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I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
This isn't really the sentiment. The problem for researchers is most of them are going to be in the academy. The academy is one of, if not the main, core of rot in the system. This means it was also going to be the place where it would be impossible to miss muscle when trimming fat.
Also, if we are being honest, its probably an extreme chore trying to separate actual science happening at universities from Faucian "science"
Say what you like about Fauci, the gain of function experiments he funded really produced results!
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I agree with your take wholeheartedly. Forward leaning governement investments in technology, education and science produced a lot of the prosperity that we currently enjoy in the USA. Seeing these things dismantled over a quasi-religious dispute is disheartening to say the least.
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Well it isn’t just about woke for me. It is about the very real and very looming debt spiral. Arresting that means cutting bullshit and sometimes even valuable things. A lot that goes through the academy is bullshit and zero value add—even in STEM.
NSF, NIH, etc. are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. The gains you’d get here are minuscule.
And to be doing it while proposing legislature that continues to skyrocket the debt.
It does not seem to be about cost cutting.
You don’t need to balance the budget. You need to slow down the deficit and increase growth.
A lot of the tax numbers are fake since they are simply keeping existing tax rates from expiring.
And do you expect the Trump admin to do that?
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Progressives "long marched through institutions". They got it. Mission Accomplished.
Now having sowed, they get to reap. This important societal institution is being bogged down in partisan culture waring, but now also from the other direction. Who could have forseen this.
I've been to grad school. In some meager way I contributed to this important endeavor and lived in it for a bit. It is valuable and we need it. At least some of it. Too bad certain people made it partisan and now are shocked that there is a price for ideological capture.
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage in your crusade to punish these people as much as possible and at worst enemies just because being in the same industry makes you think that they're the same people. This is exactly what I was talking about.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
I'm on no crusade. I don't want scientific research defended. I don't know who you are arguing against with the "scientists vote Democrat" dialog, but it is not me.
I distrust much of published research due to naked bias and replication crisis. I believe American research universities and their intellectual product are much degraded and could be vastly better. This is valuable and important so it is in need of drastic intervention. I would much prefer the scalpel to the bone saw.
I would reverse the blame you are placing here. Like me you don't want scientific research defunded? Then make extra sure it isn't perverted into a staging ground for fringe progressive ideology. If so it is both untrustworthy and on the chopping block when anti-progressives have suitable will and political power.
The entire point is that this impression you have is wrong. Why do you believe this? What experience do you have with actual math/science departments? What fringe progressive ideology have you seen them pushing?
Again, you don't have to take it from me---Alex Tabarrok should be much more credible.
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Creationists are proof academia is biased against the right. The academy tolerates infinite papers on anti-scientific bullshit like grievance studies, but somehow one branch of theology is off limits, and it just so happens to be right coded?
The fact of the matter is, the right has already tried to get academics to stop being so partisan your way, and it didn't work. Some might even say it could never work because progressives won't let it and sabotaged every initiative to ensure it wouldn't. So now we have decided to cut the cancer out entirely, and yes a lot of good cells will die along the way and that is tragic. But it's also the bed they made. They could always learn to code.
Thank you for proving my original point. At this point, maybe it was correct for scientists to have been so left-leaning because they saw through that the right had this much hate for them.
So 'the bed you made' was the response to nurses and members of the military who got the axe because they didn't get the covid vaccine. Learn to code was the response to coal miners who didn't want their mines shuttered and sent off shore.
Now is it fair to tar all academics with that brush? No of course not. But if that's how the beautiful, intelligent, charismatic, industrious elites behave, how else can you expect us dirty, stupid, fat, ugly and lazy proles to act?
When progressives assumed control of the zeitgeist I think they assumed they'd always stay in touch with the working class so they didn't need to work at it. As a result their respect for the working class atrophied, and through a blend of corruption and the seductive nature of power (and its accompanying feeling of righteousness) they have become woefully out of touch and almost fully captured by the unscrupulous. But in doing so they ceded the working class to Trump, who - whatever you might say about him - is at least able to feign respect for them.
