As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it.
I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics.
To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this.
However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.
As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected.
The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.
In my 10+ years in academia, i‘ve seen only a few STEM people in university politics. From what I have read over the years, it’s the same in ‘real’ politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’. This leads to different values and different politics.
This is such an important point that it needs to be emphasized.
Large chunks of the humanities and social sciences operate under a completely different epistemology.
This epistemology rejects reason. And I don't mean that as a jab, I mean it literally rejects the philosophical concept of Reason itself.
Everything is about ideology.
It has at it's core the notion that there is no objective truth, and that any assertion of truth is merely the application of power of one group over another.
Under this epistemology, lying, contradiction, hypocrisy, fallacy, and rhetoric are all acceptable and even encouraged.
Dig a little in to post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction and so much of the Social Justice movement will make sense.
You'll start to find very little about Social Justice is about social justice.
I'm not an expert but I think this is a pretty gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents, sort of like quoting "I think therefore I am" and going about telling people that Descartes was purely a solipsist. There's something to it, but it's not the whole truth, and in a sometimes-violent climate of name-calling (and worse) I think it can be damaging when misinformation is wielded as a club against political opponents like this.
> gross mischaracterization of these philosophical bents
Could you please explain? I don't think I misrepresented anything, but I'm open to correction. I'm no expert either, but I have explored these ideas and I feel like I gave fair summary.
> but it's not the whole truth
True, it was a summary of what I felt were the relevant points.
> misinformation
I don't think what I said is even particularly controversial, least of all misinformation. It's just not well known. Most of what I said is explicitly stated by the people who hold those beliefs.
Explain, then, the epistemology that leads someone with a degree in international relations and economics to say that being morally right is more important than being factually correct?
I agree that misinformation can be wielded like a club; I disagree that GP is the one doing so.
What about that context contradicts torstenvl's interpretation?
It seems to me that saying that Washington Post fact-checkers are "more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" is one step away from saying they are morally wrong, an example of the "post-fact" attitude that holding the right position is more important than reality.
I suppose it was inevitable that when fact-checkers became inconvenient for politicians, politicians would attack them. How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?
People who still care about facts need to stand up to those who don't, lest facts cease to matter entirely.
Edit:
In response to the claim that the WaPo is being "pedantic" and "petty", I should include their response:
> The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.
...
> What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.”
The point she is making is that playing 'gotcha!' with relatively minor errors (in this case misinterpreting 21 trillion dollars worth of unaccounted for income AND expenditure as merely 21 trillion dollars of cash unaccounted for) misses the greater conversation about huge military spending vs civilian spending.
Sure you can spend your life being pedantic about things and us nerds commonly fall in to that trap, but it doesn't engage the conversation in a meaningful way and is very petty.
The reason I linked it is because the larger back-and-forth with Cooper where she admits facts are important and talks about when she makes mistakes provides colour that is missing from the misleading snipped quote "being morally right is more important than facts".
It is not a minor error. It's not pedantic. It's not petty. She claimed the DoD lost more money than it has ever had, cumulatively, in its entire history, including when it was the Department of War.
If you want to have a conversation about military spending vs. civilian spending, fine. Let's have that conversation. But it's only worth having that conversation with people who will be honest and admit when they're wrong.
It's perfectly reasonable to debate whether we should spend money on the military or on healthcare, but that's not what she said.
Instead, she suggested we could pay for Medicare for All just by improving Pentagon accounting, without making sacrifices, which is false. Pointing out the difference is neither petty nor pedantic.
It's also dangerous (but all too common) for her to suggest that her position is "morally right" and anyone who questions it, anyone who supports the military, is "morally wrong" without even considering what happens to the world if Pax Americana ends.
>> How long until the same thing happens in academia and STEM is attacked for caring more about facts than being "morally right" according to someone's personal definition of morality?
Perhaps journalists have "facts", but, in the sciences, we don't have anything of the sort. We have evidence, and theories that attempt to interpret the evidence. Scientists are often accused of equivocating about the significance of their results, and changing their minds every few years, because the public expects "facts" and absolute scientific truth where all we have is best-guesses given the data, and uncertainty. And this is an expectation bred by the reporting of scientific results in the lay press.
