Whether we're looking at universities, corporations, or the military, there's the same phenomenon of the participation of competent White men being disincentivized. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our guys are having their prospects in life artificially reduced, and their ability to participate in the power process severely curtailed. On the other hand, the viability of the institutions is collapsing, and with it the prestige associated with them.
Telling young guys to become plumbers is a cope, and bad advice in general. They should instead be encouraged to start engaging in entrepreneurial institution-building. Withdraw participation from the compromised system, and set up competence hierarchies that will accumulate the cultural capital evaporating in real time from the legacy institutions.
Here's a fun story about declining college standards. I work as a tutor. A few weeks ago, I was going through an ACT reading comprehension passage with a student. The first sentence read --
Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle.
The student asked what a plum was.
This student took his ACT on December and got a 27/36 in Reading. This is an approximately 81st percentile score. The State thinks that this student's language ability is *well above average*!
My late-20s White son is a welder (not as a cope, but because he wanted to be a welder). For several years, the company he works for has been finding it more and more difficult to hire competent welders. After the first owner saw the handwriting on the wall and sold the company, the new owners' concept was to hire late teens - early 20s untrained White males and teach them to weld. This foundered on the rocks of "Workin' be hard, man!"
The company was then sold again. To save money, the latest owners are hiring Hispanics who can't weld and can't speak English so they can teach them to weld. So far the result has been a decline in quality that is leading to a decline in sales. Year-end bonuses declined by 2/3 this past year. The old hands such as my son aren't happy and are slowly leaving as they find good jobs at still well-run employers.
I think the cries of “peer reviewed” may be the most infuriating of all. Just a total abdication of responsibility to think about or observe anything for yourself. A Midwit’s pedantic nature and unearned sense of superiority won’t allow them to be religious in any conventional sense. However, they want so desperately to be regarded as a part of the priestly class that they’ve hollowed out and built a religion out of “science”.
Midwittery: not exactly imbecilic, yet not able to think for oneself.
Quoting from the article:
<snip> “Plagiarism is the domain of the midwit - people who don’t really have original thoughts of their own, no matter how highly they may think of themselves. And midwittery is increasingly what defines not just academia, but much of American society in general, as mediocrity rules the day.”
I had the audacity to get a PhD in Physics and for a brief few years get to smell my own farts of majesty. Then I become an aerospace software engineer and the a rocket science (God help me) and got a cold hard slap of safety critical reality.
Hyperbole aside I did a condensed matter science PhD (crystals, nanoscience, thin films) that was heavily experimental and very humbling but still the accountability of engineering really brought things closer to home.
One thing we were taught by wiser people during our studies was that peer review was “only a means for a paper to enter the scientific discourse. It wasn’t and isn’t a mark of correctness”. You can quote many papers that are terrible but have a useful bit in them. Or even cite them as not what to do.
The trouble is that idea is being gaslit by activists to be the same as “correctness” in the public’s understanding which is: you test it, use it and abuse it and the bloody thing still goes. Like a Toyota Hi-Lux basically.
And this has let so many midwits who really should know better even being midwits to force this “peer review = correctness” into real life situations. Completely passing engineering validation and verification.
And what’s worse is the midwit will still expect his water, food, cars, phones, buildings and all other things to be properly tested and deemed safe. And show no trace of awareness to this contradiction.
And they’ll even tell you they didn’t have a second breakfast.
"by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is."
I wish it were so restricted. It is not. Not in the academe or industry. Scientism is first and foremost practiced by scientists themselves with few exceptions. What is lacking IS NOT intelligence, but wisdom. I daresay few if any scientists have ever read Bacon or Newton or Hobbs or Locke and certainly not Smth. We scientists have eschewed the eclectic and embraced the esoteric. We learn more and more about less and less. AND YET we have the nerve to predict and bloviate about policy matters far beyond our brains.
This was all predicted long ago by Hutchins and Adler and Sayers.
Read the Western Canon or be conquered by a different cannon.
With regards to the replication crisis and "peer review," there is a deeper problem with "science" itself - or to be more correct - with what passes for "science" these days. The problem is an intellectual wrong turn in the philosophy of science that started with Karl Popper and was transmitted down through his disciples Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. Popper got hung up on Hume's inductive skepticism because he couldn't live with the uncertainty of induction. He became a deductivist.
"Science" suddenly got defined as nothing more than falsification, rather than the objective branch of human knowledge built on models ranked by their predictive power. The academe replaced predictive power with "peer review" and that was the beginning of the corruption. David Stove's "Popper and After" explains all of this.
