Professor Votes With His Feet

[Parasaurolophus]

As far as people being consulted about topics beyond their areas of expertise, we live in a culture where celebrities are quoted on their views about virtually any topic, and people who agree with their views will hold up the celebrity status of the person as giving more weight to the view than they would to an average person on the street, or a celebrity with an opposing viewpoint.

Indeed. And when an expert systematically distorts or misrepresents positions he doesn't like--including those outside their field of expertise--then critical thinkers should pause, take a step back, and re-assess their deference to that person's expertise.

If you don't, then either you have no epistemic standards, or your standards suck.

As I said, Peterson's views on climate change aren't that important to me because it's not his field. So the context of the "word salad" doesn't matter a lot for that reason. If there are examples of word salad where he's talking about something like mental health, then I'd pay more attention.

Don't worry! He has tons to say about mental health and the origins of mental illness. The root of mental illness is a subset of death called 'complexity'. We perceive complexity as suffering, so the solution is control. The more complexity we experience, the more symptoms we develop. At the cultural level, this induces cultural degeneration. As he puts it so eloquently in Maps of Meaning:

This "mental illness" (failure of culture, failure of heroism) is return to domination by the unknown—in mythological terms, expressed as involuntary incest (destructive union) with the Terrible Mother. (286)

There's a bazillion-part YouTube lecture series on the subject, too.

It even informs his clinical practice. As dismalist likes to say, ;)

[mahagonny]

Highly educated academics makes absurd pronouncements about my field all the time. Or some of them dabble in my field and think that because they have PhD in another field, they are naturally super-learners. I don't appreciate it, but doesn't cause me to doubt what they're saying in their own field. No one has ever called them out on these things, possibly.
The difference between them and Peterson is Peterson's on a cable talk show, so it gets disseminated, while these other guys are standing around in a function room near the bar.

[Parasaurolophus]

Highly educated academics makes absurd pronouncements about my field all the time. Or some of them dabble in my field and think that because they have PhD in another field, they are naturally super-learners. I don't appreciate it, but doesn't cause me to doubt what they're saying in their own field. No one has ever called them out on these things, possibly.
The difference between them and Peterson is Peterson's on a cable talk show, so it gets disseminated, while these other guys are standing around in a function room near the bar.

The problem is not the 'absurdity' as such, it's the inability or unwillingness to accurately characterize positions one disagrees with. That's a methodological flaw, and when we see it on display we ought to worry that it has contaminated other aspects of someone's research. Similarly, if you catch someone plagiarizing in your course, that's a good reason to have a closer look at their other coursework, too.


Of course, this is ultimately beside the point, because this whole thread is about an academic talking out of their ass about things beyond their expertise. We can excuse that kind of thing all we like, but we won't be doing so to preserve some insight he had in his own domain. As far as I can see, there's no good reason to excuse his PoMo bullshit beyond (inexplicably) thinking it's somehow true.

Like I said, fuck him, find a better Messiah. McWhorter is at least a competent linguist and not a total tilter at straw men.

[Puget]

Don't worry! He has tons to say about mental health and the origins of mental illness. The root of mental illness is a subset of death called 'complexity'. We perceive complexity as suffering, so the solution is control. The more complexity we experience, the more symptoms we develop. At the cultural level, this induces cultural degeneration. As he puts it so eloquently in Maps of Meaning:

This "mental illness" (failure of culture, failure of heroism) is return to domination by the unknown—in mythological terms, expressed as involuntary incest (destructive union) with the Terrible Mother. (286)

There's a bazillion-part YouTube lecture series on the subject, too.

It even informs his clinical practice. As dismalist likes to say, ;)

As a psychologist I in no way recognize this as belonging in my field. By that, I don't mean that don't like his viewpoint (if I could even figure out what that is here. I mean, I probably don't like his viewpoint, but that's beside the point), but that it bares so little resemblance to modern scientific psychology, both in thinking (though I honestly am not really sure what he is trying to say) and in writing style that if I didn't know he was supposedly a psychologist I would assume that he was in one of the humanities fields that still likes to talk about psychoanalytic stuff for some reason and seem to value being as hard to understand as possible. Look at any psychology paper from the last 30 years at least and you'll see what I mean-- it is going to sound much more like writing in any of the other sciences and not at all like this.

Good lord, no wonder his grad students can't get jobs!

[mahagonny]

Highly educated academics makes absurd pronouncements about my field all the time. Or some of them dabble in my field and think that because they have PhD in another field, they are naturally super-learners. I don't appreciate it, but doesn't cause me to doubt what they're saying in their own field. No one has ever called them out on these things, possibly.
The difference between them and Peterson is Peterson's on a cable talk show, so it gets disseminated, while these other guys are standing around in a function room near the bar.

The problem is not the 'absurdity' as such, it's the inability or unwillingness to accurately characterize positions one disagrees with. That's a methodological flaw, and when we see it on display we ought to worry that it has contaminated other aspects of someone's research. Similarly, if you catch someone plagiarizing in your course, that's a good reason to have a closer look at their other coursework, too.