People in the working class get so few wins that they naturally accept 'not letting the enemy win' as worth celebrating. The elites were supposed to stop this by behaving better, so the working class would have a better example to live up to. The elites stopped behaving better, as those examples demonstrate, so of course the working class does too. Extrapolating that into 'they hate science!' is how we got here in the first place.
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Scientists and scientific progress shouldn't have played politics so hard. At this point it is nigh-impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff given the insane ideological bent of the universities, and the fact that they are leveraging their large amount of cultural and fiscal capital against one side of the political aisle.
This is a straw man of the right that currently exists. Fundamentalist Christianity has been gutted in the U.S. and definitely does not hold much power in the current right wing administration. Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
No, but the current speaker of the house is. When creationists get in that high of a position, you can't call them strawmen.
Interesting! I genuinely didn’t know that. Huh.
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I’ve come to realize this about this movement, yes.
Essentially, the US can’t be my home anymore if things go on like this for much longer.
The attitude that causes someone to shout at Zelenskyy, “why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”.. that’s what’s in charge and their ire extends to me.
The best historical analogy I know of is the cultural revolution in China where the intellectual class was persecuted.
They’re not that violent, of course, but I also don’t want to give them the chance to be.
I understand that Trump and Vance may not be high on niceties. They are right that Europe is too stifling, too much limiting freedom of speech. I give them that.
And yet when Zelensky allowed himself to express freely, suddenly it was all outrage and he was quickly thrown out of the White House. We don't see that in Europe where people may be shocked about Trump and Vance and yet remain civilized. And for Zelensky it might even be just a problem of English as a second language which he hasn't mastered well.
So, I don't buy these excuses that it is just the US culture to be more open and direct that European have problem with the US leaders right now. I think that yesterday showed that they were liek petulant children and trying to enforce their pettiness on others. I don't know if it qualifies as cultural revolution but it is revengeful and classless act nevertheless.
Read what I posted below + what Rubio said. Basically they had already talked about what the deal was and this was perfunctory. Then Zelensky tried to litigate his position (that they basically had agreed to shelve) in front of the media which rightly pissed off the WH.
This isn’t a free speech issue. Zelensky can say whatever he wants. But it isn’t correct to agree to forum X for Y purposes and explicitly not Z and then do Z.
Also, I think that Vance's critique about Europe lacking free speech is overrated. It is true that Europe has some issues. But the US has even bigger issues. During covid pandemic it was twitter and other social networks censured correct scientific information, apparently due to the pressure from the White House. Also, the US had very strict vaccine mandates that were completely unjustified. Even the UK managed to largely avoid them (with some exceptions).
The US probably has even stringer free speech restrictions that Europe but they frame them differently. I am not free speech absolutist and understand that sometimes free speech can be limited and the discussion is more about grey area what is and is not unacceptable. But the US is a leader in social networks and have much greater impact on limiting free speech than Europe, respectively it has more power to restrict and most probably it uses it more than Europe.
The US has to have a diffuse and informal public-private alliance on censorship because the First Amendment blocks the most direct route for the government. As we can see now, those companies can adjust if circumstances change while laws are writ in ink.
It doesn't really say much about European virtue that they don't have as strong a version of this system given that a) they can just censor speech directly and b) they don't have the same density of indigenous social media sites.
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I don’t know about bigger. The point is those censorship attempts were considered wrong and there is a strong political backlash on one side against them. Do we see that in Europe?
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I don't understand you. It IS a free speech issue. Yes, if Trump considered it wrong, he could have refused to sign a deal. I am not saying that free speech should free one from consequences. That I can understand. But be so much against Zelensky speaking his mind that you have to thrown him out immediately? It seems to be overreaction and signal that free speech is for me and not for you!
This is silly—no one is stopping Zelensky from saying anything. But using the WH as his forum to say X when he was invited to say not X but sign a document isn’t a free speech issue.
