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http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/29/feminist-phd-candidate-science-sexist-not-subjective/#disqus_thread

In future, please include some form of commentary to go with a link, just dropping a link and a baity thread title isn't really the sort of thing that should gain traction in the OT. Thanks, motyak

 cuda1179 wrote:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/29/feminist-phd-candidate-science-sexist-not-subjective/#disqus_thread

My brain hurt reading that.

Some of the most brilliant people I know in science/medical/STEM fields are women...

Wait, so me thinking there's one reality that we all reside in is sexist? There's getting to be too many things I can't do.

Maybe a little post-modernism could improve science, but lack there of automatically making science sexist/racist is a real stretch. I'm pretty much on board with feminism, but this really strikes me as someone really didn't have a good idea for their PhD thesis, and decided to swing for the fences. It's a degree in education, and pretty much anything goes there XD

Alternative title: the right-wing outrage machine gives a random person many times more attention than they ever had before.

 Peregrine wrote:
Alternative title: the right-wing outrage machine gives a random person many times more attention than they ever had before.

Alternative Title; Evocative Paper earns Grad Student Degree

Few things say PhD like an idea that can be turned into a New York Times Best Seller

I was going to read this and noticed it's sourced from 'The Federalist'. I wouldn't line my neighbor's chicken coop with that if it came in a newspaper form.

 Peregrine wrote:
Alternative title: the right-wing outrage machine gives a random person many times more attention than they ever had before.

Or better yet: The left-wing desperately tried to pretend that this sort of thing isn't really happening and that it's all made up!

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Or better yet: The left-wing desperately tried to pretend that this sort of thing isn't really happening and that it's all made up!

It isn't made up, but it's real in the sense of "some random bloggers on the internet say things occasionally". Nobody with any real power is saying things like "facts in science are evil patriarchy, down with the scientific method". You only get that nonsense if you spend a lot of time looking for obscure sources that would struggle to get double-digit readers before being thrown up on some conservative new site as an example of everything that is wrong with society.

 Peregrine wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Or better yet: The left-wing desperately tried to pretend that this sort of thing isn't really happening and that it's all made up!

It isn't made up, but it's real in the sense of "some random bloggers on the internet say things occasionally". Nobody with any real power is saying things like "facts in science are evil patriarchy, down with the scientific method". You only get that nonsense if you spend a lot of time looking for obscure sources that would struggle to get double-digit readers before being thrown up on some conservative new site as an example of everything that is wrong with society.

Considering I've personally run into this argument TWICE, in person, 15 years and 150 miles apart, I'd say it's a little more mainstream than you think.

Let's just face it, this woman didn't get to be a PHD candidate by NOT having the attention of people in power. The saddest thing is that she might just get her Doctorate degree from this. Once people have that degree people tend to listen to whatever they have to say, regardless of how crazy it is. We get things like "daily vitamins" that no one really needs and might hurt us, or God forbid another anti-vaccination movement.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Considering I've personally run into this argument TWICE, in person, 15 years and 150 miles apart, I'd say it's a little more mainstream than you think.

Indeed.By that metric, you might encounter nearly 6 people like that over a lifetime. Truly an epidemic.

 cuda1179 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Or better yet: The left-wing desperately tried to pretend that this sort of thing isn't really happening and that it's all made up!

It isn't made up, but it's real in the sense of "some random bloggers on the internet say things occasionally". Nobody with any real power is saying things like "facts in science are evil patriarchy, down with the scientific method". You only get that nonsense if you spend a lot of time looking for obscure sources that would struggle to get double-digit readers before being thrown up on some conservative new site as an example of everything that is wrong with society.

Considering I've personally run into this argument TWICE, in person, 15 years and 150 miles apart, I'd say it's a little more mainstream than you think.

Let's just face it, this woman didn't get to be a PHD candidate by NOT having the attention of people in power. The saddest thing is that she might just get her Doctorate degree from this. Once people have that degree people tend to listen to whatever they have to say, regardless of how crazy it is. We get things like "daily vitamins" that no one really needs and might hurt us, or God forbid another anti-vaccination movement.

I'm sorry brother, but if you consider "...twice...15 years...150 miles apart..." as anything even resembling "mainstream" then you need to review the definition of "mainstream".

Well, schools don't necessarily look for what you might look for in a doctoral candidate. They look for people with a strong understanding of relevant work, methodologies, and the ability to be innovative. Note that being 100% correct doesn't really fall into any of those categories. You'll find all kinds of crazy stuff in PhD thesis', especially because being innovative and right at the same time is something that takes a lot of academics their entire lives to work out.

