= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
brazil84 comments on [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (275)
"Peer review is peer review, in all cases and contexts" I trust you really don't mean this. If a woman studies journal publishes a peer reviewed article saying that 25% of women on college campuses have been raped, I trust you would give this statistic almost no weight.
I don't mistrust academia on all topics, just on issues related to political correctness. Lots of women studies professors say that gender is a social construct. This sends a strong signal about the value of truth in some areas of academia
I update a little in your favor, but I'm an academic myself (an economist at Smith College) so my priors are fairly strongly held.
"I would tell him he has a great shot, as he would then gain a great deal of attention if he actually had credible evidence and countered the previous evidence convincingly." Yes, just like Larry Summers received when he suggested that genetics MIGHT play a role in why so few women are in sciences. When I mentioned at a panel on free speech at Smith College that I thought Larry Summers was probably right about this, another professor on the panel said I didn't belong at Smith.
The key weasel phrase is "credible evidence." And yeah, it would be tantamount to career suicide for any humanities PhD student to argue in his dissertation that the internment of Japanese Americans was a good idea. (Maybe he could get away with it if he were Japanese.)
Many, perhaps most cultures and subcultures have taboos. In Thailand, you don't insult the King. In Saudi Arabia, you don't insult Islam. And in the American Academy, you don't say anything which might be construed as racist.