At the recent Freedom of Intellectual Navigation conference at the University of Chicago, most of the speakers and attendees struck me as “dissident types”.
I fear that the answer is depressingly simple. First, we are all hypocrites, because (per Mercier and Sperber in The Enigma of Reason) the brain is set up to provide shallow reasons for what we’re doing and persuade others to our will, and that analytic reasoning arises mainly to defend ourselves from others shallow reasons. Second, the pressures for uniformity of opinion have slowed the critiques that prune back hypocrises.
Has academia always been that way or did something change that allowed its capture by anti-dissidents? Helen Andrews talks about a feminization tipping point.
In my observation, boys tend to be more combative/critical in direct interactions with each other while girls tend be more circumspect and supportive in direct interactions and criticize in more indirect ways. However, I don’t see why academia cannot maintain norms of sharp debate regardless of gender
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and others also write and lecture about this phenomenon. It is clear that something has changed as we have tried to introduce more women into various professions.
I am not sure what to do about it, however. I like having women around.
"The treason of the intellectuals." We have seen it before -- the deep corruption of intellectual elite and its desire to side up with the most repugnant actors.
Yes. But isn't it bizarre that intellectuals will align with evil. Perhaps by pursuing acts of the mind only, intellectuals forego the joys of dealing with the physical. That joy likely suffuses through the human psyche and stems from our hunter-gatherer forbearers, who lived and died by their ability to hunt and kill animals and bear children and protect them from predators. Mere thinking without any physical action may forego a basic human need, which twists & bends the psyche.
“I recognize this vision from my childhood. It’s a return to Jim Crow, with all the injustice and phoniness, only with colors and genders reversed, like the negative of an old photograph.”
In their hearts it was always about revenge, not justice… no matter what they tell themselves.
Perhaps, but my personal view is that most people just bow to the prevailing memes, taking advantage of them where they can and bending to them where they must. If asked why, they may give an ideological reason, but my hunch is that the behavior catalyzes the justification more than the justification catalyzes the behavior.
My impression is that most people just want to go along to get along. If I was still "in the system" I might very well do the same thing. The risks are too high to try to fight the prevailing tide as an individual.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free."
This is a very interesting point. Those of a certain age are all struck by how much worse race relations have become, after the implementation of a huge number of programs supposedly intended to improve race relations. Similar observations could be made about relations between the sexes, or other similar social phenomena.
"the implementation of a huge number of programs supposedly intended to improve race relations" however misguided or poorly executed were designed by liberal politicians to address real social issues, in the interests of maintaining liberal society and government.
But gradually liberals were replaced by Leftists, as young people raised on our Critical campuses grew up, got jobs and replaced their elders, who were mostly liberal in the expansive sense and also who genuinely wanted to help others and improve America. But Leftists, who now own and operate our culture and race relations, don't seek to erase the old racial hierarchy but to reverse it (whites go from top to bottom, and POCs vice versa), and don't seek to improve America, but to deconstruct and decolonize it, through the implementation of revenge labeled as Justice.
Leftists always believe society must get worse to get better (meaning they hope that social chaos can bring them into power), and always want to punish and control in the name of a "better world" and/or some vague form of Equality.
Our universities are like a massive sewage leak that's been pouring uninterrupted for decades into our social water, but as no one was willing to slay the Critical dragon and clean up the mess, we now have to live in shit.
I would agree whole-heartedly. We are in a LOT of trouble at the moment. And if we are ever going to restore some sanity, it will take a lot of effort. I am still unsure if it is even possible at this late remove.
I tried VERY hard as a young person to conform. But I really ended up frequently being a bit insubordinate, a noncomformist, a black sheep, a heretic, in spite of myself. I can see the pattern now that I am older. I tried as much as I could to blend in, to pander, to curry favor. But since I march to the beat of a different drum, it never quite worked out.
This has led to me always being branded as a nuisance, a pain in the ass, a troublemaker. Administrators and bureaucrats tend to loathe me. If you look at books describing innovation and unconventional problem solving in STEM, like 'Loonshots', you will notice that many others who are a bit "different" end up encountering a lot of resistance as they attempt to navigate the system.