Of course, this is ultimately beside the point, because this whole thread is about an academic talking out of their ass about things beyond their expertise. We can excuse that kind of thing all we like, but we won't be doing so to preserve some insight he had in his own domain. As far as I can see, there's no good reason to excuse his PoMo bullshit beyond (inexplicably) thinking it's somehow true.

Like I said, fuck him, find a better Messiah. McWhorter is at least a competent linguist and not a total tilter at straw men.

Well, a messiah is a hard thing to find, but anyone who hates the same people, or at least their ideas and methods, as I do might be an ally. Putting people with horrible ideas out of business is hard work. You look for help where you can get it, within reason. As I said, I'm hoping the voting booth is going to bring down the curtain, at least a little bit, on the idiotic new 'liberal' tyranny, wokeism, the purported effort to 'dismantle white supremacy' and related stupidity the left peddles. Peterson and I are about on the same page with most of that.
ETA:
Did you see the program where Bill Maher tried to praise John McWhorter for his bravery and McWhorter was having none of it? Sometimes you don't need a Messiah as much as just a person with a little visibility who persists in looking for common sense even when it seems to be lacking all around him, and thankfully, won't shut up about it when nutty people are holding court. That's how McWhorter sees himself. And he is a gentleman, so you and I might both learn something from him. Of course, as soon as he gets a little wind in his sails, some jackass will call him an "Uncle Tom." And I suspect that person will be your ally.

[marshwiggle]

Bias is very real, and my objection to ideas like "systemic" discrimination is precisely that such ill-defined terms allow the bias of people to find it everywhere they look. The way to reduce bias is to make objective criteria, and have them evaluated where possible by people who have as little idea as possible about who or what is being evaluated and why. Hence the "gold standard" in medicine of double-blind studies.

OK, then you support the EDI requirements.  You basically wrote one and get a gold star!

I must respectfully decline the gold star as I do not deserve it.

The reason the double-blind study is the "gold standard" is that it is the best that can possibly be achieved. In reality, there are countless situations where it isn't possible.

Suppose I want to do research on TA interventions in the lab. The TAs and students are both diverse groups, and they are not randomly assigned, since things like scheduling dictate where they wind up. In order for TAs to do their jobs in the lab, they must interact with students face-to-face. If there is bias, conscious or unconscious, in either direction, then it cannot be avoided. Even if it were somehow possible to selectively assign both students and TAs to control for this, the results of the research would therefore be less relevant to the real-world lab situations that they're supposed to be studying.

Unless their mandate is extremely tightly-defined, the zealousness of EDI committees to prevent potential "harm" could result in virtually anything being forbidden.

[Kron3007]

Bias is very real, and my objection to ideas like "systemic" discrimination is precisely that such ill-defined terms allow the bias of people to find it everywhere they look. The way to reduce bias is to make objective criteria, and have them evaluated where possible by people who have as little idea as possible about who or what is being evaluated and why. Hence the "gold standard" in medicine of double-blind studies.

OK, then you support the EDI requirements.  You basically wrote one and get a gold star!

I must respectfully decline the gold star as I do not deserve it.

The reason the double-blind study is the "gold standard" is that it is the best that can possibly be achieved. In reality, there are countless situations where it isn't possible.

Suppose I want to do research on TA interventions in the lab. The TAs and students are both diverse groups, and they are not randomly assigned, since things like scheduling dictate where they wind up. In order for TAs to do their jobs in the lab, they must interact with students face-to-face. If there is bias, conscious or unconscious, in either direction, then it cannot be avoided. Even if it were somehow possible to selectively assign both students and TAs to control for this, the results of the research would therefore be less relevant to the real-world lab situations that they're supposed to be studying.

Unless their mandate is extremely tightly-defined, the zealousness of EDI committees to prevent potential "harm" could result in virtually anything being forbidden.

Yes, a double blind clinical trial is the gold standard, but as you say, it is not always possible.  In cases where we cannot run a double blind clinical trial, we don't just ignore the potential for confounding factors to influence the results, we take pro-active measures to account for them and recognize that there are still potential biases when we interpret the outcomes.  This is the same with EDI, we cannot make everything random and completely fair so we are taking the steps that we can to reduce bias as much as possible.  This should be standard practice for any scientific study, but historically it has not been (ie most pre-clinical trials have historically been done with male populations only, crash test dummies were historically male, facial recognition software is racially biased, etc.).

In your example, you would not be required to randomize everything since it is an observational study and that is not possible.  However, you should acknowledge this fact and have a plan to consider it in your analysis and interpretation.  The EDI section is not necessarily about making things perfect, simply to recognize the issues and having a plan in place to minimize the issues. 

Personally, my research has no major human element so EDI dosnt really impact my experimental design etc.  For grant proposals I simply put that we considered EDI issues and determined they have no bearing on our experimental design and this has been fine.  That being said, I still have to address how EDI is considered in my recruiting and training plans, which seems reasonable.



