4 ms·

It's the opposite. There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones t

It's the opposite. There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones that achieved technical successes. A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations that some bronze was likely imported, because it contradicted this narrative for a given location.

godelski 3y ago
> There's a lot of pressure in academia Be careful to over generalize. There's a clear distinction in political divides between STEM departments and the humanities. But both even have inner differences. As an example, if you study Country X, you may or may not have certain conditions required to gain access to historical documents that are controlled by said country. Even if you don't live in that country and aren't leaving, those documents are on loan from said country and they control access. Long story short, stop over simplifying things and google Simpson's Paradox.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  STEM is also totally captured by left wing ideology. It's still more accountable to reality through controlled experiments, due to its domain of inquiry being the hard sciences, so maintains more scientific rationality, but the situation is bad nonetheless.
  - godelski 3y ago
    Is this something you've experienced or something you've been told. Because if the latter than my experiences differ from what you've been told.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      It's what I've observed, and experienced through personal interactions. The sample size of the people I've interacted with is admittedly very small.
      - godelski 3y ago
        Fair, but I'll mention that I'm in one of the most liberal states in America and it's not as big in my department. I routinely see professors and my advisor say stuff that is far from PC. Though I have heard of a junior professor say that we shouldn't refer to orphan processes because it might offend orphans. Kinda wish I was there, because as someone who is orphaned (single parent, not both) I particularly feel offended that he would think we're so weak that we'd need to be coddled. Our union doesn't give the STEM departments much respect. They seem to particularly hate CS and the Economists... Admittedly my sample size is small, but it gives evidence that we shouldn't aggregate beliefs about people. I'll admit, I'm frequently frustrated when people hear I'm in grad school that they immediately think I want to lick Stalin's boot. Such an interaction happened just yesterday on here where a user called me a communist when I was calling meritocracy a fool's errand. They didn't see the irony and somehow those comments got removed. Rare occurrence here...
        ETH_start 3y ago
        Thanks for sharing your experience. CS and Economics are the departments least influenced by left wing ideology from what I've gathered. I assume Math and Physics are similar in that respect.
bell-cot 3y ago
Notice "EARLIER understanding". Archaeology was a thing back when witch trials were all-too-common, and the Divine Right of kings was still mainstream thought. Howard Carter was ~done excavating Tutankhamun's tomb before British women had equivalent voting right to men.
- flextheruler 3y ago
  I think your conflating a lot of different time periods for events which differ between nations. Since you’re using a British Egyptologist as an example and we’re speaking English let’s stick to Great Britain. The divine right of kings was considered on a significant decline by the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s so that’s off by several centuries for the genesis of early/gentlemen archaeology began. The last witch trial in England was also in the late 1600s so again off by several centuries. And while you are correct about Howard Carter and women’s voting rights I think it’d be important to note that in 1902 parliament had not even given the right to representation for men who weren’t property owners either which was a significant if not majority of men.
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    I'm not confining archaeology to Howard Carter, nor his stereotype, nor his (generally) post-Victorian era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology Following a few links - William Harvey (b. 1578, graduated from Cambridge 1593) both conducted excavations at Stonehenge, and was a prominent skeptic of allegations of witchcraft. But it was 70 years after his death that the last "legal" execution for witchcraft was performed in the British Isles (Janet Horne, 1727). Meanwhile, Wikipedia also credits Robert Filmer (graduated from Cambridge 1604) with being one of the most famous exponents of Divine Right, and notes that that issue was pretty much settled - at least in Britain - by the English Civil War (1642-1651).
nostromo 3y ago
Yes, this is a central problem right now both in accademia and journalism. Lots of things aren't published because they don't confirm the author's pre-existing narratives. And on the other side, there's lots of cherry-picking for stories and papers that do confirm a hypothesis, even if they're outliers or extremely rare or the author is clearly reaching for their desired hypothesis. It's very Soviet-esque and should concern us all.
- achrono 3y ago
  I'm on the fence on this, and feel like even if it were true, the academic & journalist types are obviously going to argue the s#!t out of their position. Do you have sources that compare pre/post or show how non-conforming but equally significant news did not make it? (The "because of their prejudices" is the hardest thing to prove, you super-rarely get proof-of-intention in such matters, so just these facts should help the seal the case.)
  - dmix 3y ago
    > Do you have sources that compare pre/post It's pretty useless to compare the post-blog/social media era journalism with old newspapers to compare biases. Today we have journalism that will shameless give into their journalists personal biases, without editors calling out their bullshit. Quite the opposite, the editors probably want to dig in hard into the journos biases BECAUSE they feed into the reader's biases which get Twitter/FB clicks. And they recruit based on that ability too. Now that journalism is a low paying job that pretty much only attracts upper middle class kids who spent way too long in some University liberal arts degree and can afford the low paying early years of writing enough to get a gig at a REAL journo job at NYTimes type places (the few left where some basic level of fact checking and editorial professionalism is done)... which would be the type of orgs you're comparing it to historically. ...idk I feel like comparing the orgs to historical journalism simply on their adherence to bias/academic+journalistic integrity is waste of time. The job, market, and orgs have changed too much to go one-to-one.
- ngcc_hk 3y ago
  To a certain extent it is the black swan more important than 1 million white swan. Just wish the black swan is real. Got any pic … or evidence, reviewed journal etc.
gopher_space 3y ago
> There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones that achieved technical successes. It's more a realization that we only have a hierarchical, male dominated point of view on history and that there's a ton of backfill work to do because of that limitation. > A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations Welcome to science? If they were meeting in person someone would have bounced a muffin off his head. People take what they're doing really seriously.
- gweinberg 3y ago
  I wouldn't consider bouncing a muffin off someone's head to be "taking things seriously". Closer to the opposite.
  - 867-5309 3y ago
    even a large, stale, paperweighty muffin?
- goatlover 3y ago
  Welcome to ideology. Can’t believe your defending this.
- woooooo 3y ago
  The point is that the observations were completely uncontroversial and good science. The problem was that they conflicted with a political narrative someone wanted. If someone takes that more seriously than following the evidence where it leads, they suck and should get out of science.
- kulahan 3y ago
  We have a serious problem if someone making a minor comment results in a 10-email tirade because "that's just science" or whatever nonsense is being used to justify it.
  - 3y ago

