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Are we better than you? We tested this claim by asking ourselves and we say: Yes!
It's not quite CW but since I've stumbled over this paper twice now in completely different contexts (once from Marginal Revolution, another in my mainstream news reel) and don't know where else to post it, I want to talk about it. Especially since people clearly, uncritically have taken it at face value.
The authors, who studied philosophy, mention that philosophy student often think they are more rigorous thinkers, and claim to test the claim. They do it by using two scales by the "Higher Education Research Institute". Both of these are purely self-ratings, i.e. they strictly measure students perception of themselves.
The result is, unsurprisingly, that philosophy students self-rate as rigorous thinkers. This then gets reported by the authors as "empirically tested" higher rigorousness and open-mindedness. For extra laughs, political science is among the highest-scoring.
Tbh there is not much else to say here. It's damning that the authors did this, it's damning that the journal published it, and it's damning that this now gets smugly, uncritically shared in news, social media and blogs. Remember kids, this is how science works!
The actual report (not really a “paper”): https://philpapers.org/archive/PRITIO-26.pdf
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I find this partly fascinating, but also mostly depressing at this point. One can only be fascinated by the exact same thing so many times before just learning to accept that this is the norm. This failure of intellectualism seems almost identical to the phenomenon of autoethnographies and similar essays of ostensible self-reflection being essentially the basis of the modern ideology that's been called many things, including woke, identity politics, social justice, and perhaps most appropriately in this context, critical (race) theory. The most famous and influential of which, perhaps, is White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh, which is just the author making grand sweeping conclusions about the structure of society based on her perceptions of her own experience and almost nothing else.
The part that causes both fascination and depression is that these are academics doing intellectual work in academia, and one of the core pillars of such pursuits is that everyone is biased and susceptible to mental pitfalls, and as such, truth can only be pursued effectively by checking against objective reality, and even then, it must be corroborated by multiple disinterested or adversarial parties (e.g. we need multiple sides that each have incentives to prove each other incorrect to all agree on it before we can conclude that it's likely true). Academia is much more than this, but certainly this is one load-bearing pillar that, if removed, causes the whole thing to collapse.
Thus self-reports are very valuable for determining what people consciously believe, but for drawing any conclusions beyond that, they're close to worthless or outright worthless. This should be obvious as a baseline to any academic, in the same way that "if we score more points than the other team, then we win" should be obvious to any NBA player, or "if I point my gun at someone and pull the trigger with the safety off, then it will fling a small clump of lead really fast at that person" should be obvious to any soldier. An individual who fails at realizing these things would be interesting and bad, but it looks like we have entire leagues and armies of these people, that have power and influence equaling any other similar institution, and that's just depressing.
It appears to me a lot like a sort of cargo cult, where people mime out the motions without understand the underlying mechanisms. Here, these philosophical academics seem to be aware that proving that something is (likely to be) true requires gathering data and publishing a paper and such but unaware of how that happens. I feel like I've noticed this kind of thing in the very different, but related, field of entertainment, with recent notable commercial/popularity failure of lots of recent movies, TV shows, and video games (a few examples: the films The Marvels and Borderlands; TV shows The Acolyte, Rings of Power, Mandalorian S3, Echo, and She-Hulk; video games Concord and Star Wars: Outlaws). Many of them seemed to mime the things that more successful predecessors did, but getting so many fundamental things wrong that the stupidity just made the audience check out. It's as if the writers and producers don't understand that making a good work of visual media isn't just about the spectacle, but also the underlying logic of the things that the spectacle is representing. In fact, the latter is far more important. These are professionals whose entire 9-5 jobs it is to get these things right, in order to extract as much money from the audience as possible by entertaining them, and they're putting out stuff that someone who got a C- in a creative writing class would see as huge red flags (though now that I think about it, I wonder if modern creative writing classes are also plagued by the issue that I pointed out up above, and so even someone who got an A+ couldn't be trusted to notice these issues).
Most of academia works this way outside of the sciences. I suspect a couple of things lead to this.
First, most of these topics are literally useless outside of the academic world. Nobody who isn’t majoring in a particular branch of the humanities gives any thought to the subject. And to an extent, they’ve always more or less been something like what they are now — useless subjects studied by essentially nerds who are just really into the subject. And much like there’s no need for serious rigor when a bunch of Star Trek nerds discuss the Trek canon, there’s no real rigor in discussions about English literature. (This is somewhat better in a history class which still requires that a description match up with primary sources) if Shakespeare has a queer reading, it can be anything you need it to be. Nobody outside the subject is going to interrupt because seriously, who else is reading these papers?