I am resigned to it now. I guess it is unavoidable. Many hate me for this characteristic. I see it in some ways as a strength, but this tendency has to be carefully managed, that is for sure.
Well said! "In my opinion, thisis sentence describes 99% of academia today: "Academics who privately affirm what they won’t affirm publicly are like the Mockingbird whites who stayed mum."
That Einstein "god does not play dice" quote is misleading. In reality, Einstein identified issues with quantum mechanics that Bohr could not explain. That, in turn, led to experiments after a time that proved the superposition of states theory.
This discussion of the Veritasium lecture on the EPR paper, Bell's experiment, etcetera is quite good when read along with watching the Veritasium lecture. Einstein wasn't "wrong", he identified problems with QM that Bohr could not explain. Bohr could be described as "right" but not for all the right reasons. Einstein's contributions to QM were extremely important for clarifying and proving the theory was correct. The EPR paper was the cause of Schrodinger's cat metaphor. That metaphor when stated was intended as a thought experiment to show that hidden factors made sense, because any reasonable person would know the cat, itself, had to be alive or dead and could not be both, even when hidden away. This came to be a metaphor to describe just how weird QM really is.
Going further, painting Einstein as a dissident is somewhat misguided. He was a mainstream scientist and his ideas were rather quickly accepted by the mainstream. The “100 authors against …” book was published in German, in Germany, in 1931, and was much more the product of the anti-semitism than a representation of mainstream opinion within physics, which, by that time, had thoroughly accepted his theories.
I quite like the description in Feynman's autobiography of what it was like to be invited to meetings with Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etcetera. He said that they would go around, talk about their ideas, and then say, "____'s idea is better." This was a change from what he usually found in academia, of defensiveness, refusal to yield, grasping for credit.
I had a conversation with Arthur Young years ago in which I found out that Arthur (holder of helicopter patents) and Werner Heisenberg were college buddies and lifelong friends. In private they had some rather interesting conversations.
I really liked this, but I'm still left wondering: Why is academia so predisposed to hypocrisy?
I fear that the answer is depressingly simple. First, we are all hypocrites, because (per Mercier and Sperber in The Enigma of Reason) the brain is set up to provide shallow reasons for what we’re doing and persuade others to our will, and that analytic reasoning arises mainly to defend ourselves from others shallow reasons. Second, the pressures for uniformity of opinion have slowed the critiques that prune back hypocrises.
Has academia always been that way or did something change that allowed its capture by anti-dissidents? Helen Andrews talks about a feminization tipping point.
In my observation, boys tend to be more combative/critical in direct interactions with each other while girls tend be more circumspect and supportive in direct interactions and criticize in more indirect ways. However, I don’t see why academia cannot maintain norms of sharp debate regardless of gender
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and others also write and lecture about this phenomenon. It is clear that something has changed as we have tried to introduce more women into various professions.
I am not sure what to do about it, however. I like having women around.
"The treason of the intellectuals." We have seen it before -- the deep corruption of intellectual elite and its desire to side up with the most repugnant actors.
Yes. But isn't it bizarre that intellectuals will align with evil. Perhaps by pursuing acts of the mind only, intellectuals forego the joys of dealing with the physical. That joy likely suffuses through the human psyche and stems from our hunter-gatherer forbearers, who lived and died by their ability to hunt and kill animals and bear children and protect them from predators. Mere thinking without any physical action may forego a basic human need, which twists & bends the psyche.
“I recognize this vision from my childhood. It’s a return to Jim Crow, with all the injustice and phoniness, only with colors and genders reversed, like the negative of an old photograph.”
In their hearts it was always about revenge, not justice… no matter what they tell themselves.
Perhaps, but my personal view is that most people just bow to the prevailing memes, taking advantage of them where they can and bending to them where they must. If asked why, they may give an ideological reason, but my hunch is that the behavior catalyzes the justification more than the justification catalyzes the behavior.
My impression is that most people just want to go along to get along. If I was still "in the system" I might very well do the same thing. The risks are too high to try to fight the prevailing tide as an individual.
I’m definitely referring to the activist class here btw.
Ah yes, the "true believers".
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free."
—Pascal Bruckner
Unfortunately that seems to be exactly the point. It’s now an amorphous bureaucracy that only exists to serve itself.
