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This article misses or understates a few important points. 1. The left has a growing (in power or quantity, I can't tell which) anti-science/anti-objectivity f

This article misses or understates a few important points. 1. The left has a growing (in power or quantity, I can't tell which) anti-science/anti-objectivity fringe and it includes university faculty. We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist. Social scientist professors describe their field as one of activism, not truth seeking. These are among the more egregious absurdities that come out of some university departments, but there is a long tail of lesser absurdities. 2. Journalists haven't been "committed to objectivity, but sometimes erring" for the last twenty years or more. They consistently report the news through their political lens (consciously or unconsciously). We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias). Granted, the New York Times is far better than Breitbart, but it's hardly a paragon of objectivity. 3. These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom? How can we hope to fix our epistemic rift without making these institutions trustworthy to the objective person?

Oxitendwe 9y ago
>We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist. I agree with you completely on this, but do you have some sources for it? I'd be really interested to see how widespread the problem is, exactly. >We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias). This is a feature, not a bug. If you're a leftist, at least - this is the true purpose of the "diversity" push to remove white men from positions of power and replace them with left-leaning white women[0] and non-white minorities[1]. It is happening in tech specifically (and not any other male-dominated profession like truck driving, or female-oriented profession like nursing and kindergarten teaching) because tech companies have a vast amount of power and influence, and leftists want to stuff positions of power within those companies with people who will support them. >These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom? "Social justice" is a fancy word for radical leftism. Again, it mostly seems to revolve around removing white men from positions of power, and replacing them with people of a more left-leaning demographic. [0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Regardless-Age.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Re... [1] http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/ http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/
danielam 9y ago
Indeed. I am disappointed by the article's own Manichean, tribalist, myopic flavor. The rampant skepticism and ethos that embraces bullshitting to get your way is not partisan, it is -- as many other things -- broadly a property of our decadent culture's return to sophistry. As long as people fail to take truth seriously, and fail to engage in self-criticism instead of scapegoating some Other for their own moral failings, we will continue to spiral into the Twilight zone of insanity we've been inhabiting for some time.

Oxitendwe 9y ago

>We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist. I agree with you completely on this, but do you have some sources for it? I'd be really interested to see how widespread the problem is, exactly. >We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias). This is a feature, not a bug. If you're a leftist, at least - this is the true purpose of the "diversity" push to remove white men from positions of power and replace them with left-leaning white women[0] and non-white minorities[1]. It is happening in tech specifically (and not any other male-dominated profession like truck driving, or female-oriented profession like nursing and kindergarten teaching) because tech companies have a vast amount of power and influence, and leftists want to stuff positions of power within those companies with people who will support them. >These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom? "Social justice" is a fancy word for radical leftism. Again, it mostly seems to revolve around removing white men from positions of power, and replacing them with people of a more left-leaning demographic. [0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Regardless-Age.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Re... [1] http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/ http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/

danielam 9y ago

Indeed. I am disappointed by the article's own Manichean, tribalist, myopic flavor. The rampant skepticism and ethos that embraces bullshitting to get your way is not partisan, it is -- as many other things -- broadly a property of our decadent culture's return to sophistry. As long as people fail to take truth seriously, and fail to engage in self-criticism instead of scapegoating some Other for their own moral failings, we will continue to spiral into the Twilight zone of insanity we've been inhabiting for some time.