godelski 3y ago

> There's a lot of pressure in academia Be careful to over generalize. There's a clear distinction in political divides between STEM departments and the humanities. But both even have inner differences. As an example, if you study Country X, you may or may not have certain conditions required to gain access to historical documents that are controlled by said country. Even if you don't live in that country and aren't leaving, those documents are on loan from said country and they control access. Long story short, stop over simplifying things and google Simpson's Paradox.

ETH_start 3y ago
STEM is also totally captured by left wing ideology. It's still more accountable to reality through controlled experiments, due to its domain of inquiry being the hard sciences, so maintains more scientific rationality, but the situation is bad nonetheless.
- godelski 3y ago
  Is this something you've experienced or something you've been told. Because if the latter than my experiences differ from what you've been told.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    It's what I've observed, and experienced through personal interactions. The sample size of the people I've interacted with is admittedly very small.
    - godelski 3y ago
      Fair, but I'll mention that I'm in one of the most liberal states in America and it's not as big in my department. I routinely see professors and my advisor say stuff that is far from PC. Though I have heard of a junior professor say that we shouldn't refer to orphan processes because it might offend orphans. Kinda wish I was there, because as someone who is orphaned (single parent, not both) I particularly feel offended that he would think we're so weak that we'd need to be coddled. Our union doesn't give the STEM departments much respect. They seem to particularly hate CS and the Economists... Admittedly my sample size is small, but it gives evidence that we shouldn't aggregate beliefs about people. I'll admit, I'm frequently frustrated when people hear I'm in grad school that they immediately think I want to lick Stalin's boot. Such an interaction happened just yesterday on here where a user called me a communist when I was calling meritocracy a fool's errand. They didn't see the irony and somehow those comments got removed. Rare occurrence here...
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        Thanks for sharing your experience. CS and Economics are the departments least influenced by left wing ideology from what I've gathered. I assume Math and Physics are similar in that respect.

bell-cot 3y ago

Notice "EARLIER understanding". Archaeology was a thing back when witch trials were all-too-common, and the Divine Right of kings was still mainstream thought. Howard Carter was ~done excavating Tutankhamun's tomb before British women had equivalent voting right to men.