Give this candidate attention is actually probably going to help her, because if you're getting a PhD in education, then you're looking at teaching education (or given her theme, she might be looking to be an academic feminist or someone who studies the history of science) or being an administrator somewhere. The former tends to like people with name recognition regardless of why they're recognized. Pretty much everything written by George Saliba has been derided by critics, but he brings out new ideas, and that's built him a career. Then there's the whole field of academic contrarians, and hack jobs like Jared Diamond. Unfortunately not everyone with a "Dr" in front of their name is going to be Eric Foner or J.R. McNeill.

 Ouze wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Considering I've personally run into this argument TWICE, in person, 15 years and 150 miles apart, I'd say it's a little more mainstream than you think.

Indeed.By that metric, you might encounter nearly 6 people like that over a lifetime. Truly an epidemic.

Considering the first time was actually a rather large group, and that people don't exactly voice ALL their opinions at any given moment, yeah, I'd say that this might be pretty widespread. Heck, one Nazi poop swastika and a shouted racial slur was all that was needed to show a pattern of oppressive racism on the Univ. of Missouri.

Are we going to start a new thread for every stupid grad thesis? We'd have the whole of Off Topic filled within a day.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Considering the first time was actually a rather large group, and that people don't exactly voice ALL their opinions at any given moment, yeah, I'd say that this might be pretty widespread.

For a counter-argument, the fact that the best source the right-wing outrage machine could come up with is a student at the University of North Dakota (hardly a prestigious school) would pretty strongly suggest that nobody of any real importance is saying these things. Let's be honest here, until the right-wing outrage machine found it there was no chance that anyone outside of her department was going to read this paper.

You'll have to excuse me if I don't take a page that tells me that "We recommend: 'Real women don't want a feminist boyfriend'" very seriously. The fact that they're taking one outlier as representative for an entire academic field is also stupid.

Besides, there's actually a point to post-modern critique of academia. Nothing should be sacrosanct, because the falsification of hypotheses is the cornerstone of scientific discovery. Stubbornly clinging to "known facts", even when said facts are proven wrong, is a real problem (just look at the anti-vaccine movement).

"Feminists bad, hurr!" is a much less complicated article to write, though, so that's what we got.

Who wrote that is clearly part of the problem, it is better to drop out to escape that anti feminist school regime before getting corrupted by it.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
The fact that they're taking one outlier as representative for an entire academic field is also stupid.

The thing about academics, there shouldn't be outliers in any reputable field. I'm nearing the end of my phd, I had to find 2 supervisors who supported my research, I had to give a presentation early on to show that I'd understood the existing work in the field sufficiently to prove my research would be contributing (which was judged by 1 external expert, 1 internal expert and another student), around part way through I had to show that I'd made good progress and the thesis would be worthy of a phd (judged by 2 internal experts), then close to finishing the thesis I had to have another presentation + oral examination showing what I had done was worthy of a phd (judged by 1 internal and 1 external expert). Finally the thesis itself is examined and critiqued.

If there's outliers producing junk after going through that process then the process for that particular university (or possibly the field as a whole) is flawed.

Granted a lot of phd's are morons who have very little capacity for understanding beyond their own field of study and having a phd shows very little of a person's capacity, but the work involved in getting a phd should be solid in and of itself.

Today I leaned that racist Republicans are mainstream.

The reality is that most Phd programs are very careful about writing someone off as wrong. It opens programs to lawsuits, and of course, you never know when someone will actually turn out right. PhD prospects get a lot of leeway when it comes to what they're doing as far as subject matter goes, especially in the humanities and social sciences. As you note AllSeeingSkink, programs pay a lot of attention to how you're doing what you're doing, whether you can show it as advancing the field, and how well you can organize and present information. You can do all of that even with crazy.

There have honestly been crazier ideas that I've come across.

Link

A good example of a stupid idea that turned out to not be so stupid after all;

12. How should bosses choose who to promote?

Three Italian researchers won the 2010 Ig Nobel prize for their work which proved that organisations would be more efficient and better off if they promoted people at random. I really wish they hadn't proved that, it's not a happy thought.

The Ig Noble prize was kind of invented to celebrate crazy research that ended up having use. EDIT: And speaking of the Ig Noble prize, here's the winners from 2016 just for kicks XD

Reproduction: The late Ahmed Shafik, for testing the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats and also testing this, and for then conducting similar tests on the human male.
Economics: Mark Avis and colleagues, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective.
Physics: Gabor Horvath and colleagues, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.
Chemistry: Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.
Medicine: Christoph Helmchen and colleagues, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).[211]
Psychology: Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.
Peace Prize: Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study called "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound bs".[212]
Biology: Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.
Literature: Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.
Perception: Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.[213]

From Wikipedia

My favorite was "One the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound bs." Actually a lot more insightful than the title implies XD

The Chemistry one made me laugh in the middle of work. Well played Volkswagon.