We have gone through this many times. No one stopped Berenson to tell that covid vaccines don't stop infection. It is just that twitter was not the right forum for this. Yet, such limitation (orchestrated by the WH) is 100% of free speech issue.
The same happens here, except that happens in the WH. And even without all these legalistic details, this is simply a case when the WH doesn't want to hear something. Nothing else.
If you can’t tell the difference between Berenson on Twitter and negotiations between two countries at the WH, then I don’t know what to say.
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People seem to misunderstand the suit comment. It's not like Zelenskyy cannot afford a suit. It's not a class commentary.
World leaders dress to send a message. Zelenskyy knows this, it's why he has been wearing his black outfit since the start of the invasion. The black outfit shows that he is a wartime president, fighting an existential threat to the last man.
Trump doesn't want the Ukraine to fight to the last man. He wants a peace. Suits are the clothing of negotiations and treaties.
The clothing is one of many things that caused yesterday to break down.
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I'm going to be equally honest here and say please, do not move to the US. I've known you for years, and in all that time on reddit you were fine with the cultural revolution, sometimes actively prosecuting it yourself.
You have me mixed up with someone.
I’m a very infrequent commenter and I’m from the US.
I know you were up around Maine or NH at one point, right? I remember the leopardsatemyface post about the cod fisherman. But I thought you were from Canada originally or something, my bad.
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Probably because it was hinted in their last meeting that Zelensky should wear a suit next time he is meeting Trump. Being underdressed means you are the most powerful person in the room or you have no business being there. Zelensky decided he was the former.
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You've looked at the past 10 years and stood by, and this is the moment that makes you say "this is just like the cultural revolution"?
A working class revolt against the educated class, yes
I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.
I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness, but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests
Suppose senior members of the Academy violated federal law by using taxpayer money to develop a novel pathogen, leaked that pathogen out into the world, caused a pandemic killing somewhere around seven million people and uncounted trillions in economic damage, conspired to cover this fact up, and then coordinated the largest, most widespread and most egregious violation of human rights in at least the last fifty years, based on fraudulent scientific claims that their colleagues refused to oppose them on. In this crazy hypothetical scenario, what would the impact of these events be on your cost/benefit analysis of what's currently happening?
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Ah, struggle sessions are tolerable, as long they're led by the aristocracy, I guess.
Well then, if you did nothing all these years because you never felt censored, why exactly should anyone that did, show you any sympathy now?
Finding a synonym for "diversity" and doing a search and replace seems like a pretty low cost to me, compared to witch hunts that went off during the last decade. Dodging those was a lot harder than CTRL+H.
Despite what you think, the point is there weren't struggle sessions in math/hard-science departments. As the OP said, all you ever had to do was write in your grants about how things you liked anyways, like organizing events where older and younger graduate students could meet each other and become friends, also helped "underrepresented groups" sometimes. You could extremely easily just not be interested in politics and ignore everything outside of writing this paragraph.
Also, if you were upset about what was happening in humanities departments, you didn't really have any option except getting in bed with the creationists and Obama-birther conspiracy theorists.
The chaos and funding issues the administration is creating is not at all the same thing. Now you have to desperately scrub every appearance of links to crazies like Tema Okun and Robin DiAngelo just because they're associated with the same industry as you. It's not even clear which buzzword in which random context sets the censors off.
We already had the discussion on reddit about how your institution was using diversity statements to filter out 80% of applicants solely by the DEI office, before the actual hiring committee even got to see their resumes.
You can pretend to have been secretly against this now, but you can't pretend to be ignorant of it because we told you.
Could you be more specific here/give some kind of link? I don't recall this conversation (this forum being reddit was a while ago).
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You happen to have a link to that conversation?
I'll pm it to you.
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The diversity statements applied just as much to math as to gender studies.
The grants went to people who said the right things, which at the time were diversity.
You're wrong.
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As I have been told many times, if you welcome crazies into your ranks people will think you are crazy. I would have thought you would be upset that industry related crazies were given positions of power and influence in the first place, not that you now have to try to get rid of them.
