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As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it. I thin

As someone in academia, I often encounter (although mostly tangentially via student politics) grievance studies or rather the mindset that goes with it. I think about it as an asymmetric game. Most researchers have to give their all to get ahead in their field of study (speaking from a hyper-competitive STEM subfield, ymmv). Grievance scholars however have as part of their march through institutions achieved for themselves not to be subjected to similar standards. Consequentially, academic politics from the undergraduate level onwards is dominated by students from fields whose very existence depends on asserting their importance through these politics. To us, this is academic politics with nothing to win, everything to lose. To them, it is a vicious existential fight. It is no surprise that the rational choice most people take is to try to ignore this. However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. I am not sure how this is supposed to end but I am getting out of academia as fast as I can.

ml3v 8y ago
Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism plays a similar role. A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards. The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.
- carbocation 8y ago
  A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
  - ml3v 8y ago
    Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
    - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
      *Geoff Hinton
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      >> It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making. Here it is from Hinton himself: One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-more-like-brains/ https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >Grievance scholars isn't a real label. What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along. >Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.
  - ml3v 8y ago
    >Grievance scholars isn't a real label I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities. And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community. What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying". > On Pearl Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM. What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo. The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism. Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions. > I'm just talking about the modern context. When we say "greivence studies", This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes. It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments. The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate. If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining. > Marring whole fields of study This is the intended response. Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline. So people could point and laugh. It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway. Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look. In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.
- nonbel 8y ago
  >"Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?" Deep learning? It is curve fitting (ie pattern recognition), is there supposed to be something wrong with that?
  - leggomylibro 8y ago
    Only if you want to market it as 'AI'.
    - nonbel 8y ago
      Humans do similar though. You know a chair when you see it, but you wouldm't easily come up with the perfect definition of a chair.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - antidesitter 8y ago
        The criticism isn’t that it’s unnecessary, but that it’s insufficient: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma....
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  Oh, for fuck's sakes! You damn well know that the kind of "criticism" in "critical theory" or "grievance studies" is normative polemic. It is not open to re-evaluating its normative conclusions, but instead to inventing and evaluating arguments for those conclusions. Moral norms are baked in, and should therefore be acknowledged as part of the intellectual foundations of those fields and subfields, open to question and disagreement. This is really, genuinely different from both STEM fields and from "non-grievance" humanities fields. You are not expected to hold particular moral views, for instance, to be a moral philosopher -- in fact, the field is all about evaluating which such views can be supported without postulating them as beyond question. This applies all the more so in the famously "harder" fields of physics or mathematics, in which we are usually (not always) so far removed from needing to make morally deep decisions that we can pick up and put down ethical frameworks as appropriate to the particular application in mind (power plant, weaponry, civil engineering, etc), without ever needing to bake in moral or political goals as an intrinsic part of what it means for a paper or a textbook to be good physics, leaving good physics a matter of epistemic goals, which are explicated, evaluated, and questioned in the philosophy of science.
- buboard 8y ago
  > The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. What are the high impact journals of their fields? My understanding is that Hypatia is a leading journal.
- memeograph 8y ago
  You seem to be either unaware of the details of the Grievance Studies project or are deliberately minimizing it. They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award. This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology. Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology. The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously. Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.
  - gdy 8y ago
    "Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published?" As a matter of fact, yes. Google scigen, mathgen - you will find the stories of how computer-generated nonsensical papers were accepted by conferences and low quality journals. For example: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185
    - js8 8y ago
      Have the authors of these non-sensical papers consulted the ethical panel, whether to conduct the experiment? It seems to me (as was actually pointed out by the hoaxing authors themselves) that either you can take what they did seriously, or not, but not both.
