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(Bolding mine) I don't think anyone ever in any side of politics is particularly good at the part I bolded, but certainly the last 10 or so years have been transformative for me in learning of how unimportant this was to self-described liberals. Of course, liberalism doesn't necessarily imply free exchange of ideas and discourse, but it's certainly something I used to associate with them, and too many times I'd hear from a friend about how he went into or wanted to go into an argument with someone with [wrongthink] ideas, with or looking for some tactic to cut through that person's defenses in order to convince them without also looking for tactics by which to allow that person to convince him that [wrongthink] is actually correct.
Going into a conversation or argument looking to convince someone else without allowing for the possibility of oneself being convinced in reverse is just not a winning strategy unless your goal isn't the truth and you have overwhelming force on your side to enforce what you believe is right anyway. Because people can tell when they're being lectured to instead of being engaged with, especially in the long run.
Which reminds me of 2 separate but related phenomena that I keep seeing over and over among the woke left. One is that of "wokeness didn't fail, it was failed by the bigoted populace that was just too bigoted to accept it." This is just a continuation of the "feminism didn't fail, it was failed by the misogynistic populace that was just too misogynistic to accept it," a common sentiment among feminists before "woke" as we understand it today was a common term. I see this commonly enough among both the left and the right and in non-political contexts as well. People love avoiding accountability and blaming others, everywhere and in all contexts.
However, it is entirely and only the responsibility of the ideologues who support an ideology that requires mass buy-in from large swathes of society due to the severe societal changes it pushes to make a convincing case for their ideology, and any failure of the ideology to take hold is entirely the ideologues' fault, and you'd think that these ideologues would be motivated to realize this, in order to more effectively push their ideological changes in society (that they don't seem to realize this indicates either they care more about feeling righteous than about accomplishing meaningful political change or they genuinely believe that they have overwhelming force, or both). It's like how it's always and only the movie studio/marketer/etc.'s fault when a movie bombs, even presuming that it bombed due to society being so filled with bigots who were bigoted against the movie's message/actors/directors/marketers/etc., since no one has an obligation to give money to movie studios.
The other phenomenon is that of ideologues gutting out credible organizations and wearing them as a skin suit in order to launder their ideas through the inertial credibility of the organization while the rest of the world catches up to notice. Academia is the obvious one that people are talking about right now here, but also mainstream journalism and also even fictional media, with stuff like the Hugo awards for science fiction or the Star Wars film franchise or game companies like Bioware or Bungie, where these organizations huff and puff as if people still respect them like before the more recent ideological takeovers without seeming to recognize that you can only wear the skin suit for so long before people notice that the underlying thing isn't delivering on the promise of the label and adjusts their credibility rating accordingly.
In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces. You can choose your message, but you have no vote on how other people respond to it. If you want other people to respond to your message in a certain way, it is only and entirely your responsibility to sculpt your message to get the results you want.
As much as I hate this analogy, it reminds me of the "nice guy" phenomenon that was all the rage on feminist think pieces about a decade ago, referring to men who appear to believe they're entitled to sex for following all the instructions they were given for attracting a woman, and then lashing out at women when the sex isn't delivered. Instead of taking responsibility for his own failures (i.e. believing the instructions he was given, instead of understanding that part of the test is correctly interpreting these instructions) and fixing it, he just blames women for not filling their role. The opposite gender counterpart would be a woman in her 30s or 40s who had her sexual fun with a large set of male partners while also building her career blaming high value men in their age range for not fulfilling their role of finding them attractive and instead going for younger, less successful, less sexually experienced women. In neither case, does blaming others actually help the person in question, not without overwhelming force to enforce it (which has arguably been the case over the last few decades for the latter case), and in both cases, taking accountability for one's own failure and learning from it seems to be - to me, anyway - the most likely method to bear fruit. But people hate taking accountability more than they love their ideology winning.
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
Planck's Principle -- that "Science progresses one funeral at a time" -- has reigned for a long time.
I fear that in certain fields, the opposite might even be the case - that the science regresses one funeral at a time. It's not that the older scientists have no biases whatsoever, but it really isn't rare that younger academics (can't really call them scientists in good conscience, tbf) are much more strictly dogmatic and don't even pretend to be interested in the pursuit of truth if it goes against their beliefs.
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