On academic takeover, the statistics are quite clear that 60 years ago there were far more Republicans in US academia than there are today. Economics departments may have somewhat less skewed numbers but you would certainly expect to see a dominance of left-leaning voters in a department like anthropology.
>> you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species
That's his point, not yours. He criticized anthropologists who were (in essence) projecting 19th century Victorian England onto the whole of humanity and its history, and argues that when other anthropologists were faced with indisputable evidence that this generalization could not hold they had a mini melt down and shot the messenger.
Why the meltdown - Marxism takes as a founding axiom the idea that humanity is engaged in a constant war over control of the means of the material production, that it always had been and always would be. This idea is what justified their social agenda.
>> This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences
Yup, and that's why the author is criticizing it. Also, is there any evidence the author is a social scientist? I don't see any. Plus the author doesn't claim all anthropologists are Marxists, only that some of them are.
That is because the Republicans 60 years ago believed in science, hard work, truth and building up society. At least the to ones. The party as a whole and especially in its leadership positions have decisively shifted away from science and truth and towards defense of the currently powerful business interests at the expense of most else. Why isn’t the global warming debate a debate about how to solve the actual problem? Why isn’t the debate on how to regulate the big tech monopolies based on factuality instead of ideologically distorted facts? Because the Republicans have retreated from modern society, science, and a commitment to truth. The scientists didn’t filter out the republicans, the Republicans stopped believing in science.
No it's not, because the same effect is seen everywhere but only the US has the Republican party. Which would argue the opposite anyway - it does in fact believe in the scientific method, which is why they criticize academic research so often (because it's not really scientific).
Are you saying there aren’t conservative parties outside the Us or that conservatives worldwide haven’t pushed against science the past few decades? Is UKIP pro-science? Putin? Are there conservative parties that welcome the acceleration of social change due to increased knowledge and technology?
At every time in the history of science, there have been things to criticize. Nonetheless it is been successfully self-correcting for quite a long time. You need to provide some stronger evidence this has broken down other than one anthropologist whose ideas, according to TFA, are now more respected than earlier, which would be an actual proper functioning of science.
OK, let's get one thing straight. Everyone claims to be pro-science. There is literally no political party on earth that stands up and says "we hate science".
When you describe people as pushing back against "science" what you mean is they disagree with you about whether certain claims are in fact true claims, whether they are high quality science or not. They are not saying they reject your beliefs because they reject science, they are saying you should reject those beliefs because they are pseudo-science: something that looks superficially like science, but isn't.
"it is been successfully self-correcting for quite a long time"
It's not self correcting, that's a myth. You asked for more evidence, fine, it exists in abundance. Go research. Consider that people started talking about a replication crisis in psychology more than a decade ago yet it's still a huge problem. Claims are still being made today that clearly won't replicate when the underlying studies are briefly checked. Or look at the recent IPCC report. In the summary for policymakers it introduces a long since debunked graph that doesn't appear anywhere in the actual report itself (because it's wrong). So the IPCC is presenting a document that claims to be a summary of the science yet isn't. Guess what - the point who point out this sort of thing tend to be conservatives, or they get labelled as such, simply because non-conservatives refuse to criticize academia.
It is often said that science changes one funeral at a time, but I have certainly read a lot about efforts to fix the replication crisis. And ten years isn't long to change the behavior of a large number of independent actors. The discourse about the replication crisis comes from scientists and is being fixed by the scientific process. It supports my thesis.
Your next example, one diagram in the non-scientific portion of the IPCC report that you don't like doesn't really invalidate the "science is self-correcting." Perhaps you have more details on this supposed diagram?
If you ever attend a scientific conference, you will certainly hear scientists criticizing each other. More biting than the most wooly eyed back-woods preacher and more informed than the poshest petroleum funded climate sceptic. But they don't argue about perpetual motion, flat earth, evolution, or global warming due to the carbon burn.
"Scientists" and "journalists" are the very people being accused of propagating pseudo-science so who cares what they think? To resolve disputes about whether certain claims are scientific you can't just ask one side and say, "Well? Are you right?".
"The discourse about the replication crisis comes from scientists and is being fixed by the scientific process."
I've also read a lot. Unfortunately, it's not being fixed. There is a small amount of discourse in a small segment of a small set of fields, which has had absolutely no impact whatsoever on common practice in those fields, let alone the wider government research enterprise.
Also, mind that replicability is only one tiny part of the problem. There's also huge problems with papers that misrepresent their own data, use invalid (but replicable) methodologies, abuse statistics, are entirely fraudulent to begin with, are based on logical fallacies, encode extremely ideologically biased ideas into their study design, are based on buggy programs or invalid assumptions, cite documents that contradict the claims being made and so on. Inability to replicate is not the only problem here, even though it's the only one that really gets discussed.
"one diagram in the non-scientific portion of the IPCC report"
It's not a diagram, it claims to be a graph of long term temperature history and is thus the core claim that supports the entire thesis of the summary, and yet it's known to be fraudulent and was previously dropped from IPCC reports for being so. And non-scientific?! The IPCC supposedly a summary of a scientific report, which is itself reporting on and summarizing the science! You don't get to put claims about temperature in the summary that don't appear anywhere in the science, then claim to be summarizing science. Yet they do, and this is just an example. Fraud in apparently scientific claims is out of control, but only conservatives are willing to call it out. Then they get labelled as science deniers. It's actually the other way around though: it's the people who blindly accept anything that looks superficially like science, who are denying true science.
>> you can't look at one group of humans living somewhere and then project your conclusions about how that group functions to the entire human species
That's his point, not yours. He criticized anthropologists who were (in essence) projecting 19th century Victorian England onto the whole of humanity and its history, and argues that when other anthropologists were faced with indisputable evidence that this generalization could not hold they had a mini melt down and shot the messenger.
Why the meltdown - Marxism takes as a founding axiom the idea that humanity is engaged in a constant war over control of the means of the material production, that it always had been and always would be. This idea is what justified their social agenda.
>> This kind of bias projection is a huge problem in the social sciences
Yup, and that's why the author is criticizing it. Also, is there any evidence the author is a social scientist? I don't see any. Plus the author doesn't claim all anthropologists are Marxists, only that some of them are.