The second is that because these subjects are useless and worthless, nobody who is smart really chooses to do them. If you’re a smart individual looking to study something, you’d go toward things that actually matter. Studying physics can unlock the secrets of the universe. Chemistry can let you invent some new materials to solve real life problems. Accounting can be used in business. So immediately you have a problem because the people doing the work are people who don’t really have the intelligence to recognize bullshit. In fact, they’re constantly making their works difficult to understand with absurdly complex vocabulary to hide that they’ve said nothing interesting. Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used that it obscures the fact that the papers rarely make any sort of claim with implications outside of academia. In other subjects, jargon is used to describe things happening in the field and to make it clear what my results actually mean. When I redefine common English words in philosophy, the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.
And as a final point. Because of the first two problems, it tends to create bubbles. The people in these subjects are not moonlighting in attending physics symposiums on quantum mechanics, or reading books outside of the field. They’re in one world, and thus to them, these silly papers about nothing sound intelligent to them.
This is just the reverse of the phenomenon @RenOS mentioned. STEM people think STEM is the best thing and people studying other fields are wasting their potential (at best) or never had it. It's just as valid, which is to say it isn't valid at all. Some of my smartest school mates were humanities majors, they aren't just less capable people studying something easy.
It's not that STEM is the best. It's that there are sciences with a tight feedback loop with reality, and those without. In the former, which is most of natural sciences, it's hard too go off the deep end, in the latter, which is most humanities, it's extremely easy. There are a few special cases such as math - math has a tight feedback loop with some very basic parts of reality through its assumption - proof - conclusion structure - but you can still go some crazy places with weird, hard-or-impossible-to-prove assumption. This makes clear statements and fair marks in the humanities almost impossible, so the researchers and teachers err on the side of kindness.
In particular, this makes the humanities appeal to a certain kind of person, mostly activists, who don't actually care much about reality but care a lot about forcing their worldview on the rest of society. Also, classes in the humanities are easier on the account of literally everyone I know who has ever taken them, including full humanities majors, some even flat-out told me they're taking humanities specifically bc it's easier. It's also an objective fact of universities that there is a pecking order of difficulty where people who fail one degree always move down, but never up, when trying again even if the NC (numerus clausus, the required marks to get started) of the upper fields is technically lower. As an example, at my medicine-focused university, "applied math in life science" is among the top despite having literally no NC at all, one of the next is "molecular life sciences", one of the next is "nutritional sciences", the next are all the "care sciences" (midwifery etc.). As in this example, humanities are almost always lower than the STEM fields in this order.
There are also many great, smart & careful students & scientists in the humanities, since they still are very valuable and interesting fields to study but tbh at this point I think they're probably in the minority, and definitely not in charge.
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Do you have any examples of published philosophical works that do this? (I'll grant that you might be able to find something - some published philosophy is just bad, after all. But, I can easily point you to works that don't do this as well.)
Some amount of discussion about the definitions of terms is necessary. Think about how often we debate the appropriate definition of terms like "left" and "right" on TheMotte. We just had multiple sub-threads last week about what "cultural Marxism" means. Do you think the posters here are just being irrational or intentionally obscurantist when they engage in discussions like that? I don't think they are. I think it makes sense that we would debate what those terms mean, because they're contentious terms that get used in different ways by different people, so we need to get clear on what they actually mean in order to have a productive conversation.
Again, what sorts of examples are you thinking of? I really don't think this happens often at all in philosophy. There's jargon, certainly, but much of this jargon ("epistemic", "qualia", "a priori") is unique to philosophy and wouldn't be confused for ordinary English terms. If anything, philosophers like to invent new words and phrases to use in place of ordinary words if the ordinary words are too ambiguous (see for example the use of terms like "error theory" and "expressivism" to describe more precise sub-variants of what non-philosophers would call "moral relativism").
How much academic analytic philosophy have you read? They really do go out of their way to make the writing as straightforward (and, frankly, dry) as possible.
Writers in the "continental" tradition are known for writing with more of a poetic flourish, but, so what? They're having fun and it makes their works more fun to read, so, good for them.
Yeah, that post puzzled me too. I'm not saying the tendency he describes doesn't exist but philosophy, or at least the analytic tradition that is dominant in English-language departments, is one of the fields least guilty of it outside the hard sciences.