The probability logic of such luminaries as Laplace, Sir Harold Jeffries, Bayes, E.T. Jaynes, Claude Shannon, and R.T. Cox (to name a few) got replaced with "peer review". William Briggs' book "Uncertainty" is another good read that helps shine some light on this mess and the poor state of science currently. We don't vote on science, but that's exactly what we do now.
The "null hypothesis significance testing" (NHST), a bastardized form of frequentist statistics taught in no actual statistics curriculum, became de riguer for publishing. Gerd Gigenenzer has written about this repeatedly, including on the origins of NHST. (In short, publishers smashed together the two parts of their respective statistics that both Fisher and Neiman-Pierson DISAGREED on and now we have scientists who view "chance" as a force of nature, rather than as being a statement about the limits of our knowledge.) The Supreme Court helped reify - and incentivize this - this with some terrible decisions on what constitutes science in courts. (Frye, Daubert, and Kumho Tire).
Good sources, background, and detail on all of this can be found at the Broken Science Initiative. https://brokenscience.org/
"As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously". That's quite the assertion, is it yours? Any sources?
there's a false choice b/t sci and religion: either "we should trust only science" is a logical or a fact-based proposition; in the first case it's apriori and opens the door to other types of non-experience based thinking; in the last case, the scientific method becomes contingent and so, not necessarily trustworthy. Either way there's no need to "trust" science.
But there needs to be a more pertinent reason we don't trust experts: because we should be making our own. We should be showing to people the beauty of being on the right.
And if an expert, or anyone else, throws the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" at you, feel free to let them know that the Dunning-Krueger Effect is mostly non-sense.
"The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data" - which, in turn, leads to bad experimental design. It's like a recursive function, spiraling ever downward towards the base case of complete quackery.
Midwit - Really though, I don't understand using that as an insult. A midwit is someone with average IQ, which is the bedrock of America. Lots of midwits contributed to the Moon landing. You can make some shit happen with 110 points.
No original ideas? Not accurate. There are *fewer* original ideas, and they are more constrained to a narrow field of study, and they don't usually represent an entire paradigm shift, but there can still be useful contributions.
You're painting with some pretty broad strokes here.
Whether we're looking at universities, corporations, or the military, there's the same phenomenon of the participation of competent White men being disincentivized. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, our guys are having their prospects in life artificially reduced, and their ability to participate in the power process severely curtailed. On the other hand, the viability of the institutions is collapsing, and with it the prestige associated with them.
Telling young guys to become plumbers is a cope, and bad advice in general. They should instead be encouraged to start engaging in entrepreneurial institution-building. Withdraw participation from the compromised system, and set up competence hierarchies that will accumulate the cultural capital evaporating in real time from the legacy institutions.
Here's a fun story about declining college standards. I work as a tutor. A few weeks ago, I was going through an ACT reading comprehension passage with a student. The first sentence read --
Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle.
The student asked what a plum was.
This student took his ACT on December and got a 27/36 in Reading. This is an approximately 81st percentile score. The State thinks that this student's language ability is *well above average*!
My late-20s White son is a welder (not as a cope, but because he wanted to be a welder). For several years, the company he works for has been finding it more and more difficult to hire competent welders. After the first owner saw the handwriting on the wall and sold the company, the new owners' concept was to hire late teens - early 20s untrained White males and teach them to weld. This foundered on the rocks of "Workin' be hard, man!"
The company was then sold again. To save money, the latest owners are hiring Hispanics who can't weld and can't speak English so they can teach them to weld. So far the result has been a decline in quality that is leading to a decline in sales. Year-end bonuses declined by 2/3 this past year. The old hands such as my son aren't happy and are slowly leaving as they find good jobs at still well-run employers.
This will not end well for anyone.
I think the cries of “peer reviewed” may be the most infuriating of all. Just a total abdication of responsibility to think about or observe anything for yourself. A Midwit’s pedantic nature and unearned sense of superiority won’t allow them to be religious in any conventional sense. However, they want so desperately to be regarded as a part of the priestly class that they’ve hollowed out and built a religion out of “science”.
My new favorite word:
Midwittery: not exactly imbecilic, yet not able to think for oneself.
Quoting from the article:
<snip> “Plagiarism is the domain of the midwit - people who don’t really have original thoughts of their own, no matter how highly they may think of themselves. And midwittery is increasingly what defines not just academia, but much of American society in general, as mediocrity rules the day.”
I had the audacity to get a PhD in Physics and for a brief few years get to smell my own farts of majesty. Then I become an aerospace software engineer and the a rocket science (God help me) and got a cold hard slap of safety critical reality.