The comment you quote above seems to be about WP fact-checkers; not scientists. I don't see why you have to go from that, to a crisis in scientific credibility. Journalists can be expected to have much less rigorous research processes than scientists. In that light, the comment you quote, that being morally right is more important than being factually correct makes sense: journalistic "fact-checking" is not going to be very accurate at all. So why not make sure it's at least ethical?
In any case, I don't see any, well, evidence of the kind of crisis you're talking about.
Interestingly the field that talks most about epistemology and different epistemologies, is philosophy, which I'm pretty sure is part of the "grievance studies" bloc the authors wish to push a narrative about. It is absolutely the field you'd go into if you wanted to dissect and examine different epistemologies.
> post-structuralism, postmodernism, critical theory and deconstruction
I've worked in the pre-eminent enemy-of-the-right organisation in Australia, GetUp. I also am/was a postgrad philosopher. I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context.
Additionally, to read these four areas and to then claim that they form the basis of "identity politics" demonstrates a fundamental misreading. Perhaps this misreading is a motivated one.
"I can confidently say I've not heard a single left-wing activist talk about any of those 4 areas in my time working at that organisation, or, truly, in any other activist context."
I've mostly heard these things discussed on Reddit and YouTube because of Jordan Peterson. I've heard postmodernism discussed by a professional counseller but nobody else I've ever talked to. I find it intriguing the intensity which people fight beliefs that seemingly few people believe or have even heard of.
I do find epistemology a very interesting subject in the modern day though. I've heard arguments in Canada about how traditional native forms of knowledge should be acknowledged to be as legitimate as science. People aren't proposing this merely as a thought experiment they want things like oral tradition to hold weight in the court system. They feel that a lack of scientific evidence about possible harms from say natural resource development is being used as grounds to harm the ecology of areas in spite of the warnings and precautions of oral traditions. Epistemology is becoming very relevant politically here in these parts yet it seems to be a subject that both myself and the public at large is uneducated about.
I'd be interested to hear more about this - but in the past its certainly true that indigenous myths were seen as useless to science. There are several examples of natural events and disasters being correlated with myths retold in indigenous oral histories.
You're right to point to Mr. Peterson regarding these postmodernism complaints. A succinct summary is that he claims in a movement called "postmodern neo-marxism". Marxism is a modernism movement, the phrase itself is already a contradiction. And yeah, almost no activists even know about postmodernism.
Aboriginal Traditional Knowledge DOES have weight in the Canadian legal system just not very much especially in the lower courts. A point bought up in the context of using it in the courts is - isn't oral tradition fundamentally built on hearsay?
It is a super interesting jurisprudential question, because legal systems are typically objective in part, but also rely on some idea of what a "reasonable person" would consider factual or reasonable. It stands to reason then, that under a native epistemology, it is reasonable for oral tradition aka hearsay to be given legal weight - when under the modern tradition we wouldn't. It is probably worth wondering if we'd consider aboriginals to have no knowledge if we took a hardline view that all hearsay was not knowledge. I think that's a pretty counterintuitive conclusion, so I think there must be some credit given to knowledge in a system with no written record. And, the next question that comes to my mind anyhow is what would it be like if nothing was considered knowledge unless it was written down? This isn't even currently the case in our modern tradition, given that witnesses and memories are still considered to have at least some weight.
I had previously associated that with the right wing partisan media like Fox News and infowars. Surprised to hear that this may be relevant in academic social sciences as well
I'd say they are a little different. Infowars et al are basically just running their mouths for tabloid headlines. Academics adopting this "alternative epistemology" is more concerning. Stupid blowhards will be stupid blowhards, but the should-be bastions of clarity and reason doing this based on a rejection of all Western philosophy is concerning.
That is the whole point of 'STEM' it is to separate technical from humanities. Otherwise you would just call engineering, or biology, or math. Someone knew exactly what they were doing when they invented the word 'STEM'.
>> As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need
to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the
related fields it has infected.
Traditionally, if you think a scientific field is a bunch of nonsense, you
have two options: a) ignore it, and, b) change it from within, by publishing
better work yourself, etc.