 

[Hibush]

 The Guardian covered a Jordan Peterson interview this week:

He sounds intelligent, but he's completely wrong.
"He has no frickin' idea," she said.

[mahagonny]

The Guardian covered a Jordan Peterson interview this week:

He sounds intelligent, but he's completely wrong.
"He has no frickin' idea," she said.

Neil Young, your public health advocate. Isn't one those guys on his third liver now?

Wondering: if qualified scientists can predict where human beings-induced climate change is going to lead us, do they all identify the same date in which the earth will be uninhabitable, given a model with the same factors?

ETA: Unfortunately I have reached my limit of free articles at the Guardian, so I can't reread today. And they're not getting one thin dime of my money, the commies!  Is there another way to access it?

[Parasaurolophus]

Wondering: if qualified scientists can predict where human beings-induced climate change is going to lead us, do they all identify the same date in which the earth will be uninhabitable, given a model with the same factors?

No, because that's not how it works. It's not like solving for x; climate is an incredibly complex system, and it's chaotic, which is to say that tiny changes in starting conditions can lead to outsized effects.

Besides which, worldwide uninhabitability isn't really the result that should interest us. There's a lot of very, very bad stuff before you get to that point.

ETA: Unfortunately I have reached my limit of free articles at the Guardian, so I can't reread today. And they're not getting one thin dime of my money, the commies!  Is there another way to access it?

Try your local or institutional libraries, or looking for the cached page.

[mahagonny]

Wondering: if qualified scientists can predict where human beings-induced climate change is going to lead us, do they all identify the same date in which the earth will be uninhabitable, given a model with the same factors?

No, because that's not how it works. It's not like solving for x; climate is an incredibly complex system, and it's chaotic, which is to say that tiny changes in starting conditions can lead to outsized effects.

Sounds pretty similar to what Dr. Peterson said in an interview I saw recently. The disagreement seems not to be over what could happen, but what to do right now. And who to hate.

Besides which, worldwide uninhabitability isn't really the result that should interest us. There's a lot of very, very bad stuff before you get to that point.

Like for example, as my friend Sheila would tell us, having bought property in Manhattan during the Bill DeBlasio years.

Try your local or institutional libraries, or looking for the cached page.

Thanks!

[Juvenal]

The Guardian covered a Jordan Peterson interview this week:

He sounds intelligent, but he's completely wrong.
"He has no frickin' idea," she said.

Neil Young, your public health advocate. Isn't one those guys on his third liver now?

Wondering: if qualified scientists can predict where human beings-induced climate change is going to lead us, do they all identify the same date in which the earth will be uninhabitable, given a model with the same factors?

ETA: Unfortunately I have reached my limit of free articles at the Guardian, so I can't reread today. And they're not getting one thin dime of my money, the commies!  Is there another way to access it?

Limited articles? The Guardian seems to have no paywall/limit for me and they say so, just asking for contributions now and then, but not scuttling my access.  On the other hand, I have given them some spare change from time to time.  Spending time with BoJo the PM is very refreshing as diversion from vexations closer to home.

[mahagonny]

The Guardian covered a Jordan Peterson interview this week:

He sounds intelligent, but he's completely wrong.
"He has no frickin' idea," she said.

Neil Young, your public health advocate. Isn't one those guys on his third liver now?

Wondering: if qualified scientists can predict where human beings-induced climate change is going to lead us, do they all identify the same date in which the earth will be uninhabitable, given a model with the same factors?

ETA: Unfortunately I have reached my limit of free articles at the Guardian, so I can't reread today. And they're not getting one thin dime of my money, the commies!  Is there another way to access it?

Limited articles? The Guardian seems to have no paywall/limit for me and they say so, just asking for contributions now and then, but not scuttling my access.  On the other hand, I have given them some spare change from time to time.  Spending time with BoJo the PM is very refreshing as diversion from vexations closer to home.

Of course, I feel duly chastened for being inattentive to the messages on my computer screen. And thanks for the heads up. As soon as I see something in the Guardian that should do more good than harm to the reader who trusts them I'll consider sending a little something to them.

[Hibush]

The Guardian covered a Jordan Peterson interview this week:

He sounds intelligent, but he's completely wrong.
"He has no frickin' idea," she said.

Neil Young, your public health advocate. Isn't one those guys on his third liver now?

Neil Young serves a good purpose in getting science coverage where the scientists are not the hook. The Guardian article interviewed a impressive number of scientist in the article, and well chosen ones at that. The others were no more charitable to the psychologist.

[jimbogumbo]

David Crosby has had one liver transplant. But then you would never (see below) anyone.

It's hard enough for him to write coherently at the best of times, so I imagine the letters of recommendation he wrote from his medically-induced coma in Russia (to "treat" his benzo addiction) did no one any favours.

Next time you're down remind me to kick you.