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This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.
It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.
What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.
I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.
For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.
But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.
I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.
This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.
So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.
(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)
I think you explained better here and in other posts, what you meant, but I think using resentful and ignorant was probably a poor choice, because it's not exactly what you seem to be saying.
I think we are largely on the same page aside from that. Given the ideological skew of this place, Making sure you are signaling that you do indeed know what you are talking about is going to be useful, for example when talking about atheism, I now make a point to say that I was in fact raised in a Christian household and was Christian until I became an atheist, which is helpful in that it means we can skip the "Do you really know what Christianity is" and similar tangents. So probably making sure to highlight your direct experience with the Red Tribe (as I did also) up front will be helpful here.
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The frustration I think everyone's feeling with this discussion is that while what you're saying is true in a certain way and for certain sample of people, it applies to almost no one here. A bad faith poster in this forum may cherrypick sources and cite only the studies already favorable the their viewpoint, but they're still citing and searching for and reading [abstracts of] studies - which puts them miles ahead of a median person, who gets their entire memeplex wholesale from a medium of their choice.
Now I'll give you, this leaves "regular" red tribers in a worse position - Fox et al just has a worse quality of journalism than NYT or WaPo, or whatever you thing the "default" blue tv station is. Or so I've heard, I'm not an American and I've seen <15m of Fox News material in my life (I try to never watch it, just so I can angle-shoot someone who would accuse me of getting my viewpoints from there).
But yeah, if I may be a bit self-indulgent, you arrive at a space where people are in the top ~5-2% of striving to be up to date on the news and research, and proclaim that a core tenet of their affiliates is "proud, resentful ignorance". People are taking it personally, even if they probably shouldn't.
A perfect microcosm of different faction's approach to knowledge would be 2020. In the beginning, you get grays and "high reds" freaking out about approaching epidemic, while the mainstream and progs are mocking them for being weird techbros, telling people to celebrate freely in the streets, and "justtheflu"ing it. Then the epidemic arrives, and suddenly everyone's got an opinion. The reds get locked in the "low" mode, so they inherit the "just the flu, bro" position and insist on folk medicine, evidence be damned. This is the source of the supposed March-April switch of the positions - there was hardly a switch, it's mainly different demographics. The blues find themselves in a more truth-aligned position, until they too err catastrophically for ideological reasons (telling people to go out and protest in June).
tl;dr As i/o on twitter put it, the worst of the right are retarded, the worst of the left are mentally ill.
Because most people here are not actually Red Tribe conservatives. We're mostly Blue Tribers and Blue Tribe dissidents (or Grey Tribe). Hlynka's conservatism was closer to the Red Tribe people I know in person than to most of the conservatives we have here I think, (particularly in being hostile to HBD), but he was pretty unusual compared to the median Motte poster.
Conservatives I know in person are not hostile per se to HBD, but definitely would see 'blacks less intelligent' as a significantly overrated factor compared to bad culture, and may not want to focus on it to begin with. For lots of them it comes off as pointlessly offensive even if true, like calling someone 'fatso' instead of 'heavyset'.
Besides, blacks can marry their babymamas, work hard, etc, but they can't very well become smarter.
And therein lies their downfall. Because once you eliminate every other factor and blacks are still less likely, you're caught between the claims of double-secret discrimination and HBD. Make HBD anathema, and yep, it's The Man up to his old tricks again.
You haven't eliminated every other factor. Blacks do have a bad culture. Go listen to pop country vs hip hop.
Now if you convinced blacks overnight to adopt a much better culture wholesale the gap wouldn't disappear but I don't think most red tribers are firmly committed to the equality of races in natural giftedness. It just seems pointless, from a red tribe perspective, to focus on the unfixable parts of problems when there's just so so much that can be fixed.
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So you're suggesting that a culture exemplified by a man who talked about a Hobbes-shaped hole in discourse is somehow so anti-intellectual that Skibboleth is right?
Hmm, No, as I don't think he was a perfect exemplar, just the closest we have here in a specifically online unusual space. Just because most Blues don't want to farm, doesn't mean none of them do, they are still Blues even if unusual.
None of my neighbors have ever mentioned Hobbes for example. But their fundamental ideas seem to match his reasonably well even if he backs his up with more of a philosophical bent.
You don't have to know anything about Hobbes to have ideas that match. Whether it's because you worked it out yourself or the culture you were brought up in taught you something similar without ever talking about Enlightenment philosophy specifically. I don't know that many Blues outside of academia would know much about Mill either.
My grandfather didn't know Hobbes from Paine from Locke but his thoughts on human nature and people being selfish and violent if not restrained mesh pretty well.
Philosophers do not have exclusivity on making observations about people. They just write about it more. As opposed to my grandfather who kept a shotgun under his bed and wrote very little that wasn't accounting for his farm.
He'd probably have thought Hobbes should have got a real job, and that he was making basic observations sound fancier than they were. But he would roughly have agreed about the fundamental nature of men.
Having said that, he wasn't against learning. He asked my father who was a maths teacher to help him with his books and towards the end of his life, investments because he said an educated man doesn't have to break his back. He left money to help pay for my kids to go to university. He valued useful knowledge.
I don't know if I would call it anti-intellectual as much as pro-practical. And of course generalizing elides that people are varied even between cultures or tribes.
Does that make more sense?
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That is true, but that is because academia has abandoned the scientific method. And we know this is the case because the more a discipline retains the scientific method, the more conservative it is. And the further away from the scientific method it got, the more conservatives stayed away.
Conservatives like to be certain before they make declarations about reality because they don't want to break society, whereas progressives prefer moving fast and fixing anything they break. Both perspectives have merit imo, but academia disagrees, so of course conservatives don't want to be a part of it. Say it was possible, would you want to build a lifelong career around being a primary antagonist on the motte? Would you expect your friends and family to?
I agree with monzer, nobody is necessarily to blame for it, it's perverse incentives and cognitive biases on both sides. Having control over academia however, does mean progressives are more responsible for the current dismal state of things imo, because even before you start conspiracy theorising, more access to academia means they have fewer excuses for not recognising the biases and incentives.
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Red tribers mostly respect discoveries in eg hard mathematics, chemistry, archeology, etc. But generally not philosophical theorizing, or gender studies, or what have you. So yes it's writing off entire fields but it's because they think the answers are so obvious/already known(there are two genders, you can figure out which one you are by dropping your pants in front of a mirror) that the field in question consists of making yourself stupid to avoid them.
History. Red tribe loves studying history.
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And entering some of these fields feels like the equivalent of 'Feel like you disagree with the tenets of Islam? Become a Koranic scholar and argue with Muftis all day' in which the consensus and shared assumptions that fields like Gender Research are built on essentially originate from a series of value judgements than underpin all contemplation.
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