But, to mobilise some kind of research police to tell other academics what to
research and how to research it? I don't think so. Academics should be free to
study whatever they like. If this ends up producing a load of garbage like
gender studies, then so be it. They can study their irrelevant and useless
subjects, so that I can study my all-important subject (AI; and I'm being
sarcastic- of course my own field looks more important to me).
In any case, it's really not the job of STEM researchers, or any researchers,
to police other fields. I don't see any sort of justification in what you describe.
I agree in principle and I think most researchers do, which is why grievance studies have been allowed to do whatever they wanted for so long, but grievance studies have taken it upon themselves to police other fields. "Policing" that is only self-defense at this point.
By "policing other fields" I assume you mean papers that are critical of STEM research?
The comment to which I replied calls for STEM researchers to "do something" - without specifying what. What are you suggesting should be done? Are we talking about writing papers criticising those fields, as they criticise ours, or are we talking about some more radical kind of "self-defense" like making sure their funding is cut and their research and teaching positions cancelled?
I think there's a place for departments that are concerned with ethics and social issues, but such departments are not above reproach either.
It seems sensible, at the very least, to ensure their research meets the highest standards of rationality just as they ensure STEM meets high ethical standards.
I also think it's worthwhile to ensure those departments are completely inclusive and don't exclude Christians, white men, the right wing, etc. A principled, rational approach to inclusion can help ensure that the social departments are truly representative of all the people.
Edit:
This isn't a description of grievance studies as it currently exists, rather it's an answer to the question "what should we do?" - we should advocate and lobby for something like this, I think.
>> It seems sensible, at the very least, to ensure their research meets the highest standards of rationality just as they ensure STEM meets high ethical standards.
Thank you for clarifying. But, why is that anything to do with STEM researchers, or researchers from any other field, than the fields in question? What are we, the guardians of scientific rationality? If a field is full of nonsense, it's up to its community to fix it. If they don't see the problem- well, that, too, is their problem.
You and other commenters here sound like you think a problem in, e.g., gender studies is a problem for all of academia. I really don't see why.
Edit: to clarify- I don't see how the gender studies etc fields "ensure that STEM meets high ethical standards". If such critique is really common among the humanities, at least my field is completely ignoring it. And I don't see how we can be forced to pay attention if we don't really care to.
In short- they can say what they like. Why should I care?
Because reputation spreads. The linguistics department understands that the literature department's behavior does not reflect on the chemistry department, but the electorate seems not to grasp that so easily. Since STEM depends heavily on government to fund basic research, STEM's progress can definitely be impeded by widespread mistrust of academia as a whole.
Your comments here amount to bitter insulting stereotypes, without any support by evidence or analysis, or any real engagement with the people you disagree with. To an outside bystander with no stake in whatever game you are playing, this kind of uglyness largely discredits whatever point you were trying to make.
I would recommend keeping such rhetoric off of this forum. It doesn’t lead in a direction of productive conversation, and it feeds negative stereotypes about scientists/techies. There are many better venues for venting.
I am not venting at anyone, but expressing my concern over the damage being done to something I love.
I have insulted no person and I have proposed a positive agenda of having the STEM field step in to get rid of these grievance study areas from universities.
“Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.
You have called these scholars unintelligent, an infection, gangrenous, an existential threat to the university, etc. who must be “gotten rid of”.
What is your definition of “insult” if this doesn’t qualify? Or are you maintaining that “no person” is insulted if you aim your vacuous broadsides at a group?
You and others supporting your position here haven’t specified precisely who you are talking about, given any concrete evidence/explanation about what you are so mad about, provided any serious analysis, etc.
It’s pretty much “those Sneetches with no stars on their bellies on them are really terrible. We Sneetches with the stars should make sure to keep them out of our hallowed institutions.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Storie... (Trigger warning to delicate STEM students: Dr. Seuss with his message of diversity and toleration was a famous “grievance scholar”)
I've read non-scholarly writings about surfers including behavior/etiquette in the water and found it interesting. I think it would be a worthwhile subject for research. Examining human behavior in niches can be illuminating to different and broader contexts.
I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.