This is a very interesting point. Those of a certain age are all struck by how much worse race relations have become, after the implementation of a huge number of programs supposedly intended to improve race relations. Similar observations could be made about relations between the sexes, or other similar social phenomena.
"the implementation of a huge number of programs supposedly intended to improve race relations" however misguided or poorly executed were designed by liberal politicians to address real social issues, in the interests of maintaining liberal society and government.
But gradually liberals were replaced by Leftists, as young people raised on our Critical campuses grew up, got jobs and replaced their elders, who were mostly liberal in the expansive sense and also who genuinely wanted to help others and improve America. But Leftists, who now own and operate our culture and race relations, don't seek to erase the old racial hierarchy but to reverse it (whites go from top to bottom, and POCs vice versa), and don't seek to improve America, but to deconstruct and decolonize it, through the implementation of revenge labeled as Justice.
Leftists always believe society must get worse to get better (meaning they hope that social chaos can bring them into power), and always want to punish and control in the name of a "better world" and/or some vague form of Equality.
Our universities are like a massive sewage leak that's been pouring uninterrupted for decades into our social water, but as no one was willing to slay the Critical dragon and clean up the mess, we now have to live in shit.
I would agree whole-heartedly. We are in a LOT of trouble at the moment. And if we are ever going to restore some sanity, it will take a lot of effort. I am still unsure if it is even possible at this late remove.
I tried VERY hard as a young person to conform. But I really ended up frequently being a bit insubordinate, a noncomformist, a black sheep, a heretic, in spite of myself. I can see the pattern now that I am older. I tried as much as I could to blend in, to pander, to curry favor. But since I march to the beat of a different drum, it never quite worked out.
This has led to me always being branded as a nuisance, a pain in the ass, a troublemaker. Administrators and bureaucrats tend to loathe me. If you look at books describing innovation and unconventional problem solving in STEM, like 'Loonshots', you will notice that many others who are a bit "different" end up encountering a lot of resistance as they attempt to navigate the system.
I am resigned to it now. I guess it is unavoidable. Many hate me for this characteristic. I see it in some ways as a strength, but this tendency has to be carefully managed, that is for sure.
If you don't already, you should follow (and promote) Frances Widdowson in Canada.
Dear Kent,
Well said! "In my opinion, thisis sentence describes 99% of academia today: "Academics who privately affirm what they won’t affirm publicly are like the Mockingbird whites who stayed mum."
thanks for writing this,
randy
That Einstein "god does not play dice" quote is misleading. In reality, Einstein identified issues with quantum mechanics that Bohr could not explain. That, in turn, led to experiments after a time that proved the superposition of states theory.
This discussion of the Veritasium lecture on the EPR paper, Bell's experiment, etcetera is quite good when read along with watching the Veritasium lecture. Einstein wasn't "wrong", he identified problems with QM that Bohr could not explain. Bohr could be described as "right" but not for all the right reasons. Einstein's contributions to QM were extremely important for clarifying and proving the theory was correct. The EPR paper was the cause of Schrodinger's cat metaphor. That metaphor when stated was intended as a thought experiment to show that hidden factors made sense, because any reasonable person would know the cat, itself, had to be alive or dead and could not be both, even when hidden away. This came to be a metaphor to describe just how weird QM really is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJZ1Ez28C-A
https://www.reddit.com/r/quantum/comments/1jpi397/veritasium_lightpath_video_misleading/
Going further, painting Einstein as a dissident is somewhat misguided. He was a mainstream scientist and his ideas were rather quickly accepted by the mainstream. The “100 authors against …” book was published in German, in Germany, in 1931, and was much more the product of the anti-semitism than a representation of mainstream opinion within physics, which, by that time, had thoroughly accepted his theories.
I quite like the description in Feynman's autobiography of what it was like to be invited to meetings with Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etcetera. He said that they would go around, talk about their ideas, and then say, "____'s idea is better." This was a change from what he usually found in academia, of defensiveness, refusal to yield, grasping for credit.
I had a conversation with Arthur Young years ago in which I found out that Arthur (holder of helicopter patents) and Werner Heisenberg were college buddies and lifelong friends. In private they had some rather interesting conversations.