In case you haven’t seen them yet, I want to call your attention to the latest attack on the scientific method: positionality statements, in which authors attach totally irrelevant personal information to their scientific manuscripts. Typical of the illogic of our schizophrenic age, this is occurring at the same time that the NSF
For too long have we relied on the likes of Gauss and Einstein, Newton and Noether. It's time to let the alternatively gifted shine. People should not be discriminated against on their inability to solve a 2nd order partial differential equation, or whether they can't tell the difference between a matrix and a dominatrix.
It's important that we allow the alternatively-smart to have their say.
We need more papers discussing things like the "Feminist Theory of Glaciation" in order to establish more justice in human-ice interactions - and who better to do that than those who identify as a glacier?
Or if you don't have quite enough whiteness in your life you can always top it up a bit by reading "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness" and getting the number of l's in your alhamdulillah's correct.
It's important when discussing the social justice of interpretive Lego that one actually has lived experience in building things with little plastic bricks.
Not only do these statements go against universal norms of political neutrality in science, they also indicate a corrupt, conformist type of personality. What kind of scientist can one be, what can one discover and judge if one is so conformist and thinks of the world in clichés? The end of meritocracy is the end of America.
As I think about positionality statements a bit more, I think I can discern a few more problems with them.
(1) Allowing these might encourage a sort of "one-upmanship" phenomenon, where people are inventing all sorts of nonsense to get themselves extra social justice or victimhood points. It is unseemly, at the least.
(2) Is there any review or control on these PS? Can there be?
We already have a burgeoning problem with fraud and cheating in STEM. Does one think that the positionality statements cannot be gamed? That they will not eventually be full of lies and nonsense? Who judges their validity? On what basis? Will people have to submit DNA tests and all kinds of other information to "certify" that their PS is accurate? Someone will still find a way to cheat, even then, if the stakes are high enough.
(3) If this information is floating out there, how long before assorted bureaucrats and managers will use it to put their thumbs on the scales? This is highly likely, I suspect.
(4) Encouraging PS by allowing PS can create opportunities for personal attacks and identity theft and all kinds of other similar problems. How much information should we be forcing into the public domain? Should we be encouraging this kind of behavior?
(5) Social justice and woke and victimhood criteria are not static. Groups that are preferred can swiftly be reclassified as oppressors. And once this information is out there, it is too late. For example, Jews were long thought to be somewhat protected. However, after October 7th, this was revealed to be completely false, and many Jews were shocked by what happened to them. If you are the eldest child in a large family, do you get extra victimhood points or fewer? This is sort of arbitrary and can change in a flash. Being an only child can be good, or bad, from a victimhood standpoint, and this can also change rapidly. We have the emergence of "white adjacent" groups like East and South Asians, who are supposed to be discriminated against now because they do too well on exams. So their "diversity" is no longer welcome, according to emerging and evolving social justice standards. These things change constantly, and will continue to change. What is currently judged as impressive might be the opposite in a few short years. But if you create PS, and publish them, you have boxed yourself into a corner. And the PS could be used later to attack you.
And I suspect that there are a lot of other issues involved with PS. These PS are a very bad idea.
Positionality statements are generally bad. But automatically rejecting papers that have them is even more of a violation of scientific standards. That goes too far, and amounts to an ideological ban. We must evaluate scientific work based on the work itself, by discouraging and disregarding personal statements, but not by retaliating against anyone who makes them.
What makes this even more tragic is that these individuals probably are not nearly as embarrassed as are others with a greater knowledge and understanding of science. Worse yet, these are the faculty members who will be "enlightening" their students with this sad, pseudo self-aggrandizing drivel.
I am shocked that such nonsense is permitted. I had no idea that positionality statements were common now. This is ridiculous.
I could write a positionality statement that would put all others to shame. However, as I have mentioned before, I reject this stupid pandering. Judge me on my competence and the merits of what I produce. That is it.
Luckily, I haven't come across these Positionality Statements in my field. I'm sorry for anyone in this blog who must deal with such ridiculous absurdities.
Real Science knows not the race and gender of its authors. Real Scientists are not judged by the color of their cloth but by the content of their work.
With insipid DEI running so called colleges, I would not send my child to one of these ding dong schools run by tenured professors who in real life, can't find their way out of a paper bag. Instead I would send them to a good trade school where they will graduate pretty quickly and be making LOTS of money before your dipshtt kid is even through one year, wasting your money and his/her (yes, only two sexes) time. I have little to no respect for anyone "teaching" at a college today unless they are at a medical school and I do think there are a few good doctor/teachers left but with DEI, it could be dying also.
Ideological test are now becoming common to submit manuscripts in STEM. Besides the positionality statements well discussed here, many journals require filling of forms that require affirmation of gender ideology and DEI concepts in order to submit a manuscript. This is wrong, there should be no ideological litmus tests to submit manuscripts. Is their science not valuable enough on its own that they need to instead be requiring ideological conformity in political and social ideologies?
Wondering if these statements were proactively offered by the authors, or required by the journal. Either way they are a terrible trend. Are all university researchers infected by this virus? Where should parents who don’t want their kids infected send them to college?
For Thriller and SciFi fans amongst you: the intersectionality approach to all aspects of life has been most fully developed in Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull novels. The result are Privilege Levels 1-10. A white male cis catholic Irish able-bodied conservative would be a 1, a POC female trans genderqueer neurodiverse otherkin antifa sympathiser would be at least an 8.
I disagree.
