Piss-Poor Social Science That The Left Will Protest vs. Piss-Poor Social Science That The Left Will Accept.
This post isn't timely, but if it's true it might as well be new.
When piss-poor social science is used to rehabilitate the age-old canard that men shouldn't seek ambitious women, progressive academics rush to condemn the author as a sexist.
When piss-poor social science is used to rehabilitate the age-old canard that Jews can't be trusted to be loyal to their country, progressive academics rush to celebrate the authors as brave.
So it's not the robustness of the conclusions that's determining progressive reactions to controversial articles. And it's not the rigor of the methods that are used to arrive at those conclusions. If it's not how reliable the results are, then it seems reasonable to assume that what's driving reaction is that academics just dislike the first set of conclusions and really like the second set of conclusions. And at this point, just getting them to admit to this pretty obvious dynamic would be a huge win.
When piss-poor social science is used to rehabilitate the age-old canard that men shouldn't seek ambitious women, progressive academics rush to condemn the author as a sexist.
When piss-poor social science is used to rehabilitate the age-old canard that Jews can't be trusted to be loyal to their country, progressive academics rush to celebrate the authors as brave.
So it's not the robustness of the conclusions that's determining progressive reactions to controversial articles. And it's not the rigor of the methods that are used to arrive at those conclusions. If it's not how reliable the results are, then it seems reasonable to assume that what's driving reaction is that academics just dislike the first set of conclusions and really like the second set of conclusions. And at this point, just getting them to admit to this pretty obvious dynamic would be a huge win.