Hyperbole aside I did a condensed matter science PhD (crystals, nanoscience, thin films) that was heavily experimental and very humbling but still the accountability of engineering really brought things closer to home.
One thing we were taught by wiser people during our studies was that peer review was “only a means for a paper to enter the scientific discourse. It wasn’t and isn’t a mark of correctness”. You can quote many papers that are terrible but have a useful bit in them. Or even cite them as not what to do.
The trouble is that idea is being gaslit by activists to be the same as “correctness” in the public’s understanding which is: you test it, use it and abuse it and the bloody thing still goes. Like a Toyota Hi-Lux basically.
And this has let so many midwits who really should know better even being midwits to force this “peer review = correctness” into real life situations. Completely passing engineering validation and verification.
And what’s worse is the midwit will still expect his water, food, cars, phones, buildings and all other things to be properly tested and deemed safe. And show no trace of awareness to this contradiction.
And they’ll even tell you they didn’t have a second breakfast.
"by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is."
I wish it were so restricted. It is not. Not in the academe or industry. Scientism is first and foremost practiced by scientists themselves with few exceptions. What is lacking IS NOT intelligence, but wisdom. I daresay few if any scientists have ever read Bacon or Newton or Hobbs or Locke and certainly not Smth. We scientists have eschewed the eclectic and embraced the esoteric. We learn more and more about less and less. AND YET we have the nerve to predict and bloviate about policy matters far beyond our brains.
This was all predicted long ago by Hutchins and Adler and Sayers.
Read the Western Canon or be conquered by a different cannon.
With regards to the replication crisis and "peer review," there is a deeper problem with "science" itself - or to be more correct - with what passes for "science" these days. The problem is an intellectual wrong turn in the philosophy of science that started with Karl Popper and was transmitted down through his disciples Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. Popper got hung up on Hume's inductive skepticism because he couldn't live with the uncertainty of induction. He became a deductivist.
"Science" suddenly got defined as nothing more than falsification, rather than the objective branch of human knowledge built on models ranked by their predictive power. The academe replaced predictive power with "peer review" and that was the beginning of the corruption. David Stove's "Popper and After" explains all of this.
The probability logic of such luminaries as Laplace, Sir Harold Jeffries, Bayes, E.T. Jaynes, Claude Shannon, and R.T. Cox (to name a few) got replaced with "peer review". William Briggs' book "Uncertainty" is another good read that helps shine some light on this mess and the poor state of science currently. We don't vote on science, but that's exactly what we do now.
The "null hypothesis significance testing" (NHST), a bastardized form of frequentist statistics taught in no actual statistics curriculum, became de riguer for publishing. Gerd Gigenenzer has written about this repeatedly, including on the origins of NHST. (In short, publishers smashed together the two parts of their respective statistics that both Fisher and Neiman-Pierson DISAGREED on and now we have scientists who view "chance" as a force of nature, rather than as being a statement about the limits of our knowledge.) The Supreme Court helped reify - and incentivize this - this with some terrible decisions on what constitutes science in courts. (Frye, Daubert, and Kumho Tire).
Good sources, background, and detail on all of this can be found at the Broken Science Initiative. https://brokenscience.org/
"As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously". That's quite the assertion, is it yours? Any sources?
there's a false choice b/t sci and religion: either "we should trust only science" is a logical or a fact-based proposition; in the first case it's apriori and opens the door to other types of non-experience based thinking; in the last case, the scientific method becomes contingent and so, not necessarily trustworthy. Either way there's no need to "trust" science.
But there needs to be a more pertinent reason we don't trust experts: because we should be making our own. We should be showing to people the beauty of being on the right.
And if an expert, or anyone else, throws the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" at you, feel free to let them know that the Dunning-Krueger Effect is mostly non-sense.
I wrote a small piece about it here:
https://thedistro.substack.com/p/confidence
"The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data" - which, in turn, leads to bad experimental design. It's like a recursive function, spiraling ever downward towards the base case of complete quackery.
Midwit - Really though, I don't understand using that as an insult. A midwit is someone with average IQ, which is the bedrock of America. Lots of midwits contributed to the Moon landing. You can make some shit happen with 110 points.
No original ideas? Not accurate. There are *fewer* original ideas, and they are more constrained to a narrow field of study, and they don't usually represent an entire paradigm shift, but there can still be useful contributions.
You're painting with some pretty broad strokes here.
Oh shit I'm a midwit.
Tanks on Harvard Yard: lol!
"Colored People are ruining science and academia."