For too long have we relied on the likes of Gauss and Einstein, Newton and Noether. It's time to let the alternatively gifted shine. People should not be discriminated against on their inability to solve a 2nd order partial differential equation, or whether they can't tell the difference between a matrix and a dominatrix.
It's important that we allow the alternatively-smart to have their say.
We need more papers discussing things like the "Feminist Theory of Glaciation" in order to establish more justice in human-ice interactions - and who better to do that than those who identify as a glacier?
Or if you don't have quite enough whiteness in your life you can always top it up a bit by reading "Learning Arabic as a Path to Whiteness" and getting the number of l's in your alhamdulillah's correct.
It's important when discussing the social justice of interpretive Lego that one actually has lived experience in building things with little plastic bricks.
I am white, but vomit green, as seen after reading these positionality statements.
Not only do these statements go against universal norms of political neutrality in science, they also indicate a corrupt, conformist type of personality. What kind of scientist can one be, what can one discover and judge if one is so conformist and thinks of the world in clichés? The end of meritocracy is the end of America.
As I think about positionality statements a bit more, I think I can discern a few more problems with them.
(1) Allowing these might encourage a sort of "one-upmanship" phenomenon, where people are inventing all sorts of nonsense to get themselves extra social justice or victimhood points. It is unseemly, at the least.
(2) Is there any review or control on these PS? Can there be?
We already have a burgeoning problem with fraud and cheating in STEM. Does one think that the positionality statements cannot be gamed? That they will not eventually be full of lies and nonsense? Who judges their validity? On what basis? Will people have to submit DNA tests and all kinds of other information to "certify" that their PS is accurate? Someone will still find a way to cheat, even then, if the stakes are high enough.
(3) If this information is floating out there, how long before assorted bureaucrats and managers will use it to put their thumbs on the scales? This is highly likely, I suspect.
(4) Encouraging PS by allowing PS can create opportunities for personal attacks and identity theft and all kinds of other similar problems. How much information should we be forcing into the public domain? Should we be encouraging this kind of behavior?
(5) Social justice and woke and victimhood criteria are not static. Groups that are preferred can swiftly be reclassified as oppressors. And once this information is out there, it is too late. For example, Jews were long thought to be somewhat protected. However, after October 7th, this was revealed to be completely false, and many Jews were shocked by what happened to them. If you are the eldest child in a large family, do you get extra victimhood points or fewer? This is sort of arbitrary and can change in a flash. Being an only child can be good, or bad, from a victimhood standpoint, and this can also change rapidly. We have the emergence of "white adjacent" groups like East and South Asians, who are supposed to be discriminated against now because they do too well on exams. So their "diversity" is no longer welcome, according to emerging and evolving social justice standards. These things change constantly, and will continue to change. What is currently judged as impressive might be the opposite in a few short years. But if you create PS, and publish them, you have boxed yourself into a corner. And the PS could be used later to attack you.
And I suspect that there are a lot of other issues involved with PS. These PS are a very bad idea.
Positionality statements are generally bad. But automatically rejecting papers that have them is even more of a violation of scientific standards. That goes too far, and amounts to an ideological ban. We must evaluate scientific work based on the work itself, by discouraging and disregarding personal statements, but not by retaliating against anyone who makes them.
What makes this even more tragic is that these individuals probably are not nearly as embarrassed as are others with a greater knowledge and understanding of science. Worse yet, these are the faculty members who will be "enlightening" their students with this sad, pseudo self-aggrandizing drivel.
I am shocked that such nonsense is permitted. I had no idea that positionality statements were common now. This is ridiculous.
I could write a positionality statement that would put all others to shame. However, as I have mentioned before, I reject this stupid pandering. Judge me on my competence and the merits of what I produce. That is it.
PS=BS
Science is science (evidence based)...and nescience is nescience. (positionality based).
Luckily, I haven't come across these Positionality Statements in my field. I'm sorry for anyone in this blog who must deal with such ridiculous absurdities.
Real Science knows not the race and gender of its authors. Real Scientists are not judged by the color of their cloth but by the content of their work.
With insipid DEI running so called colleges, I would not send my child to one of these ding dong schools run by tenured professors who in real life, can't find their way out of a paper bag. Instead I would send them to a good trade school where they will graduate pretty quickly and be making LOTS of money before your dipshtt kid is even through one year, wasting your money and his/her (yes, only two sexes) time. I have little to no respect for anyone "teaching" at a college today unless they are at a medical school and I do think there are a few good doctor/teachers left but with DEI, it could be dying also.
Ideological test are now becoming common to submit manuscripts in STEM. Besides the positionality statements well discussed here, many journals require filling of forms that require affirmation of gender ideology and DEI concepts in order to submit a manuscript. This is wrong, there should be no ideological litmus tests to submit manuscripts. Is their science not valuable enough on its own that they need to instead be requiring ideological conformity in political and social ideologies?
Wondering if these statements were proactively offered by the authors, or required by the journal. Either way they are a terrible trend. Are all university researchers infected by this virus? Where should parents who don’t want their kids infected send them to college?
It’s as bad as offering bribes.
Instead of calling these snippets of text "positionality statements", I think we should call them "biographical manifestos", or BMs.
For Thriller and SciFi fans amongst you: the intersectionality approach to all aspects of life has been most fully developed in Kurt Schlichter's Kelly Turnbull novels. The result are Privilege Levels 1-10. A white male cis catholic Irish able-bodied conservative would be a 1, a POC female trans genderqueer neurodiverse otherkin antifa sympathiser would be at least an 8.
Spoiler: It doesn't end well.