8 ms·

Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production

112 points by Reedx 7y ago

throwaway57023 7y ago
I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, publish or perish, etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".
booleandilemma 7y ago
Can anyone provide the tl;dr on this?
- jonbronson 7y ago
  The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  Somebody named Rudi Dutschke[1] is responsible for a 50-year-long conspiracy to take over American culture in order to make the author unpopular in college. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke
mikelyons 7y ago
The rise of social justice is the evolution of our society from red/orange through high orange to a green society on the Spiral Dynamics model of psychological / spiritual evolution. We're seeing the limits and the ugliness of unhealthy/low orange in the environment, politics, culture, et al. The transition to green will be painful and violently resisted by orange/red portions of our society, but it is necessary for our survival and for rescuing the ecology of the Earth from the excesses of unbridled stage orange capitalism. I'm so curious what our economic systems and culture will look like in stage green, but it'll likely not happen in my lifetime, which I just have to accept ...
- rubbingalcohol 7y ago
  Did you recently get laid off from the TSA? The only purpose your "threat level" categorization of social issues serves is to marginalize viewpoints you disagree with under the brush stroke of "progress at any cost." There are conservative values that are deeply necessary for a free society to function and that afford people the privilege* of criticizing their freedoms in the first place. (*well actually a right but rejecting civil rights in favor of 'wokeness' is so hot right now)
  - dang 7y ago
    Hey, please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It lowers discussion quality, evokes worse from others, and discredits your argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mikelyons 7y ago
    I'm not saying that conservatives are unhealthy, I'm saying there are unhealthy levels of conservatism just as there are unhealthy levels and limits to liberalism. The reason that it can be said that unity rather than adversary is higher in development is that conservatism tends to be resistance to the fundamental impermanence of reality. All things must change. Reality and consciousness are evolving. The world is becoming globalized and we are moving towards unity. And it's not about who's bad or good, better or worse, it's about what level of development are you at, how high is your awareness, how well do you understand reality. Demonizing a second grader for not reading at a high school level doesn't make any sense, just as telling a retiree he is lazy for quitting work doesn't make any sense. I'm trying to help people see the thing they are defending when they react violently. What is it in you that gets so angry when you read what I wrote? Worth examining. Edit: Also worth reading about Spiral Dynamics and seeing how it applies to Life and to politics.
ralusek 7y ago
It's always interesting to see Hayek's words, followed by a timestamp. Similar, although less recent at nearly 25 years ago, is this Peter Thiel video discussing the illusion of multiculturalism in 1996 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722. The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework. The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."
- andrekandre 7y ago
  > Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. do you have any hard evidence if this? > people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions assuming that is true, why is that?
  - EGreg 7y ago
    People are skeptical of markets because of various factors: 1. That the rich get richer, so to speak, and inequality grows, leading to increasing numbers of people not being able to afford basic rent. 2. That government is captured by markets and corporate welfare is rampant, while welfare programs for the poor are cut 3. People are not LLCs and we don’t want them to just go bankrupt and run out of resources because they can’t earn enough to cover basic needs. This is becoming especially pertinent with automation and outsourcing reducing demand for local labor. 4. That traditionally valued activities such as a homemaker raising kids have zero market value now that both sexes work and so on. Non-market solutions such as a single payer for universal health insurance, universal education etc. are considered essential in any modern democracy. This is called social democracy.
cwyers 7y ago
> In short, literally none of this stuff is actually new. Indeed, as Oliver Traldi has pointed out, the entire contemporary debate around ‘free speech’ and ‘political correctness’ bears an uncanny likeness to 1990s controversies on these same topics. Perhaps George Santayana was right when he declared that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Um, how far ago does the author think the 90s are? Yes, many of the same arguments from the 90s are happening now. It's not because people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's because a large number of people were alive in the 90s and now and are having the same debate still.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  There are a lot of "regular people" out there interested in these issues who were too young to have been involved in the '90s. Maybe the tone is off but I certainly appreciated the history lesson.
Nasrudith 7y ago
That is an awful lot of words for "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy". Put aside the possibility that the reason elites disagree is because they know something that the author doesn't. Even if one disagrees with a prevailing philosophy or even if it is objectively wrong but the idea catches on doesn't mean there is a conspiracy. That a rant from the 70s sounds like one today says more about the source than it does the target really - given ongoing processes one would expect the complaints to differ more substantially as the changes either "succeed" and are embraced as the norm or "fail" and are discredited. I use quotes because it is a matter of perception more than if they are actually good ideas. To be frank it seems to be pure projection of the "eauality feels like oppression to the privledged" sort.
- makomk 7y ago
  "It was largely a grassroots campaign. It was very deliberate, but also decentralized — with actors from different backgrounds and interests, concerned with different causes, working different institutional levers — learning from, and building upon, the work of one-another over time." That... seems like about as far from a vast conspiracy as you can get whilst still describing a group of people with a common goal and set of beliefs.
- Turing_Machine 7y ago
  The piece makes a scholarly argument and is written in scholarly language. It is neither a "conspiracy theory" nor a "rant". You are using loaded rhetoric in an attempt to dismiss the piece without actually engaging with the ideas set forth in it.
  - Turing_Machine 7y ago
    And, of course, by brigading this down you are making the author's point for him.
- bloaf 7y ago
  Here is another statement which you can characterize as "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy." > Republicans have been making concerted efforts to stack US courts with conservative judges. Accusing someone of promoting a conspiracy theory is to accuse someone of making creating an unfalsifiable story, which does not seem to be the case in either my example statement or the original post. Specifically, there are no claims that "evidence to the contrary is fabricated" or "lack of key evidence is due to deliberate suppression." Now it may be the case that the author would respond in this way when presented with contrary evidence, or when pressed for some key supporting evidence, but as it stands there is no cause to levy the "mere conspiracy theory" charge at the author.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
I've never understood where the criticism was for American Universities having a somewhat more "Leftist" culture among social sciences is coming from. Once you learn how to speak the "leftist" language, it's extremely easy to get high grades. Read and understand a Foucault and De Beuvoir work, coast on easy A's through these "grievance" studies courses. I did 1/10th the amount of work for a graduate level gender studies course as I did in a graduate level programming class. I certainly don't like the idea of not knowing the political orientation of a professor before I write an essay (as it is eminently important for my grade, no matter how impartial one pretends to be), and a radical left cannon means that I can write like I'm Marx and get a free pass into the Academy. The people on HN who don't like this simply don't know how to play the game.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  Or perhaps people have standards that make them dislike some harmful things that benefit themselves personally.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Those easy A's are there because you don't actually learn anything in those courses. You aren't getting your money's worth.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
js8 7y ago
I don't disagree with the piece, but it is quite biased. The institutionalization of non-scientific (that is, there is no clear criteria of what constitutes the truth in knowledge) "crap" is much more wider phenomenon, and not just some aberration of "the left". Nor is it confined to universities. Here are other examples: - Neoclassical economics, especially the macroeconomics. (It's ironic they quote Hayek, who significantly contributed to its rise.) If you want a similar article with this example, look at Steve Keen's Debunking Economics. - String theory in physics. This example shows that it doesn't have to be related to politics and society at all. - Various project management methodologies, lately the Scrum and Agile craze. The truth is probably that in many institutions, there is some atrophied department that mostly lost its useful function in favor of defending some internal dogma.