So it's weird the way he gives "philosophy" as his main exemplar. Like, say there was a flaw in a lot of recent American vehicles' onboard computers, and it was found to affect 17 Ford models, 14 GM ones, and 2 Chrysler ones (and an overall share of their respective sales roughly proportionate to those numbers). It's as though someone went on a big rant about that, and got a lot right, except they explicitly claimed it was mainly a Chrysler problem.
Absent the concrete examples you very reasonably asked for, I suppose the maximally charitable interpretation is that he thinks the continental tradition is all that exists.
(EDIT: First sentence of the second paragraph wasn't very accurate previously, toned it down.)
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From a tweet I saw earlier this year:
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I'm shocked that people are rating Sociology higher than Art History.
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Funny, but look at those confidence intervals! And the axes—it’s the equivalent of every restaurant averaging 4 to 4.5 stars. At first I thought the ratings were a Likert scale, but philosophy did score over 5, so it’s probably not.
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There's slightly more to the paper than what you included in your summary. They also polled students on things like "how often do you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?". Those seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported, if we think that self-reports can ever have value at all. But you're correct that they also did flatly ask students to rate themselves on "openness to having my own views challenged" and "critical thinking skills". And then they uncritically reported the survey results as "empirical data". Which is wild.
Failings of individual philosophers notwithstanding, I have always believed that education in (analytic) philosophy is the best way to develop critical thinking, and I still maintain that quite firmly. I attribute this broadly to two distinctive features of philosophy:
Norms of argumentation - there's a great Substack post that details the norms that surround debates of contentious positions in professional philosophy:
These are basically just the norms that we already try to adhere to on TheMotte - basic principles regarding how to treat your interlocutor's position with fairness. And these norms are often sorely lacking in public discourse, so being in an environment where these norms are explicitly encouraged is beneficial, because it teaches people how to actually try understanding positions that are different from their own instead of just instinctively tearing them down.
Of course, debate itself is not unique to philosophy. Debate is found in virtually every academic field. But what's unique about philosophy is that the questions are almost by definition never settled solely by recourse to empirical facts (like say, the experimental data in physics, the primary sources in history or literary studies, etc). Logical argumentation and the careful examination of opposing positions are the only tools you have in philosophy, so you have to get good at them.
Exposure to a wide variety of views - In the course of studying philosophy, you'll encounter a number of extremely bizarre views like dialetheism, object eliminativism, and mathematical fictionalism. You may even be persuaded to begin holding some bizarre views yourself, after evaluating the arguments - or at least, you'll begin to see how reasonable people could come to hold those views. This has the effect of making you more tolerant of other people's views in general. The thinking goes, "if I was wrong about something as fundamental as 1+1=2, then what else could I be wrong about? If someone comes along with something wild that I've never thought of before, maybe I should give him a fair hearing, instead of just dismissing him out of hand."
Obviously individual philosophers are not perfect - they're still fallible individuals, and philosophy can't make you invulnerable to all mistakes in reasoning. A lot of professional philosophers have uncritically jumped on the woke bandwagon just like their colleagues in every other department, and they're unfortunately failing to uphold the norms of inquisitiveness and impartiality that should be central to philosophy. But I nonetheless think that philosophy still gives you the best chance of developing those epistemic virtues, even if it's not guaranteed.
I think self-reports could have value for determining answers to questions like "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?" and "how often do you believe you explore topics on your own, even if they're not required for a class?" but those poll questions you quoted don't seem like reasonable things that could be self-reported at all. I don't think there's any good reason to believe that one's belief about how often one does these things has much correlation with how often one actually does these things, outside of the extremes, like literally never doing it or doing it constantly. I'd guess that they'd be more correlated with how high status the reporter believes these activities to be and how highly of themselves the reporters think. But that's just my pet conjecture, and in any case, I don't see a way to measure these potential correlations just from the self-reporting patterns without actually measuring the underlying activity.
It's the difference between what you're actually measuring vs. what you're trying to measure. Self-reports, with questions such as "how often do you ask questions in class?" only measure "how often do you believe you ask questions in class?". With any luck, belief in X actually correlates with X - but that's something that should be established at some point. My prior is that it correlates somewhat with X, but also correlates well with how highly one thinks of themselves, and for small differences between populations it becomes a meaningless measurement.
I really wish these papers would report it as "Philosophy students believe they are more inclined to consider alternative views" rather than just straight-up reporting their beliefs as truth.