If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed - "in the areas of cultural, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies." [1]
As for engaging with their work I don’t think that it is possible to have a rational discussion with people that think papers like these are worthwhile academic research [1].
Accepted and published
Helen Wilson (pseudonym) (2018). "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon". Gender, Place & Culture: 1–20. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "Who Are They to Judge? Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding". Fat Studies. 7 (3): i–xiii. doi:10.1080/21604851.2018.1453622. (Retracted)
M. Smith (pseudonym) (2018). "Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use". Sexuality & Culture. 22 (4): 1542. doi:10.1007/s12119-018-9536-0. (Retracted)
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity) (2018). "An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant". Sex Roles. 79 (11–12): 762. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0962-0. (Retracted)
Accepted but not yet published
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire". Hypatia.
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality". Journal of Poetry Therapy.
Maria Gonzalez, and Lisa A. Jones (pseudonyms). "Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism". Affilia.
Revise and resubmit
Richard Baldwin (borrowed identity). "Agency as an Elephant Test for Feminist Porn: Impacts on Male Explicit and Implicit Associations about Women in Society by Immersive Pornography Consumption". Porn Studies.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy". Hypatia.
Stephanie Moore (pseudonym). "Super-Frankenstein and the Masculine Imaginary: Feminist Epistemology and Superintelligent Artificial Intelligence Safety Research". Feminist Theory.
Maria Gonzalez (pseudonym). "Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy". Women's Studies International Forum.
Under review
Carol Miller (pseudonym). "Strategies for Dealing with Cisnormative Discursive Aggression in the Workplace: Disruption, Criticism, Self-Enforcement, and Collusion". Gender, Work and Organization.
So is a fair summary of your position: “Anyone working in roughly the same field as any journal editor who was taken in by a hoax should be fired from their job and removed from intellectual discourse, and their subjects of study should be blacklisted as inherently illegitimate”?
How far do you cast your net? You seem to want to throw out anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, literary criticism, etc. Are you going to scrap history, philosophy, political science, economics, education, religion, design, ... departments too?
Be careful what you wish for: an awful lot of scholarship in lower-tier STEM journals is also garbage, albeit typically a different flavor of garbage: unoriginal, lazy analysis, strong claims unsupported by the evidence, based on incorrect technical premises, making false advertisements of its practical applicability, massaging data in illegitimate ways, etc. (I know this because I spend a lot of time reading math and science papers in my spare time.) Even Nature and Science occasionally need to retract a paper when it turns out the author plagiarized it or falsified the data.
P.S. You didn’t need to copy/paste a wall of hoax paper titles from Wikipedia.
No. I am suggesting that I can't have a rational conversation with anyone who thinks the hoax papers are serious research. Surprisingly that is what I said.
I don't want to throw out any area of research, I want to throw out those that publish papers that pretend to be research.
I am very critical about researchers failings in the natural sciences. I am probably even more critical of bad science because it is so much more damaging.
I think the wall of hoax papers does rather get across the scale of the problem.
> I think we inhabit such different intellectual universes that I doubt we can have a civil conversation, but let’s try.
That's a pretty pompous thing to say...
>> “Grievance studies” (like “social justice warrior”) is a made up term whose goal is to group together a large group of people with a wide range of interests, ideological premises, methodologies, etc., and dismiss/discredit them collectively without bothering to engage with their work.
> If grievance studies is just a “made up term” then how can I be insulting anyone let alone any group?
You're being obtuse. It's obvious to anyone with experience of human society that terms can be made up that have very little utility beyond being insulting to some person or group.
The GP makes a valid point about the use and meaning of those terms. I can admit that even though I'm no fan of many of the ideas and attitudes that are lazily lumped under them.
> As for who I am wishing to see removed from academia it people in those areas that the hoax we are discussing exposed
Would you like a system more like the Soviet Union's, where a political authority controls who gets admitted into academia and who gets kept out?
"Grievance studies" are all rooted in conflict theory, which was developed by one of sociology's three founding fathers, Karl Marx.
They are literally rooted in a single (disproven) theory that all relationships are based on power and dominance. These are the people I believe we are talking about, the ones who speak of power and oppression and some tribe or class that is in control and must be stopped in the name of virtue, subsequently going on a witch hunt finding evidence and evils wherever they look because they have been taught to use post-modern reasoning, a form of irrational reasoning meant to question logic but not be used as logic.