112 points by Reedx 7y ago

I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, publish or perish, etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".

booleandilemma 7y ago

Can anyone provide the tl;dr on this?

jonbronson 7y ago
The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pgcj_poster 7y ago
Somebody named Rudi Dutschke[1] is responsible for a 50-year-long conspiracy to take over American culture in order to make the author unpopular in college. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke

mikelyons 7y ago

The rise of social justice is the evolution of our society from red/orange through high orange to a green society on the Spiral Dynamics model of psychological / spiritual evolution. We're seeing the limits and the ugliness of unhealthy/low orange in the environment, politics, culture, et al. The transition to green will be painful and violently resisted by orange/red portions of our society, but it is necessary for our survival and for rescuing the ecology of the Earth from the excesses of unbridled stage orange capitalism. I'm so curious what our economic systems and culture will look like in stage green, but it'll likely not happen in my lifetime, which I just have to accept ...

rubbingalcohol 7y ago
Did you recently get laid off from the TSA? The only purpose your "threat level" categorization of social issues serves is to marginalize viewpoints you disagree with under the brush stroke of "progress at any cost." There are conservative values that are deeply necessary for a free society to function and that afford people the privilege* of criticizing their freedoms in the first place. (*well actually a right but rejecting civil rights in favor of 'wokeness' is so hot right now)
- dang 7y ago
  Hey, please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It lowers discussion quality, evokes worse from others, and discredits your argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mikelyons 7y ago
  I'm not saying that conservatives are unhealthy, I'm saying there are unhealthy levels of conservatism just as there are unhealthy levels and limits to liberalism. The reason that it can be said that unity rather than adversary is higher in development is that conservatism tends to be resistance to the fundamental impermanence of reality. All things must change. Reality and consciousness are evolving. The world is becoming globalized and we are moving towards unity. And it's not about who's bad or good, better or worse, it's about what level of development are you at, how high is your awareness, how well do you understand reality. Demonizing a second grader for not reading at a high school level doesn't make any sense, just as telling a retiree he is lazy for quitting work doesn't make any sense. I'm trying to help people see the thing they are defending when they react violently. What is it in you that gets so angry when you read what I wrote? Worth examining. Edit: Also worth reading about Spiral Dynamics and seeing how it applies to Life and to politics.

ralusek 7y ago

It's always interesting to see Hayek's words, followed by a timestamp. Similar, although less recent at nearly 25 years ago, is this Peter Thiel video discussing the illusion of multiculturalism in 1996 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722 https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722. The degree to which radically far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework. The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."

