atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
There are a lot of cultural reasons to prefer the US to the UK
- The UK is much more aristocratic and hereditarian---there's a royal family, a House of Lords, everyone is judged by the accent they developed while growing up, most politicians didn't just go to the same few universities, but literally the exact same high school, etc.
- Social conversation in the UK sometimes feels like its 50% a competition about how cleverly you can insult the other person. This is really distracting if you ever want to talk about something substantive. Despite it being mostly in good humor, the constant negativity is really draining.
- The above two points also enforce quite a bit of social conformism. Having unusual hobbies or interests for your social class is much harder than in the US.
- Ambition and particularly hard work are looked upon much more favorably in the US.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Isn't this because most of the rhetoric you hear from politicians is targeted at the general public? They're specifically playing for an audience without the expertise to see through the obnoxious, bad-faith games. I hope first, that they don't do the same when behind closed doors and second, that if the public got better at whatever the LSAT tests, their strategies for communicating with the public would also change.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
There are entire books on how to study for the LSAT. I presume that would be a place to start, though it might be good to hear from someone who actually took the test.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments
Right, part of the reason I'm posting this is that I don't really talk to that many lawyers and that I think they're a few here that might be able to give a more informed view. Is it correct to extend what you're saying bit to that the bad-faith arguments can be arbitrarily subtle and training people to catch more obvious bad faith also trains them to hide their own bad faith better?
There is no way it would stay neutral
Oops, I guess I forgot this other very important anti-poll test argument that they're way too easy to corrupt. Embarrassingly enough, it's actually probably the textbook one too through various Jim Crow examples. Thanks for making it.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Someone recently showed me some LSAT practice questions and I cannot get over how amazing of a test it is. If you're like I was and not familiar with the style, I encourage you to look some up---either some quick internet search or do some short test-prep site quiz like this.
I have never before seen something that I more wished the general population was better at. Can you imagine a world in where significantly more people had the reading comprehension and understanding of arguments to answer these accurately? It feels like 90% of what's annoying about politics and political discussion would just disappear---all the obnoxious bad-faith argumentative games wouldn't work anymore because everyone would see through them, we'll actually be able to have national discussions about substance instead of the nonsense that happens now, etc. Why is studying LSAT-style questions not part of the mandatory school curriculum? Wouldn't pushing for this be one of the best ways to "raise the sanity waterline"?
Now for the controversial point---I've also never been so tempted by the idea of a poll test. I know the two main reasons why disenfranchising a large group is bad: first, democracy isn't about making the best decision, but about making sure that every group feels heard by the system so that they don't violently rebel when it decides against them. Second, it's important to give the rulers of a country incentives to keep everyone happy so that institutions stay inclusive for all the standard Why Nations Fail reasons. However, I never thought I would see a test that so perfectly measures the skills needed to accurately judge political arguments! Maybe if we're in the world where practicing the questions is part of everyone's years of mandatory schooling and the LSAT-score threshold is low enough that almost anyone could cross it if they took that part of school seriously?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Yup, it's really a testament to the strength and dynamism of the economy in Texas. You have to condemn the grid mismanagement that led to the blackout, but it's really amazing to have a place that can just eat a cost like that as if it were nothing. I feel similarly about Hurricane Harvey on this second point.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Second, we had a moderate disaster back in 2021
Wikipedia claims >$195 billion in property damage. As a comparison, Hurricane Harvey is listed as $125 billion and the 2011 Japan earthquake as $360 billion, though in 2011 dollars.
If these numbers are correct(?), this is closer to "one of the most expensive natural disasters in human history" than "a moderate disaster".
Thank you for proving my original point. At this point, maybe it was correct for scientists to have been so left-leaning because they saw through that the right had this much hate for them.
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