The important question is, how do they compare to other sources of evidence in that regard?
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead’s Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson’s infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O’Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those “old Reagan speeches” depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my positio
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position.
And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s real GNP versus the US’s real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that “doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed”. Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link?
You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they’re talking about.)
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today—but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
I did not criticize your example of a lie. I let that characterization stand unchallenged.
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie. Until you provide that, your example is not a special case of your general claim that “[academics] engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed.” (Emphasis added.)
(Providing a single example won’t suffice to prove the general claim, of course. But an inability to provide such an example would be telling.)
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie.
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
As someone who’s taken the SAT twice in recent months (and half a dozen more as practice), this is simply false.
The SAT’s questions for the essays are constructed to be as vague as possible, requiring no knowledge of history, current events, or literature; usually they are things like “Do we value only what we struggle for? ” or “Is it always essential to tell the truth, or are there circumstances in which it is better to lie? ” or “What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? ”. It’s possible that a question in the reading section would have a passage from a literary critic espousing the greatness of Steinbeck, followed by a question along the lines of “Why does the author of Passage A argue that Steinbeck was the conscience of America?”, but I’ve never seen a question even this political.
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
I thought that you insisted on talking about issues that weren’t “still today holy.” Why have you changed your mind?
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
Do you mean for that to be an example of a question on an SAT exam, together with an answer that would be scored low because of its political content?
I believe that if such an answer were given in a well-organized and technically well-written essay, it would receive a high score. Obviously you would have to explain why Steinbeck became the “the conscience of America” while the many other people employed by Stalin didn’t. So you would have to refer at some point to the content of what he wrote or said in some detail. But if you did this in a way that demonstrated a familiarity with the material, and your argument were well-structured in a technical sense, then I think that you would pass just fine.
Do you have an example of someone who took the SAT and got poor scores for well-written answers because of the views expressed in those answers?
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
So, I took you at your word on this in my previous comment. But now I’m curious — What was the nature of this employment? A quick Google search didn’t turn up any claims that Steinbeck received money from Stalin. Or were you using “employed” only in the sense of “used as a tool”, without meaning to imply that Steinbeck was compensated?
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn’t mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960.
What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It’s very likely that some American academic after 1960 “retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960” for political reasons. Why do unnecessary harm to your credibility by mischaracterizing your citations?
In short: Samuelson’s readers were told in 1961 (and shown in a graph) that the economy of the Soviet Union was growing, and would continue to grow, significantly faster than the American
economy. Nine years later, readers were told the very same thing – even though, according to Samuelson’s own 1970 graph, the ratio of Soviet GNP to U.S. GNP in 1970 was the same as it was in 1961.
Which 1970 graph implies the 1960s and before went backward between 1960 and 1970. The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
In 1910, the Russian Tsardom was a great power. In order to supposedly have rapid Soviet growth, and yet the Soviets are somehow still not yet surpassing the USA, it was necessary to retroactively deindustrialize the Russian Tsardom, and every year, retroactively deindustrialize it more and more.
Samuelson’s graph was one example of many of this retroactive deindustrialization, which sticks out more than most because occurring between two editions of his book—the Soviet implied starting point being worse in his 1970 graph than his 1960 graph.
The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
Why? Nothing implying that is stated in your link. The 1970 graph certainly implies that things didn’t go as rosely for the USSR during the 60′s as the 1961 graph predicted. But your link doesn’t explain the derivation of the two graphs in enough detail for us to see that they imply different conditions in the USSR prior to 1960.
Again, you could probably find an example of someone doing what you claim (an American academic after 1960 retroactively adjusting pre-1960 Soviet history for political reasons). I acknowledge that that probably happened more than once.
But what you seem to think is documentation of such an event, just isn’t. Furthermore, you never provided any documentation for your claim that doubting such assertions would get a student failed. This leads me to believe that you have a very skewed notion of how often such events happened, which gives me less confidence in your general conclusions about the attitude of academia at the time.
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
In any case, what I find really scary is the anti-epistemology that makes people believe that these numbers have any sensible meaning in the first place.
