This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To be honest I’ve never seen examples of unprofessionalism or activism in any of my sojourns in the academic world, particularly not among STEM.
I’m sure you can find examples of scientists behaving badly, and maybe a bad apple does spoil the lot, but I’ve truly only ever seen cases where instances of fudging data gets you excommunicated from your career, and several examples of wishy washy politicized (or just romanticized) science leading to pushback and loss of reputation.
It could be that I’m blind to it. But that’s my experience.
There’s several things going on here IMO. One, it’s hard to see all of an institution when you’re inside it, you only interact with and see your local closest nodes.
But also, it’s really hard for people outside to have an accurate grasp of it as well. A lot of the information that flows to the public sphere itself flows through biased mediums. You could easily paint a whole system as Chinese robbers based on an example or two.
So, I acknowledge there could be a lot of highly politicized scientists in some epidemic of science that I’m not really perceiving. But I’m also suspicious of these takes that STEM science is so deeply political at present.
There’s a big mismatch between my experience and what you’re implying, there’s probably a reality inbetween our two positions but I’m almost certain that the extreme view that many here take towards science is not it.
I would counter that I went to grad school at a fairly high-ranked US institution in a hard science and I saw plenty of unprofessionalism and activism. We had
the well-known DEI criteria on hiring and admissions
several subfields (attached to a general cluster of "Science and Technology Studies") that were fed from the department's common funding pool and openly advocated for the full range of clichés from exploring connections between Marxist theory and [area that you would think has nothing to do it] to criticising $discipline because its usage of hard mathematical formalisms is exclusionary to women and minorities (this was an actual talk that a PhD student with them was invited to give at a $discipline retreat!)
undergrads who agitated against in-class exams and generally any form of assessment that is somewhat resilient against cheating with SJ lingo about stress and disparate impact, and deferred to them
profs joining organisations such as the UCS, which directly aim to leverage their academic status for partisan ends
pronoun pressure in internal email threads, Zoom meetings etc.
...and of course, there is the general wagon circling between everyone under the umbrella of "academia". I am not in medicine, but suggesting that it is sketchy that several of the core actors on the US side who were cited as authorities on the COVID lab leak question had clear conflicts of interest was treated as somewhat traitorous by many in my social environment, and conversely it was seen as good and pro-social to participate in outreach activities such as participating in a meeting at some local town hall to assure people "as a scientist" that the expert position (that we had no special expertise on) must be believed.
The best thing I can say in its defense is that the core mechanism of inward-facing capital building, that is, publication at conferences and in journals, has not been ideologically subverted yet (in our particular area - I gather that the situation is quite different in e.g. genetics). The closest they got was attaching workshops of the form "social issues in X" with their own acceptance criteria to prestigious conferences, but participation in those generally did not translate to any respect in the field proper (though it may be useful/necessary to clear some diversity statement criteria at later career stages, which I dodged as I returned to Europe).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link