The tactics they use, weaponizing shame and applying post-modern reasoning/critical theory, is a Marxist socialist tactic when combined with his ideology that cuts to the core of the most fundamental human psychological need -- the need for social connection, validation (psychological or scientific), and by using reasoning that cannot be argued with rationally is disarming if not disorienting in a political fight/argument. There's even a word for when they use it against other radical socialist groups -- leapfrog paranoia -- meant to get the different intersectional factions to unite against a common enemy in order to seize power. This is all in their own words.
(sidebar - watch the documentary Hard Times at Douglas High, where an inner city debate team uses critical theory in a debate about anything to make it about racism in order to win. In other words all debates became about their narrative, and these were Baltimore kids in what was the first integrated high school, indoctrinated by their professor back in the 90s).
It's coercive and dishonest, not simply persuasive, and a form of violence. They force people to submit under threat of social disconnection, which research has shown is more brutal than physical violence because it's psychologically traumatic, permanent, and has a biological impact on the individual as well as a sociological impact. Guilt is saying you did something wrong, shame is saying you are something wrong. There is no greater authoritarian or fascist behavior, which needs to be pointed out as distinct from the field of study itself.
So if the words "grievance studies" or "social justice warrior" are offensive, perhaps a better and more historically accurate and verifiable label to apply would be to call them Marxists or conflict theorists? I don't think that would be completely fair because as pointed out, few even know what those words mean let alone the roots and origins of their own beliefs, the nature of the tactics they use, or the nature of reasoning and belief systems themselves. What word wouldn't be offensive that embodies the characteristics that define them to others? The "grievance studies" label seems scientifically accurate and neutral without any attached ideology or behaviors.
If this offends anyone it is not meant to, I take no sides in any of this and seek the value in studying all of it.
Maybe the entire funding schemes need an overhaul? At least in Europe, i think it would be useful and productive to have a realignment of incentives and measures. And perhaps it is worth to explore a more transparent system than the current funding pipeline.
I think the trend is for people to leave academia instead of trying to do politics ; besides , a lot of people went into academia to avoid politics in the first place.
Someone's been out of academic life for a long time. Sign up for the colloquia at your former institution. STEM ain't gonna help you. They're as bad as everyone else.
What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along.
>Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?
This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.
I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities.
And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community.
What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying".
> On Pearl
Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM.
What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo.
The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism.
Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions.
> I'm just talking about the modern context.
When we say "greivence studies",
This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes.
It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments.
The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate.
If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining.
> Marring whole fields of study
This is the intended response.
Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline.
So people could point and laugh.
It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway.
Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look.
In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.
>I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities.
Associating "grievance studies" with the humanities might be a little too broad, after all the ultimate villain of modern critical thought (Colonial-era affluent Englishmen, probably), loved and generously funded the humanities of their day. To cast the claim in the strongest light I would say that it simply refers to the minority of people that, under the flag of helping, have made horrible accusations towards innocent people (a brief review of the literature will turn a few of these up, after all there's nothing stopping them from being published). In the most pessimistic light, "grievance studies" would just be, as you say, a conservative action word belonging right next to all of the similar liberal action words. The fact of the matter is that it is probably being used right now in both ways, by different camps.
Edit to respond to edit in the parent comment:
>but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments.
The claim that "whole departments" deserve to be marred is exactly what he's saying, and a lot of people agree. In this comment thread, I saw someone call the group of people (which out of respect for your argument against using the term I will not name) a "gangrenous foot." There is no word-mincing going on when someone calls whole departments gangrenous feet.
>I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities.
Stop trying to associate humanists who care about literature and art, and social scientists who care about truth, with political activists who have academic cover.
You seem to be either unaware of the details of the Grievance Studies project or are deliberately minimizing it.
They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award.
This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology.
Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology.
The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously.
Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.
"If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression, they should come out honestly and say so. But to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive."
In my opinion, this equally applies to allegations of unethical experimentation.
>> Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published?