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
Fair enough. My point is only that, until we know more information than sam0345′s link provides, we cannot give a confident answer to this question. (Namely, we need to know the method by which Samuelson converted data into graphs.)
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted.
The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead’s Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results.
We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead’s anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union’s enlightened penal system.
You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to −10, and thus disappeared from sight.
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of −10, but I think he isn’t exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I’m a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I’ve run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren’t publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean. The only solution that I can think of is to continue the conversation via private messages. I publicly promise to keep the contents of such a conversation private. (I also extend this offer to sam0345.)
ETA: My impression of you from reading your comments leads me to expect that such a conversation would be dispassionate and to-the-point.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean.
There are lots of areas where I can give examples of stuff that used to be unmentionable in academia, such as the frequent revisions of the history of the Soviet Union.
Which examples imply that there is lots of stuff that is still unmentionable in academia—and what is unmentionable in academia is for the most part unmentionable on LW.
To take an issue that is no longer controversial, and therefore less likely to get us massively downvoted than gender differences or little known primitive tribes with strangely politically correct ways of life, like Margaret Mead’s Samoans: The Soviet Union.
As a source of information about the Soviet Union, academics were absolutely dreadful and utterly worthless compared to almost any other source of information. They engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed. After 1990, they improved markedly, and suffered total amnesia that their positions had once been completely different.
One would have received a far more accurate and up to date account of the problems of price control and central planning by listening to old Reagan speeches, than by reading Samuelson.
Recall Samuelson’s infamous graph showing that the Soviet Union (thanks to its superior economic system) would inexorably overtake and soon surpass the united states.
The later editions of his book required greater adjustment of inconvenient facts to produce the desired prediction, which all students were required to agree with or be marked down.
Since political correctness has only gotten worse since then, one should conclude that on any issue touching directly or indirectly on any of the sensitive topics, academics are not reliable.
Further, there is an ever growing collection of obscure and minor topics that once upon a time, for reasons complicated, obscure and long forgotten, were once relevant to one of the major sensitive topics, resulting in an official truth being issued on this minor topic, so that just as the US has a thousand military bases in countries that no one has heard of to protect against long forgotten acts of aggression by a Soviet Union that no longer exists, academia has a thousand taboos, where speaking the truth can get one in big trouble, like treading on a hidden mine, on issues where no one would expect such a taboo. Indeed, it is on these obscure complicated minor issues that the basic unreliability of academia is most strikingly apparent., since on the major issues the academic position is subtly false in a clever way, whereas on minor issues it is apt to be just plain false in a how-many-fingers-is-O’Brien-holding-up way.
Your citation of a blog post by a tenured academic (Don Boudreaux) gives me confidence in my position. If, further, those “old Reagan speeches” depended upon the work of academics (e.g., Hayek), then my position seems very secure to me.
But I am more interested in spending my time in this conversation on the subject of the OP.
I chose the example of the Soviet Union because now, since 1990, academics can speak the truth on the Soviet Union. But their failure to speak that truth before 1990 implies that on one thousand other issues, they cannot speak the truth, which should undermine your confidence in your position.
And since, on an issue where the truth is now permitted, the evidence is that academia was previously totally unreliable to the point of being entirely worthless, you would like to keep the issue to topics where the truth is, for the most part, still not permitted.
But your example was incomplete. Your example of a “massive flagrant barefaced lie” was a forecast from 1961 of the projected growth of the USSR’s real GNP versus the US’s real GNP between the years of 1960 and 2000. You said of such claims that “doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed”. Do you in fact have an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting that forecast from your link?
(For reference, here is the 1961 forecast from the Samuelson text that they’re talking about.)
You damage your credibility even with those sympathetic to your conclusions when the examples you use to back up your general claims fail to be special cases of those general claim.
The lie was not that he made a wrong projection for the future, but that he adjusted the past to suit official government politics.
That he was lying is evident from the fact that the official story was officially changed, like the vanishing commissar.