As I was commenting below, where in the world did you get the impression that DiAngelo and Okun were welcomed and not forced on us by general university politics?
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Is one of the fathers of DNA getting stripped of his awards not a struggle session, or is biology not a hard science? There was absolutely no affirmative action in maths departments, cross your heart and hope to die?
So all these people who totally were not in favor of DEI struggle session somehow couldn't be bothered to actually oppose it in any way, to the point where the only opposition were Obama-birther conspiracy theorists?
Was Sokal an Obama-birther conspiracy theorist, by the way?
I still want to know why I should be bothered by this, given that these people were unbothered by what was going on in the last 10 years.
I specifically mentioned math and hard sciences (excluding biology) because that's what I could speak about authoritatively. Maybe the Watson stuff really was a struggle session, or maybe there was some more stuff going on behind the scenes. In math, I've known of old professors who've said similar things without much consequence. Generally, the line is that political views are fine, but unambiguously treating colleagues and particularly younger students/postdocs badly because of these political views is not---when I say some stuff going on behind the scenes, maybe Watson was crossing the line. Yes, most will say that there should be censure for crossing the line and fine, if just wanting colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy is what you call hopelessly woke, then you win the argument. Many on this forum explicitly do not want colorblind and gender-blind meritocracy, so.....
The affirmative action point is similar. I've explained before what affirmative action I've seen in math departments: e.g. people would realize that graduate students in some group do disproportionately well post-graduation and conclude that the admissions process must be missing talent in that group. They then implement a brute-force hack to give people from that group an extra leg up in the admissions process and calibrate the magnitude until outcomes are around the same. You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy.
and how the hell do you know that people weren't unbothered? It was so easy to get people to denounce Okun and DiAngelo by pointing out the right perspectives. I guess people didn't reorient their entire career towards nasty political fights in other departments instead of doing the science that they were much more interested in so screw them, right? You can't expect everyone to be willing to expose themselves to all the nastiness Sokal got. Unless you're doing that serious work to build your own groups, yes, your only choice is to join a coalition that's already there, with the creationists and birthers and all.
Well then, we're at a mutual disadvantage, because the fields I'm familiar with are one's you're not (or does IT count? I guess it doesn't matter because I'm not an academic and only know the corporate world), and vice-versa. At the end of the day my experiences left me with no reason to believe that any such reasonable spaces exist anywhere in the Western world. Maybe math departments managed to play the Kolmogorov Complicity game just right, but how am I supposed to verify that?
While I'm more traditionalist and believe we'd all be better off if we stopped pretending men and women are the same, gender- and color-blind mertiocracy are acceptable terms of a cease fire for me. I just don't know how you can claim they haven't been ruthlessly violated by progressives.
What I will argue is that by discussing entry criteria, and education outcomes, we've moved from the field of math and hard science, and firmly into social sciences, a field that you've conceded is ideologically compromised. I will also argue that I have no reason to trust either in the information provided - every single argument about systemic racism / sexism, like the "wage gap" or disproportionate arrest stemming from bias, turned out to be flawed and probably made disingenuously to begin with, so I have no inclination to give this argument any benefit of the doubt - or the intentions stated. And another argument that I'd like to make as well, is that even if you want to call this (aspirational) meritocracy, you cannot call it gender- or color-blind, if you're purposefully taking account of someone's race or gender!
Finally, I will ask if you are really sure you want to be making arguments like "You can argue that this clumsy shortcut isn't a good idea, but it's still for the sole purpose of achieving meritocracy" in the context of this conversation? Because there's something I'd like to apply it to, if you find it compelling.
Because I've been having conversations with people about this topic for years, and have seen scant few progressive-minded academia-inclined posters who expressed any sort of discomfort with them. Most you'd get from people pretending that the woke are powerless, marginal, and unrepresentative of the left, and I don't count that as being bothered by them.
No, but at some point it behooves you to say something. At the very least don't contribute to attacks on people who are saying something.
Do you think you may be contributing to the nastiness by calling anyone who wants to do something against the woke "creationists and birthers"?
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