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Survey questions like this are implicitly about belief, whether you spell it out or not. Of course the answers aren't always truthful, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think you can make the answers more reliable simply by inserting “do you believe”, and conversely, they aren't less reliable when that was only implied.
Try it yourself. Answer the following questions:
Or:
Or:
Or:
Seriously, answer these. Was there any question pair where the second answer differed from the first? And if not for you, why would you think that inserting “do you believe” changes anyone else's answer?
Well yeah, the fact that basically everyone would answer those questions with the same answer, despite the fact that those questions ask 2 fundamentally different things - the former being a question about objective reality and the latter being about subjective perception - was kind of the entire point I was making.
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Someone even pointed out it's a self-report, and the author(?) goes "That's right!" and goes on without the faintest clue of the implications. I kind of wish you wouldn't show me this, it's been a while since my view of humanity has taken such a hit.
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This sort of naked self serving intellectual autofellatio is reminiscent of all the 'liberals are smarter than conservatives' drivel that gets repeatedly updooted on reddit and shared breathlessly by irritatingly smug college kids on facebook from 2004 to likely forever.
It is therefore unsurprising that the meta of Intelligence has been both denigrated and conspiratized by the dissident right who may have been unwillingly grouped into the stupid meanie conservative doodoohead category by an unaware shifting of the overton window (hi guys! thats us here!). Calling oneself Intelligent is for buzzfeed quiz taking morons or mentally damaged pseudointellectuals whining on /r/gifted that they're actually super smart and therefore should be rewarded without cause, not us actually smart people who use our brains for Good!
As a result, one incoherent strain within right wing thinking now is a desire to use Facts and Logic without being Intelligent. Being a polysyllabic sophisticate swirling wine and commenting on the fragrant notes of burnt rubber and bleach to signify rotten grape discernment is the revue of ivory tower intellectuals, which we Real People are not. We are meat eating beer drinking car workshopmen doing Real People stuff, while actually in our deepest of souls we pontificate and circlejerk amongst our intellectual kin as much as possible.
A consequence of this, possibly relatable to some on this board, is an aggressive hiding of ones power level within 'polite' company and a simultaneous revulsion at the baseness (as in lowness, in the originally uncouth way as opposed to chadian basedness) of DR intellectualism. Though one may be comfortable enough to speak openly in forums or even within friend groups, it is unbecoming to actually read or watch DR podcasters. I've alttabbed to degenerate tentacle hentai rather than let my wife notice I'm watching Tucker Carlson.
As opposed to the non-degenerate tentacle hentai preferred by polysyllabic wine-swirling sophisticates such as myself.
Urotsukidoji vs Dream Of A Fishermans Wife
Touché.
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I often think that “hiding one’s power level” often drives the narrative forward. If you have every conservative hiding their power level, and every liberal flaunting theirs, it’s going to keep the myth alive.
To be honest, at best I think most “smart liberals” are actually over educated mid wits who know how to game the education systems to get good grades and pats on the head from teachers. The problem, obviously is that one can grade grub and be a moron. In fact, it probably helps. To win that came, you have to be smart enough to figure out the answers the teachers want you to give, and have the skills to research and produce a paper giving the correct answer. On the other hand, you have to be dumb enough to accept these narrative at face value and to have few original thoughts in your head. To me, this is actually a great tell of lesser intelligence. Just ask them what they disagree with the authorities on. Ask them to come up with an answer where there’s no establishment answer. They absolutely have no idea how to do it. They cannot think through a problem and come up with a real answer to the question.
"Hiding one's power level" is a little different -- it's not about smarts, but about believing politically incorrect facts such as the disproportionate number of US murderers who are black.
I think possibly one of the most revealing papers about this sort of thing was the MIT paper where they lambasted COVID skeptics (and Trump supporters!) for being willing to do research.
Irresistible to quote from that:
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Do you have any evidence that capacity for independent thinking is lower in your outgroup than your ingroup? If not, you are just guilty of a flipped version of the same thing that the parent accused them off, with "free critical thinkers vs. NPCs" taking the place of the "smart pro-science liberals vs. chud knuckledraggers" one.
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Many people like to use fancy words and sayings and jargon to give the appearance that their position is more profound than it really is. Case and point: sovereign citizens.
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If she can't love you at your Tucker Carlson, she doesn't deserve you at your Tentacle Hentai.
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You put it into words.
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We really should introduce AAQCs for the funniest posts.
I don’t think there’s actually any restriction on it.
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