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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I'm not totally sold on that, in particular because I know of fields dominated by progressives where studies are frequently put out that don't support the progressive line. I would agree on Crit studies, sociology, education, and journalism, but not necessarily the others. My intuition is weakly in your favor though on those others.

Regardless, notice what you didn't include - STEM, which makes up a big part of academia. Economics as well. This fits my point fairly well, that it's too strong a claim that all of academia is tainted.

STEM is still in the entryist phase. The current academics are being constantly bombarded from the rest of the school, particularly the DIE deans. Some major STEM journols are at least partially captured at this point. See, for example, Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-astrophysics-helped-me-embrace-my-nonbinary-gender-identity-in-all-its-complexity

Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01522-z

If you know any STEM professors they will tell you how much this is being foisted upon their departments from inside and outside the university. They don't particularly like it, they want to do their physics. But they are being made to care.

The first article is about a person who connected to the idea of "we don't know everything" in physics because it was relatable in some way to their gender. It's hardly a sign of ideological capture, unless you would also agree that if someone were to post an article about how they found more meaning in their faith by the revelations of physics to be a sign of religious capture?

The second is still not the same as what the OP is getting at. It's not enough to show that a field is progressive, you have to show that the actual consensus on the subject matter is progressive-aligned and wrong. That was the OP's claim, that people were doing academia without being truth-seekers.

It should not concern you that physicists are overwhelmingly progressive unless their political ideology is suspected in changing what they say. But as far as I can tell, we're not close to, for example, ditching the Standard Model or anything.

That's not to say we don't have any reason to be concerned, I'm very worried about the peddling of superstitious nonsense sourced from indigenous mythology as equal to science in any way. But until it happens, you shouldn't say it is happening, only that it is a risk to be concerned about.

I think that attitude is how we got Sociology and Psychology in the position we are in right now. The ideal time to have armed engineering an physics departments with powerful tools to fire any DEI entrist (even not in there departments) meddling with their work was 10 years ago. Maybe 15. The next best time is now. If there isn't strong action now, in 10 years Science and Nature will look like today's Scientific American.

That's not at all what we are discussing. The discussion is over whether the fields are currently compromised by progressive ideologues, not how you would keep them free of ideological meddling.

They are compromised. Its just that the level is not nearly to that level of other fields. Sure, they papers about new compounds extracted from coral, or whatever, are still going to be accurate. But they will be accompanied by a piece about how coral extraction chemistry needs more women and BIPOC.

Which wouldn't change the truth value of what they're saying, which is something OP explicitly said - that they were no longer truth-seeking for the sake of it. To quote the top-level comment.

"I simply don’t think it has a descriptive orientation anymore, nor do think it is any longer the realm of truth-seeking."

So then currently biochemistry is about 80% truth seeking, while sociology is 1%. But, importantly, biochemistry lends the sociology department its own credibility as well. They are inseparable in normal situations, so they are also part of that 99% non-truthseeking.

So then currently biochemistry is about 80% truth seeking

Insofar as it's activities go, maybe, but not how truthful its biochemistry-related conclusions are. Unless there's proof that biochemists are lying about or hiding their results to support a political conclusion?

They are inseparable in normal situations, so they are also part of that 99% non-truthseeking.

Inseparable to who? Because people just about anywhere can make the distinction, and it's not hard (or outside the Overton Window) to explain to people why a per-field analysis is required.

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