I think it would be possible to publish a paper in one of the large machine learning venues with completely made up results and techniques, that nonetheless looked very impressive. One would have to take a bit of care to make the paper look legitimate, in other words, copy the style and conventions of a machine learning paper- but it's not that hard to do. After all, a great deal of machine learning research is, well, not quite made up, but for example there are important details left out of papers, experiments are poorly described, data is not available, results are interpreted in fanciful manner, etc etc.
Of course, such a "hoax" would be immediately condemned by the whole field because results would have to be fabricated. Then again, that is what Boghossian is accused of.
A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles.
Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them.
But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data.
You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies.
Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures.
I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth.
But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian.
>> It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models)
Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making.
Here it is from Hinton himself:
One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas.
Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.
The tldr from my reading is that Pearl thinks you can't ascend the "ladder of causality" with pure DL -- i.e. while you can make associations to answer simple probabilistic questions, you can't create a system that can answer questions like "if this intervention is made at t0, what is the likely outcome at t1?" or consider counterfactuals like "would my mother have lived longer if she didn't drink?"
You'd probably be best served by reading Pearl himself, his recent Book of Why is good, this much earlier paper[0] kind of lays out a few things too as for his reasoning that causal inference needs different tools. There's also some stuff in the blogosphere about an earlier dispute you might find fun, i.e. the methods of using causal inference tools. Example[1].
>> However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
I don't understand- why is it not an option to ignore "it" (politics in various humanities fields) anymore? What are the "career ending events" that could happen to me, if I ignore those politics, as I do?
and this happened specifically because it was pressed to do so by people who, for the most part, subscribe to the same ideology as the editorial board of "Gender, Place and Culture" (author is a "Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law"):
>Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace.
This is very similar to Soviet science. Mathematicians and physicists were obligated, unofficially of course, to put Marx or Lenin quote somewhere at the start of their article, and if they did, they were left in peace.
>Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
I was surprised to learn that this was true for the “hard” sciences. In the early 30s, after Hubble published his research showing that the universe is expanding, the Big Bang Theory started to become accepted by the mainstream scientific community. However, the Soviet authorities declared (a secular fatwa) that it was against Marxist orthodoxy – apparently, on the basis that its concept of “creation” was crypto-Christian. As a result of this stifling and repressive atmosphere, George Gamow, fled the regime. He later developed the theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (explaining how the Big Bang was responsible for the abundance of Hydrogen and Helium in the universe).
It was Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow's name on the paper ... I heard a story that they invited one of the authors just to get the A, B, G first letters of authors last names.
"Stalin and the Scientists" by Simon Ing tells a very different story.
Many Soviet scientists were severely punished when they found themselves on the wrong side
of Communist dogma. Making empty statements was not possible if, for example, you disagreed with Lysenkoism. If you refused to swallow unscientific nonsense you ran a very real risk of some combination of losing your job, being shipped off to a labor camp and losing your life.
Fortunately, the Grievance Studies folks have not yet figured out how to construct a gulag.
As someone who has been involved in academia and left-wing activism since the 00's, student politics has at least since then been an extremist cesspool, and looking back through history, it seems that plenty of vicious protests and movements seem to arise in universities. Increasingly, fields targeted by the hoax authors are shrinking, particularly since 2008, which seems to indicate they don't have as much influence in universities as the right-wing would enjoy thinking.
These fields do and they don't. The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness.
I do agree the students are far smarter than the professors and have been increasingly staying away from these fields. They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
> The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness.
So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Why aren't their tenures and salaries going up, if that's the case?
>So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations?
Administrators don't enjoy staff and budget cuts, they work to prevent them. That's a big part of their jobs, actually. If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.
I'm claiming that the university administrations are beholden to external forces, and the external forces are to blame for the decline of the humanities. The university administration would rather not have any part of their university decline, obviously.
Sure, but to claim that a group looking to push an agenda, a group that wields, in the right-wing imagination, inordinate power, can't even increase recruitment into their ranks, seems counter-intuitive.
