Academia

Junk Science Warning Signs: Part I

by

So, commenter Tatyana asked about how a layman can discern the signals that indicate that a discussion has left the realm of rigorous thought. I thought I’d set down some thoughts on that over the course of a couple of posts, starting from the extreme left tail of the distribution and working my way in to stuff that’s more mainstream, could possibly be true, but ought not to be pounced on because there’s a lot more work to be done before a conclusion is reached.

So, to start out with, I’ll tackle something that’s obvious to me as being in the looney science bin: the attacks on the Large Hadron Collider. As I mentioned before, my little online Science Fiction group ran afoul of the utter nutbars in the “LHC Will End the Woooorld” camp. I dug a little deeper into the “some scientists” whom the anti-LHCers cite. I uncovered that the most prestigious scientist whom they could quote was a German biochemist I’d never heard of named Otto Rössler.

So then I dug a little deeper into Professor Doctor Rössler’s record, and came up with quite a lot. Unfortunately, it was quite a lot of utter rubbish. I see that rubbish cited all over the Internet, so I tried to set the record straight. After the jump is the blog post I made, mostly for my SF group’s amusement, about how I was able to tell Rössler was a crank. Enjoy.

Read more

Rhinoceros!

by

This link is not about a zoological species, but rather about Israel-bashing, anti-Semitism, and political intimidation on an American college campus. It deserves careful reading.

The “rhinoceros” reference is, of course, to Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play, which is summarized at the link. (The play has also been made into an excellent film, featuring Zero Mostel–this would be a very good time to order it from Netflix or pick it up at a local video store.)

See also my 2002 post on the rise of political violence and intimidation in America.

link via Meryl Yourish

Quote of the Day

by

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

…

Academics control the narrow neck through which America’s managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

…

Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

Alan Guelzo, Conservatism’s Greatest Failure: The Academy

Discovering Their Own Prejudice

by

So, a white, Catholic, leftist, college student dresses as a Muslim woman in small-town Alabama to examine predjuces against Muslims. [h/t Instapundit] Instead she finds:
 

“I expected people to say, ‘What is this terrorist doing here? We don’t want your kind here,’ ” said Woldt, a 22-year-old blue-eyed Catholic, recalling her anticipation before stepping into a local barbecue joint. “I thought I wouldn’t even be served.”
 
Instead, Woldt’s experiment in social anthropology opened her own eyes. Apart from the initial glances reserved for any outsider who might venture through a small-town restaurant’s doors, her experience was a pleasant one.

What Woldt discovered was not the prejudices of the small-town, southern, white American but instead the prejudices and  stereotypes  of  contemporary  leftist  academia. Woldt expected to find prejudice not because she had already seen it but because her education indoctrinated her to expect it in others. This little incident opens a window on the insular, elitist and bigoted world of leftists in  contemporary  academia.  

Read more

Two Worthwhile Interviews

by

Peter Robinson interviews Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Sowell talks about his book, A Conflict of Visions, current affairs and the presidential election in a discussion that took place before the election. Steele talks about Barack Obama, US racial politics and the presidential election in the context of his book, A Bound Man. The video version of each interview is roughly one-half hour long and is accompanied by a written transcript. Click the “Read the rest…” link below to watch the videos or read the transcripts.

Read more