andrekandre 7y ago
> Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none the primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. do you have any hard evidence if this? > people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions assuming that is true, why is that?
- EGreg 7y ago
  People are skeptical of markets because of various factors: 1. That the rich get richer, so to speak, and inequality grows, leading to increasing numbers of people not being able to afford basic rent. 2. That government is captured by markets and corporate welfare is rampant, while welfare programs for the poor are cut 3. People are not LLCs and we don’t want them to just go bankrupt and run out of resources because they can’t earn enough to cover basic needs. This is becoming especially pertinent with automation and outsourcing reducing demand for local labor. 4. That traditionally valued activities such as a homemaker raising kids have zero market value now that both sexes work and so on. Non-market solutions such as a single payer for universal health insurance, universal education etc. are considered essential in any modern democracy. This is called social democracy.

cwyers 7y ago

> In short, literally none of this stuff is actually new. Indeed, as Oliver Traldi has pointed out, the entire contemporary debate around ‘free speech’ and ‘political correctness’ bears an uncanny likeness to 1990s controversies on these same topics. Perhaps George Santayana was right when he declared that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Um, how far ago does the author think the 90s are? Yes, many of the same arguments from the 90s are happening now. It's not because people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's because a large number of people were alive in the 90s and now and are having the same debate still.

nerdponx 7y ago
There are a lot of "regular people" out there interested in these issues who were too young to have been involved in the '90s. Maybe the tone is off but I certainly appreciated the history lesson.

Nasrudith 7y ago

That is an awful lot of words for "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy". Put aside the possibility that the reason elites disagree is because they know something that the author doesn't. Even if one disagrees with a prevailing philosophy or even if it is objectively wrong but the idea catches on doesn't mean there is a conspiracy. That a rant from the 70s sounds like one today says more about the source than it does the target really - given ongoing processes one would expect the complaints to differ more substantially as the changes either "succeed" and are embraced as the norm or "fail" and are discredited. I use quotes because it is a matter of perception more than if they are actually good ideas. To be frank it seems to be pure projection of the "eauality feels like oppression to the privledged" sort.

makomk 7y ago
"It was largely a grassroots campaign. It was very deliberate, but also decentralized — with actors from different backgrounds and interests, concerned with different causes, working different institutional levers — learning from, and building upon, the work of one-another over time." That... seems like about as far from a vast conspiracy as you can get whilst still describing a group of people with a common goal and set of beliefs.
Turing_Machine 7y ago
The piece makes a scholarly argument and is written in scholarly language. It is neither a "conspiracy theory" nor a "rant". You are using loaded rhetoric in an attempt to dismiss the piece without actually engaging with the ideas set forth in it.
- Turing_Machine 7y ago
  And, of course, by brigading this down you are making the author's point for him.
bloaf 7y ago
Here is another statement which you can characterize as "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy." > Republicans have been making concerted efforts to stack US courts with conservative judges. Accusing someone of promoting a conspiracy theory is to accuse someone of making creating an unfalsifiable story, which does not seem to be the case in either my example statement or the original post. Specifically, there are no claims that "evidence to the contrary is fabricated" or "lack of key evidence is due to deliberate suppression." Now it may be the case that the author would respond in this way when presented with contrary evidence, or when pressed for some key supporting evidence, but as it stands there is no cause to levy the "mere conspiracy theory" charge at the author.

Der_Einzige 7y ago

I've never understood where the criticism was for American Universities having a somewhat more "Leftist" culture among social sciences is coming from. Once you learn how to speak the "leftist" language, it's extremely easy to get high grades. Read and understand a Foucault and De Beuvoir work, coast on easy A's through these "grievance" studies courses. I did 1/10th the amount of work for a graduate level gender studies course as I did in a graduate level programming class. I certainly don't like the idea of not knowing the political orientation of a professor before I write an essay (as it is eminently important for my grade, no matter how impartial one pretends to be), and a radical left cannon means that I can write like I'm Marx and get a free pass into the Academy. The people on HN who don't like this simply don't know how to play the game.

Smithalicious 7y ago
Or perhaps people have standards that make them dislike some harmful things that benefit themselves personally.
zozbot234 7y ago
Those easy A's are there because you don't actually learn anything in those courses. You aren't getting your money's worth.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

js8 7y ago

I don't disagree with the piece, but it is quite biased. The institutionalization of non-scientific (that is, there is no clear criteria of what constitutes the truth in knowledge) "crap" is much more wider phenomenon, and not just some aberration of "the left". Nor is it confined to universities. Here are other examples: - Neoclassical economics, especially the macroeconomics. (It's ironic they quote Hayek, who significantly contributed to its rise.) If you want a similar article with this example, look at Steve Keen's Debunking Economics. - String theory in physics. This example shows that it doesn't have to be related to politics and society at all. - Various project management methodologies, lately the Scrum and Agile craze. The truth is probably that in many institutions, there is some atrophied department that mostly lost its useful function in favor of defending some internal dogma.