danieltillett 8y ago
As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected. The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.
- carbocation 8y ago
  Not important, but I think you intend en masse when you write on mass (almost the same pronunciation when spoken).
  - twic 8y ago
    Indeed, the STEM community has recently taken decisive action on mass: https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhaul.html https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhau...
    - buboard 8y ago
      They should also make the decisive step and call it Grave instead of kilogram. It's unfair
- brodo 8y ago
  In my 10+ years in academia, i‘ve seen only a few STEM people in university politics. From what I have read over the years, it’s the same in ‘real’ politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’. This leads to different values and different politics.
  - 8y ago
tomlock 8y ago
As someone who has been involved in academia and left-wing activism since the 00's, student politics has at least since then been an extremist cesspool, and looking back through history, it seems that plenty of vicious protests and movements seem to arise in universities. Increasingly, fields targeted by the hoax authors are shrinking, particularly since 2008, which seems to indicate they don't have as much influence in universities as the right-wing would enjoy thinking.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  These fields do and they don't. The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness. I do agree the students are far smarter than the professors and have been increasingly staying away from these fields. They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
  - tomlock 8y ago
    > The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness. So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Why aren't their tenures and salaries going up, if that's the case?
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      >So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Administrators don't enjoy staff and budget cuts, they work to prevent them. That's a big part of their jobs, actually. If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
>Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. This is very similar to Soviet science. Mathematicians and physicists were obligated, unofficially of course, to put Marx or Lenin quote somewhere at the start of their article, and if they did, they were left in peace. >Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. Yes, exactly the same.
- Anthony-G 8y ago
  I was surprised to learn that this was true for the “hard” sciences. In the early 30s, after Hubble published his research showing that the universe is expanding, the Big Bang Theory started to become accepted by the mainstream scientific community. However, the Soviet authorities declared (a secular fatwa) that it was against Marxist orthodoxy – apparently, on the basis that its concept of “creation” was crypto-Christian. As a result of this stifling and repressive atmosphere, George Gamow, fled the regime. He later developed the theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (explaining how the Big Bang was responsible for the abundance of Hydrogen and Helium in the universe).
  - hpcjoe 8y ago
    It was Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow's name on the paper ... I heard a story that they invited one of the authors just to get the A, B, G first letters of authors last names.
    - JorgeGT 8y ago
      It was Gamow who included Bethe's the name when sending the manuscript. Alpher, who was his PhD student, was not pleased at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper?oldformat=true#Bethe's_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93G...
- shmulkey18 8y ago
  "Stalin and the Scientists" by Simon Ing tells a very different story. Many Soviet scientists were severely punished when they found themselves on the wrong side of Communist dogma. Making empty statements was not possible if, for example, you disagreed with Lysenkoism. If you refused to swallow unscientific nonsense you ran a very real risk of some combination of losing your job, being shipped off to a labor camp and losing your life. Fortunately, the Grievance Studies folks have not yet figured out how to construct a gulag.
buboard 8y ago
I think you are underestimating the damage caused by this considering the degree to which public policy is shaped by academia.
- ml3v 8y ago
  Yes because the editorial board of "Gender, Place, and Culture" are know for writing most of the civil liberties legislature. I'm sure everyone @ ACLU is a subscriber /s
  - int_19h 8y ago
    ACLU has had some interesting re-alignments recently, so it doesn't come out quite as tongue in cheek as perhaps intended. https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazis-charlottesville https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi... and this happened specifically because it was pressed to do so by people who, for the most part, subscribe to the same ideology as the editorial board of "Gender, Place and Culture" (author is a "Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law"): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendment-trump-charlottesville.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm... Then you have activist students actually shutting down ACLU presenters on the campus because “liberalism is white supremacy”: http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protests-american-civil-liberties-union/ http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protest... So yes, it's definitely affecting things.
  - buboard 8y ago
    you might be underestimating it as well.
mensetmanusman 8y ago
I recommend this interview with Camille Paglia related to this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. I don't understand- why is it not an option to ignore "it" (politics in various humanities fields) anymore? What are the "career ending events" that could happen to me, if I ignore those politics, as I do?

ml3v 8y ago

Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism plays a similar role. A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards. The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.