flextheruler 3y ago
I think your conflating a lot of different time periods for events which differ between nations. Since you’re using a British Egyptologist as an example and we’re speaking English let’s stick to Great Britain. The divine right of kings was considered on a significant decline by the Glorious Revolution in the late 1600s so that’s off by several centuries for the genesis of early/gentlemen archaeology began. The last witch trial in England was also in the late 1600s so again off by several centuries. And while you are correct about Howard Carter and women’s voting rights I think it’d be important to note that in 1902 parliament had not even given the right to representation for men who weren’t property owners either which was a significant if not majority of men.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  I'm not confining archaeology to Howard Carter, nor his stereotype, nor his (generally) post-Victorian era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_archaeology Following a few links - William Harvey (b. 1578, graduated from Cambridge 1593) both conducted excavations at Stonehenge, and was a prominent skeptic of allegations of witchcraft. But it was 70 years after his death that the last "legal" execution for witchcraft was performed in the British Isles (Janet Horne, 1727). Meanwhile, Wikipedia also credits Robert Filmer (graduated from Cambridge 1604) with being one of the most famous exponents of Divine Right, and notes that that issue was pretty much settled - at least in Britain - by the English Civil War (1642-1651).

nostromo 3y ago

Yes, this is a central problem right now both in accademia and journalism. Lots of things aren't published because they don't confirm the author's pre-existing narratives. And on the other side, there's lots of cherry-picking for stories and papers that do confirm a hypothesis, even if they're outliers or extremely rare or the author is clearly reaching for their desired hypothesis. It's very Soviet-esque and should concern us all.

achrono 3y ago
I'm on the fence on this, and feel like even if it were true, the academic & journalist types are obviously going to argue the s#!t out of their position. Do you have sources that compare pre/post or show how non-conforming but equally significant news did not make it? (The "because of their prejudices" is the hardest thing to prove, you super-rarely get proof-of-intention in such matters, so just these facts should help the seal the case.)
- dmix 3y ago
  > Do you have sources that compare pre/post It's pretty useless to compare the post-blog/social media era journalism with old newspapers to compare biases. Today we have journalism that will shameless give into their journalists personal biases, without editors calling out their bullshit. Quite the opposite, the editors probably want to dig in hard into the journos biases BECAUSE they feed into the reader's biases which get Twitter/FB clicks. And they recruit based on that ability too. Now that journalism is a low paying job that pretty much only attracts upper middle class kids who spent way too long in some University liberal arts degree and can afford the low paying early years of writing enough to get a gig at a REAL journo job at NYTimes type places (the few left where some basic level of fact checking and editorial professionalism is done)... which would be the type of orgs you're comparing it to historically. ...idk I feel like comparing the orgs to historical journalism simply on their adherence to bias/academic+journalistic integrity is waste of time. The job, market, and orgs have changed too much to go one-to-one.
ngcc_hk 3y ago
To a certain extent it is the black swan more important than 1 million white swan. Just wish the black swan is real. Got any pic … or evidence, reviewed journal etc.

gopher_space 3y ago

> There's a lot of pressure in academia to find and publicize examples of "not hierarchical and male dominated" settlements, especially ones that achieved technical successes. It's more a realization that we only have a hierarchical, male dominated point of view on history and that there's a ton of backfill work to do because of that limitation. > A friend once received a 10 email tirade over several hours by making some benign metallurgical observations Welcome to science? If they were meeting in person someone would have bounced a muffin off his head. People take what they're doing really seriously.

gweinberg 3y ago
I wouldn't consider bouncing a muffin off someone's head to be "taking things seriously". Closer to the opposite.
- 867-5309 3y ago
  even a large, stale, paperweighty muffin?
goatlover 3y ago
Welcome to ideology. Can’t believe your defending this.
woooooo 3y ago
The point is that the observations were completely uncontroversial and good science. The problem was that they conflicted with a political narrative someone wanted. If someone takes that more seriously than following the evidence where it leads, they suck and should get out of science.
kulahan 3y ago
We have a serious problem if someone making a minor comment results in a 10-email tirade because "that's just science" or whatever nonsense is being used to justify it.
- 3y ago