reminds me of the Marxist who can explain everything with the struggle of the workers against the capitalists.
The sentence looks like your study did damage. You shouldn't come out of learning about politics believing that you can fully understand the factors of anything political.
I think the difference I highlighted is an important one.
I am referring to the normative parts of frameworks. For instance feminism makes many normative statements. It is a project dedicated to changing certain policies and cultural attitudes. The eventual influence of these frameworks are based largely on their acceptance.
People make statements. Abstract intellectual labels don't. People have all sorts of personal goals. If one sees everything as the battle of certain frameworks then a lot dealing with individual people is lost.
Additionally you can also miss when new thoughts come along that don't fit into your existing scheme. A lot of people coming from the humanities for example have very little understanding of the discourse of geeks.
The political effects of getting people to meditate and be in touch with their bodies are also unknown unknowns for a lot of people trained in the standard political ways of thinking.
I don't have much to comment on this except that many academics in the humanities level charges of dehumanization and ignoring individual agency against a lot of works in economics or quantitative sociology and political science (ex. they might criticize an economics paper that attributes civil unrest to food shortages without discussing how it might originate in individual dissatisfaction with oppression and corruption). So it's ironic if I've done the same disservice to those academics.
I don't really know what you're referring to. But if you're talking LW-style memes, I think that it is generally true that futurism isn't of much interest to many in the humanities. And to a great degree it is orthogonal to what they do. A scenario like the singularity may not be, in that it's not orthogonal to anyone or anything, but I haven't had many conversations about it with those in the humanities.
What are you thinking of?
But I am sure there are academics who can readily discuss the effects of the fall of physically demanding labor, the effect of physical rigors on those in the military, or the interaction of all flavors of Buddhism with politics.
Dissatisfaction with oppression and corruption in itself doesn't have much to do with individual people being actors. Standard feminist theory suggests that social groups are oppressed.
As far as LW ideas go, prediction markets do have political implications. X-risk prevention does have political implications.
CFAR mission also mentions that they want to change how we decide which legislation to pass.
A bunch of geeks are working on getting liquid democracy to work.
Wikileaks and it's in actions do have political effects.
Sweden recently changed their Freedom of Press laws to make it clear that having a server in Sweden is not enough to profit from Swedish press protections because Julian Assanges Wikileaks tried to use Swedish press protection to threaten people who try to uncover sources of Wikileaks.
In Germany a professor of sociology recently wrote a book that argued that Quantified Self is driven by the belief that it's possible to know everything. It isn't. The kind of geeks New Atheists that want everything to be evidence-based and who believe that they can know everything generally reject QS for not doing blinded and controlled trials. He simply treated all geeks the same way and therefore missed the heart of the issue.
How much have polticial scientists wrote about Crypto Wars and in Cory Doctorow words the recent war on general computing?
Estonia had to be defended against cyber war by a lose collection where likely the stronger players weren't government associated. It's also quite likely that we live in a time where a nongovernemntal force is strong enough to start such a war.
The NSA is geeky enough that it's NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander modeled his office after the Star Treck bridge.
Jeff Bezos brought the Washington post. Pierre Omidyar who made his money with ebay sponsored First Look Media. Those are the signs that more and more political power goes to geeks.
I'm just pointing to a political idea to which you probably aren't exposed.
Military training is not supposed to build empathy but the opposite. Soldiers are trained to ignore bodily feelings.
How much of this course was history? How similar was it to other history courses you've taken? A course syllabus might be useful, but I understand if you'd prefer privacy. I could see this happening with a course on general scientific principles that used history to develop practice problems, but then what you learned would be scientific principles; not really history. Was it just the professor was better as his/her job than other history professors or is there something that's readily replicable to other history courses?
It was history of philosophy, focused on reading major works chronologically with a good dose of historical context and background for each (e.g. biblical authorship theories, prevailing attitudes that works were responding to, historical events like wars that would have influenced the authors, etc.). Work included twice-weekly journal entries on our readings, occasional quizzes, and essays tying several works together. A partial list of the curriculum, which we read in this (chronological) order, was:
The other hybrid philosophy/history course, the radical one, did have a couple excellent, very historically-oriented, readings. One was Black Jacobins about the Haitian revolution, others were about the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and a left-radical rebellion against the Bolsheviks in the early USSR (which I have unfortunately forgotten the name of, but it does demonstrate the pluralism of pre-Bolshevik socialism).
Detailed historical explorations were the stronger part of that course, and served to show how clear investigation into the facts could dispel or nuance a charicatured view of history.