carbocation 8y ago
A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
- ml3v 8y ago
  Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    *Geoff Hinton
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    >> It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making. Here it is from Hinton himself: One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-more-like-brains/ https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
whatshisface 8y ago
>Grievance scholars isn't a real label. What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along. >Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.
- ml3v 8y ago
  >Grievance scholars isn't a real label I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities. And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community. What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying". > On Pearl Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM. What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo. The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism. Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions. > I'm just talking about the modern context. When we say "greivence studies", This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes. It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments. The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate. If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining. > Marring whole fields of study This is the intended response. Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline. So people could point and laugh. It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway. Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look. In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.
nonbel 8y ago
>"Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?" Deep learning? It is curve fitting (ie pattern recognition), is there supposed to be something wrong with that?
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  Only if you want to market it as 'AI'.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    Humans do similar though. You know a chair when you see it, but you wouldm't easily come up with the perfect definition of a chair.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      The criticism isn’t that it’s unnecessary, but that it’s insufficient: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma....
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
Oh, for fuck's sakes! You damn well know that the kind of "criticism" in "critical theory" or "grievance studies" is normative polemic. It is not open to re-evaluating its normative conclusions, but instead to inventing and evaluating arguments for those conclusions. Moral norms are baked in, and should therefore be acknowledged as part of the intellectual foundations of those fields and subfields, open to question and disagreement. This is really, genuinely different from both STEM fields and from "non-grievance" humanities fields. You are not expected to hold particular moral views, for instance, to be a moral philosopher -- in fact, the field is all about evaluating which such views can be supported without postulating them as beyond question. This applies all the more so in the famously "harder" fields of physics or mathematics, in which we are usually (not always) so far removed from needing to make morally deep decisions that we can pick up and put down ethical frameworks as appropriate to the particular application in mind (power plant, weaponry, civil engineering, etc), without ever needing to bake in moral or political goals as an intrinsic part of what it means for a paper or a textbook to be good physics, leaving good physics a matter of epistemic goals, which are explicated, evaluated, and questioned in the philosophy of science.
buboard 8y ago
> The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. What are the high impact journals of their fields? My understanding is that Hypatia is a leading journal.
memeograph 8y ago
You seem to be either unaware of the details of the Grievance Studies project or are deliberately minimizing it. They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award. This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology. Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology. The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously. Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.
- gdy 8y ago
  "Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published?" As a matter of fact, yes. Google scigen, mathgen - you will find the stories of how computer-generated nonsensical papers were accepted by conferences and low quality journals. For example: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185
  - js8 8y ago
    Have the authors of these non-sensical papers consulted the ethical panel, whether to conduct the experiment? It seems to me (as was actually pointed out by the hoaxing authors themselves) that either you can take what they did seriously, or not, but not both.

danieltillett 8y ago

As a former academic (I left to go back to my startup) the STEM academics need to step in and do something about the whole grievance study area and the related fields it has infected. The STEM disciplines are the heavy artillery within the university system and when they act on mass over some issue the other side folds. The problem is that the STEM disciplines rarely act on mass over something like this, but the damage to the whole university reputation is now so great that STEM is at risk of losing public support and funding. It is time to act.

carbocation 8y ago
Not important, but I think you intend en masse when you write on mass (almost the same pronunciation when spoken).
- twic 8y ago
  Indeed, the STEM community has recently taken decisive action on mass: https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhaul.html https://www.bipm.org/en/news/full-stories/2018-11-si-overhau...
  - buboard 8y ago
    They should also make the decisive step and call it Grave instead of kilogram. It's unfair
brodo 8y ago
In my 10+ years in academia, i‘ve seen only a few STEM people in university politics. From what I have read over the years, it’s the same in ‘real’ politics. That needs to change. We can not complain about politics when we do not take part in it. I assumed for a long time that people in universities have scientific, enlightenment, world-views. A lot of them do not. I know people in Phd programs who belive in angels and astrology. I know some who ‘do not belive in truth’. This leads to different values and different politics.
- 8y ago

tomlock 8y ago

As someone who has been involved in academia and left-wing activism since the 00's, student politics has at least since then been an extremist cesspool, and looking back through history, it seems that plenty of vicious protests and movements seem to arise in universities. Increasingly, fields targeted by the hoax authors are shrinking, particularly since 2008, which seems to indicate they don't have as much influence in universities as the right-wing would enjoy thinking.