Wrong reference. There is nothing obviously wrong with his 1961 forecast by itself. What is obviously wrong is that between his 1961 forecast and his 1970 forecast, Academia retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960 to accommodate official state department politics.
The lie becomes apparent on comparing the 1970 forecast with the 1960. The problem is not that the predicted future has changed, but that the alleged past has changed.
My example of a lie is that the data on which that projection was supposedly based was obviously fraudulent, since it got adjusted, not the projection itself.
Comparing the later with the earlier projection, it is evident that Samuelson started with the prediction (inevitable Soviet Victory due its superior economic system), then invented the past to support the prediction.
Similar adjustments of history continue today—but since 1990 Soviet history has now ceased to undergo additional changes, and the alarming frequency of changes to Soviet history before 1990 can now be ridiculed.
It is now permissible to laugh at rewrites of Soviet history, but not permissible to laugh at rewrites of science history, even though we can easily discover the true history of science, while the truth of Soviet history can never be known.
I did not criticize your example of a lie. I let that characterization stand unchallenged.
My criticism was that you have not given an example of a student who was failed specifically for doubting what you called a lie. Until you provide that, your example is not a special case of your general claim that “[academics] engaged in massive flagrant barefaced lies, and doubting these lies would cause a student to be swiftly failed.” (Emphasis added.)
(Providing a single example won’t suffice to prove the general claim, of course. But an inability to provide such an example would be telling.)
Let us suppose that a student was today to doubt one of the holy issues that are still today holy.
Many of the questions on the SAT amount to “Are high status members of the state and academia always good and reliable?”, and everyone knows the answer they are to give.
Typical question on an issue that is still today holy: “Why was John Steinbeck the conscience of America”.
Answering “Because he was employed by Stalin” is not going to get you far.
As someone who’s taken the SAT twice in recent months (and half a dozen more as practice), this is simply false.
The SAT’s questions for the essays are constructed to be as vague as possible, requiring no knowledge of history, current events, or literature; usually they are things like “Do we value only what we struggle for? ” or “Is it always essential to tell the truth, or are there circumstances in which it is better to lie? ” or “What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? ”. It’s possible that a question in the reading section would have a passage from a literary critic espousing the greatness of Steinbeck, followed by a question along the lines of “Why does the author of Passage A argue that Steinbeck was the conscience of America?”, but I’ve never seen a question even this political.
I thought that you insisted on talking about issues that weren’t “still today holy.” Why have you changed your mind?
Do you mean for that to be an example of a question on an SAT exam, together with an answer that would be scored low because of its political content?
I believe that if such an answer were given in a well-organized and technically well-written essay, it would receive a high score. Obviously you would have to explain why Steinbeck became the “the conscience of America” while the many other people employed by Stalin didn’t. So you would have to refer at some point to the content of what he wrote or said in some detail. But if you did this in a way that demonstrated a familiarity with the material, and your argument were well-structured in a technical sense, then I think that you would pass just fine.
Do you have an example of someone who took the SAT and got poor scores for well-written answers because of the views expressed in those answers?
So, I took you at your word on this in my previous comment. But now I’m curious — What was the nature of this employment? A quick Google search didn’t turn up any claims that Steinbeck received money from Stalin. Or were you using “employed” only in the sense of “used as a tool”, without meaning to imply that Steinbeck was compensated?
What retroactive adjustment are you talking about? That blog post doesn’t mention any claim by anyone about anything prior to 1960.
What makes this sloppiness strange is that you surely could have found a correct citation to bolster your claim. It’s very likely that some American academic after 1960 “retroactively adjusted Soviet history previous to 1960” for political reasons. Why do unnecessary harm to your credibility by mischaracterizing your citations?
Quoting from the article:
Which 1970 graph implies the 1960s and before went backward between 1960 and 1970. The 1970 graph implies that the 1960s and before were worse than depicted in the 1960 graph.
In 1910, the Russian Tsardom was a great power. In order to supposedly have rapid Soviet growth, and yet the Soviets are somehow still not yet surpassing the USA, it was necessary to retroactively deindustrialize the Russian Tsardom, and every year, retroactively deindustrialize it more and more.
