Posted on 07/15/2017 11:26:01 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The academic enterprise is supposed to be about truth. Those who are entrusted to teach are expected to convey knowledge to their students, not their opinions. And when academics write books, they should do so to deepen knowledge in their fields, never to mislead readers.
Sometimes, however, academics allow their zeal to convert students or the public to their beliefs to get the better of them. They go from seeking truth to twisting it; writing books not to illuminate, but to inflame.
The most infamous case of that occurred in 2000, when Emory University history professor Michael Bellesiles published a book, Arming America, that purported to show that our “gun culture” was of fairly recent origin, as shown by the “fact” that guns had actually been quite rare in early America. The book was highly acclaimed because it confirmed the anti-Second Amendment bias of many intellectuals.
Lurking in its pages, however, was a huge academic fraud that would bring it down, along with Bellesiles’ career. His evidence was mostly fabricated and once skeptics began looking into the book closely, the more dishonesty they found. The publisher, Knopf, eventually withdrew the book and Bellesiles resigned from Emory’s faculty after a committee found that his responses to questions were evasive. (For a full account, this Yale Law Journal article by Professor James Lindgren is excellent.)
Arming America comes to mind because two recent books by academics similarly twist truth in order to advance their beliefs and confirm the biases of “progressive” readers. Those books are Economism by University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak and Democracy in Chains by Duke University history professor Nancy MacLean.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Not when those who lust for power realize that they can create an army of useful idiots to go out and do the dirty work of violent protests for them by controlling their education.
The Intellectual Yet Idiots who control our colleges and universities hire Intellectual Yet Idiot thugs like them to be their professors. This started back in the 1960’s and has gotten out of control in the past few years under Obama.
Universities/Colleges are controlled and operated by the Intellectual Yet Idiots, who have been controlling our lives for decades.
Nassim Taleb Exposes The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class!
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?, but their main skills is ability to pass exams written by people like them.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science.
(For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.)
This is an excerpt. To read or copy the full article go to the link below:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-16/nassim-taleb-exposes-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class
Bellisiles is a minor offender when compared to the likes of Michael Mann and his infamous "Hockey Stick" hoax. Yes, you can in fact ride that sort of thing to fame and fortune, or you can be a relatively impoverished educational professional laboring in obscurity. Is anyone surprised when someone falls to the temptation?
Kwak and McLean? Simle really. Run them out of the $hit filled leftists nests that are the poorest of excuses for today’s academic community.
There’s more money in inflaming passions than there is in seeking truth, at least temporarily.
Kwak and McLean? Didn’t they do the theme from “Happy Days”?
How ironic the motto of my alma mater: quaecumque sunt vera.
The irony of Bellisles’ dramatic fall is that he was brought down, not by “gun nuts” or the NRA, but by fellow academics that wanted to access his supposed “probate records” for their own historical research.
When their efforts to access his sources ended in blind alleys, and Bellisles’ responses to their inquiries were evasive to say the least...that generation had enough integrity to recognize him as dangerous and call him out. I question if the current generation of academic historians would be so willing to rock the boat for the sake of “truth”.
Lets call them Klack and McWean.
Academia has been in trouble since the USSR planted its moles in universities (and news outlets and Hollywood) in the mid 1900s. The USSR is gone, but the effect of its moles and their active efforts to subvert young Americans has not subsided.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.