danieltillett 8y ago
These fields do and they don't. The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness. I do agree the students are far smarter than the professors and have been increasingly staying away from these fields. They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.
- tomlock 8y ago
  > The graduates from these areas tend to infect the university administration and wear down the other areas with guerrilla tactics of increasing wokeness. So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Why aren't their tenures and salaries going up, if that's the case?
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations? Administrators don't enjoy staff and budget cuts, they work to prevent them. That's a big part of their jobs, actually. If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.

nopriorarrests 8y ago

>Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. This is very similar to Soviet science. Mathematicians and physicists were obligated, unofficially of course, to put Marx or Lenin quote somewhere at the start of their article, and if they did, they were left in peace. >Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. Yes, exactly the same.

Anthony-G 8y ago
I was surprised to learn that this was true for the “hard” sciences. In the early 30s, after Hubble published his research showing that the universe is expanding, the Big Bang Theory started to become accepted by the mainstream scientific community. However, the Soviet authorities declared (a secular fatwa) that it was against Marxist orthodoxy – apparently, on the basis that its concept of “creation” was crypto-Christian. As a result of this stifling and repressive atmosphere, George Gamow, fled the regime. He later developed the theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (explaining how the Big Bang was responsible for the abundance of Hydrogen and Helium in the universe).
- hpcjoe 8y ago
  It was Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow's name on the paper ... I heard a story that they invited one of the authors just to get the A, B, G first letters of authors last names.
  - JorgeGT 8y ago
    It was Gamow who included Bethe's the name when sending the manuscript. Alpher, who was his PhD student, was not pleased at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93Gamow_paper?oldformat=true#Bethe's_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher%E2%80%93Bethe%E2%80%93G...
shmulkey18 8y ago
"Stalin and the Scientists" by Simon Ing tells a very different story. Many Soviet scientists were severely punished when they found themselves on the wrong side of Communist dogma. Making empty statements was not possible if, for example, you disagreed with Lysenkoism. If you refused to swallow unscientific nonsense you ran a very real risk of some combination of losing your job, being shipped off to a labor camp and losing your life. Fortunately, the Grievance Studies folks have not yet figured out how to construct a gulag.

buboard 8y ago

I think you are underestimating the damage caused by this considering the degree to which public policy is shaped by academia.

ml3v 8y ago
Yes because the editorial board of "Gender, Place, and Culture" are know for writing most of the civil liberties legislature. I'm sure everyone @ ACLU is a subscriber /s
- int_19h 8y ago
  ACLU has had some interesting re-alignments recently, so it doesn't come out quite as tongue in cheek as perhaps intended. https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazis-charlottesville https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi... and this happened specifically because it was pressed to do so by people who, for the most part, subscribe to the same ideology as the editorial board of "Gender, Place and Culture" (author is a "Critical Race Studies fellow at the U.C.L.A. School of Law"): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendment-trump-charlottesville.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm... Then you have activist students actually shutting down ACLU presenters on the campus because “liberalism is white supremacy”: http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protests-american-civil-liberties-union/ http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protest... So yes, it's definitely affecting things.
- buboard 8y ago
  you might be underestimating it as well.

mensetmanusman 8y ago

I recommend this interview with Camille Paglia related to this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> However, ignoring it is not an option any more, so out of fear, people chose sides. Taking one side means having to make empty statements and then being (for the most) left in peace. Taking the other side means having career-ending events happening to you. I don't understand- why is it not an option to ignore "it" (politics in various humanities fields) anymore? What are the "career ending events" that could happen to me, if I ignore those politics, as I do?