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Nornagest comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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.
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.