Samuelson’s graph was one example of many of this retroactive deindustrialization, which sticks out more than most because occurring between two editions of his book—the Soviet implied starting point being worse in his 1970 graph than his 1960 graph.
Why? Nothing implying that is stated in your link. The 1970 graph certainly implies that things didn’t go as rosely for the USSR during the 60′s as the 1961 graph predicted. But your link doesn’t explain the derivation of the two graphs in enough detail for us to see that they imply different conditions in the USSR prior to 1960.
Again, you could probably find an example of someone doing what you claim (an American academic after 1960 retroactively adjusting pre-1960 Soviet history for political reasons). I acknowledge that that probably happened more than once.
But what you seem to think is documentation of such an event, just isn’t. Furthermore, you never provided any documentation for your claim that doubting such assertions would get a student failed. This leads me to believe that you have a very skewed notion of how often such events happened, which gives me less confidence in your general conclusions about the attitude of academia at the time.
You can find the graphs from Samuelson’s book along with excerpts from his commentary in this paper (starting on page 8):
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517983
Now, the question is whether the 1970 graph can be interpreted in some reasonable way that wouldn’t imply a revision of the claim about the 1960 GNP ratio in the 1961 book. (Not a revision of the prediction for the 1960s, mind you, but a revision of the 1960 figure that was already in the past when the 1961 edition was being prepared.) I would say that the answer to this question is no, though I can imagine that reasonable people might disagree.
In any case, what I find really scary is the anti-epistemology that makes people believe that these numbers have any sensible meaning in the first place.
Fair enough. My point is only that, until we know more information than sam0345′s link provides, we cannot give a confident answer to this question. (Namely, we need to know the method by which Samuelson converted data into graphs.)
A subject where plain speaking is apt to result in being massively downvoted.
The academics cited by OP describe a primitive and little known tribe behaving in an implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results, just as Margaret Mead’s Samoans acted in implausibly politically correct manner with improbably politically correct and satisfactory results.
We should therefore have as much faith in these anomalously well behaved primitives as we should have had in Margaret Mead’s anomalously well behaved Samoans, or, returning to my much safer topic, those criminals so marvelously reformed the by Soviet Union’s enlightened penal system.
You would prefer to discuss evidence of academic reliability on topics where most evidence of academic unreliability will get the post presenting such evidence downvoted to −10, and thus disappeared from sight.
Do you mean to say that you have evidence for your claim that you decline to present for fear of being downvoted?
Or have you already presented (or pointed towards) all your evidence for your claim?
I think sam0345 may be exaggerating with a projection of −10, but I think he isn’t exaggerating when he suspects that there are examples of academic unreliability that would be unfeasible to discuss on LW, even though I am a bit more optimistic about what LW can handle than Vladimir_M, for instance. It would be a bad mistake to even attempt to collect evidence on some topics.
I’m a psych junkie, and by following certain online debates and reading journals, I’ve run into several topics where peer-review studies that aren’t publicized contradict the public story. With some of these topics, LW has proven itself to not be quite ready for them, though Vladimir_M sometimes dances around them, and I and others have discussed some of the lighter ones. Other topics are not discussable in public at all in any forum where a speaker wants to retain any reputation. In fact, it would be a hazard to others to even mention these topics on LW, given that many people comment here with their real names, and LW would be tarred by even tolerating serious discussion of those findings.
It is difficult to continue this conversation productively because the nature of your claim is such that you will not want to give examples to back it up or to clarify what you mean. The only solution that I can think of is to continue the conversation via private messages. I publicly promise to keep the contents of such a conversation private. (I also extend this offer to sam0345.)
ETA: My impression of you from reading your comments leads me to expect that such a conversation would be dispassionate and to-the-point.
There are lots of areas where I can give examples of stuff that used to be unmentionable in academia, such as the frequent revisions of the history of the Soviet Union.
Which examples imply that there is lots of stuff that is still unmentionable in academia—and what is unmentionable in academia is for the most part unmentionable on LW.