The part of the story that I'm trying to emphasize is that the "ranks," although heavily embedded in academia to the point of controlling it, are perceived enemies of the public at large. They hold power within the academic world but are disliked outside of it, and the outside forces are responsible for the declines of enrollment, and so on. True or not it's self-consistent. You could compare it to the executives at a corporation that was notorious for polluting and hiding scientific evidence: they hold power within their company, and even if the public found out what they were doing and started to react it would still be very dangerous for an employee within the company to speak out against them. You can't say, for example, "Kim Jong Un isn't really powerful because the US is sanctioning his country, so you should try to usurp his position" because although he has little power outside of his country, he has a lot of power inside of it.
To further cement the point, imagine a kidnapper defending themselves by saying, "I could not have exerted force on the victim because I am not powerful, and I can prove that I am not powerful because if I was powerful I would not be in court."
That last example is beautiful. Imagine someone in court saying "I am not strong enough to do thing x, which is easier than thing y". It sounds like in this case the judge's (your) response is "but you did y".
I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.
>I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that it is happening, I'm just defending its logical consistency.
Although, I will point out that I have never seen a university where ex-science administrators outnumber ex-humanities administrators. It's quite believable that, as a result, humanities culture would be more common among administrators than science culture. As a result of that, a humanities student might think that the admins have "no culture in particular," because they have humanities culture and that's like water for a humanities student. At the same time, the scientists will be thinking, "nobody around here thinks like a scientist."
> If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.
>The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person.
Lets be entirely honest here. You do think this conspiracy is happening.
It is just name calling and dog whistling. The reason "grievance studies" is used is that just like "sjw" and "politically correct" its an evasive term designed to be loosely defined, so people can read what they want into it.
If you say to someone "you're engaging in grievance studies" they'll say "no". That's the limit of the debate you'll have with them, by your own design.
No amount of "university cringe compilations" or videos on prageru will get anyone close to the truth of what happens on university campuses. To claim that university students in particular, the people that are most likely to be exposed to different disciplines, are broadly unable to recognize their own academic "cultures" is absurd.
Funny how some people's enemies are stupid and weak while being powerful and threatening at the same time. A superposition! Beware the fearsome Eigenliberal!
Ok so they simultaneously have an inordinate effect on other disciplines, like science, but can't hold it together enough to keep their own boat afloat?
I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.
I think you're assuming that your personal experience is representative and unbiased. Is there a particular reason you'd consider yourself an expert on "grievance studies"? Is there a comprehensive list of areas of study you'd consider members? Could we perhaps figure out what level of knowledge you have in those fields, and with the academics within them?
I used to be a STEM academic and so dealt a great deal with university administrators and to a lesser extent academics within the grievance fields. Neither I enjoyed.
I also used to sit on the university wide committee that allocated PhD scholarships. Part of our job was to try and work out some sort of ranking of candidates between different fields. This wasn’t too hard for most fields, but I can tell you when we got to the grievance field candidates and their proposed projects we would all scratch our heads. In the end we just set aside a faction of the scholarships for these areas and accepted the ranking the departments provided.
So you sat on a panel with no experts in a particular field, and so deferred to experts from that field, and also had bad experiences with university administrators, and this lead you to believe you were an expert in the field where you deferred away your authority. If there's a good case for being suspect of scientists who claim authoritatively that other disciplines are bad, it is being made by you, right now.
What's amazing is that you can scratch your head when confronted by the thesis proposal of someone who just got out of honours/masters in a field but simultaneously anoint yourself an expert in that field.
Did you read the word "we" in my comment? I was not alone in being unable to rank these students and I have never anointed myself an expert in these fields.
Oh so multiple people were not experts in the subjects. Cool.
Also isn't it strange that while administrations are supposedly stuffed with these "grievance studies" people - not one person on your board was qualified to properly evaluate those fields.
It is just the nature of university wide committees that you won’t always have experts in every field on the committee.
We certainly had people for outside the STEM fields on this committee and they were in no better position than the scientists trying to rank these grievance study students and projects.
So at the time you and your colleagues chose to defer to experts in those fields, but currently you assume you are an expert in the content and character of the fields. What changed?
> I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience [sic] studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.
Dismissed due to lack of expertise.
> They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
Dismissed (and stop listening to so much american commentary, arts degrees don't cost much here).
I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics.
To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this.
However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you.
I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.