On one hand we have a small journal article (I doubt it's her doctoral work) by a grad student in the field of education talking about STEM syllabi using gendered language.

On the other hand we have a website talking about the same student and paper, claiming that she is a feminist who claims that the scientific method is sexist, linking to prior posts on the same website as proof for their arguments.

I think we can learn a lot from both by reading the journal article as well as the post.

 cuda1179 wrote:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/29/feminist-phd-candidate-science-sexist-not-subjective/#disqus_thread

In future, please include some form of commentary to go with a link, just dropping a link and a baity thread title isn't really the sort of thing that should gain traction in the OT. Thanks, motyak

Just yet another example of how post-modernist, neo-progressivism, and third wave feminism (all typically lumped together under the category of "regressive left"), are a disease that is dragging down institutions of higher learning.


And as this clearly shows:

For a counter-argument, the fact that the best source the right-wing outrage machine could come up with is a student at the University of North Dakota (hardly a prestigious school) would pretty strongly suggest that nobody of any real importance is saying these things. Let's be honest here, until the right-wing outrage machine found it there was no chance that anyone outside of her department was going to read this paper.

Some liberals and traditional leftists, as part of a knee jerk reaction, enable this crap and the dumbing down of colleges and universities, by claims that there is some organized "right-wing outrage machine" or "right wing conspiracy" at play, generating hysteria. And the same leftist enablers have the unmitigated gall to continue insisting that the majority of the American right are idiots and ignorant types.


The fact of the matter is that bull like this (the topic of the linked article) is common on many college campuses nowadays. To deny that fact is either being outright dishonest, engaging in deliberate deflection, or are ill-informed.


Thankfully, there are still some sane people among the American left who don't by into this post-modernist, neo-progessive crap, or engage in denial that the regressive left exists and is a major influence in modern universities.

If it's common, you wouldn't mind providing some more evidence then?

Or are you just "outraged"?

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Just yet another example of how post-modernist, neo-progressivism, and third wave feminism (all typically lumped together under the category of "regressive left"), are a disease that is dragging down institutions of higher learning.

And by lumping everything together like that, despite the fact that those things have very little to do with each other, you demonstrate that you're more interested in parroting right-wing propaganda than seriously analyzing the issue here. And it's hardly a "disease dragging down institutions of higher learning". The fact that the right-wing outrage machine had to resort to pulling up some random student at the University of North Dakota (again, hardly a prestigious school) as their best example is a fairly strong argument that this thing isn't much of a problem. If it was really such a widespread problem as the right-wing outrage machine suggests there would be better examples from the elite universities, and a lot of them.

Some liberals and traditional leftists, as part of a knee jerk reaction, enable this crap and the dumbing down of colleges and universities, by claims that there is some organized "right-wing outrage machine" or "right wing conspiracy" at play, generating hysteria.

You'll notice that at no point in posting here did I defend the legitimacy of the author's claims (nor will I, since they seem to have very obvious flaws). The issue with the right-wing outrage machine is that the article in the OP can best be summed up as "occasionally college students say stupid ". If you look hard enough eventually you'll find someone saying something really stupid, and maybe they'll even be in a PhD program while they say it. But this paper that would probably never have been read by anyone outside the author's department is held up as an example as if it was someone with real influence saying those things. It's clickbait garbage appealing to the desire to get angry about "leftist" ruining the world, nothing more.

And the same leftist enablers have the unmitigated gall to continue insisting that the majority of the American right are idiots and ignorant types.

One look at the republican party platform and the number of people supporting Trump would suggest that this claim, while insulting, is probably not far from the truth.

The fact of the matter is that bull like this (the topic of the linked article) is common on many college campuses nowadays. To deny that fact is either being outright dishonest, engaging in deliberate deflection, or are ill-informed.

Oh really? Then why is the University of North Dakota the best example for the article in the OP? Why not find some examples of this happening at prestigious programs at an elite university.

Thankfully, there are still some sane people among the American left who don't by into this post-modernist, neo-progessive crap, or engage in denial that the regressive left exists and is a major influence in modern universities.

What the hell does "regressive left" even mean? And how is it compatible with "neo-progressive" as a description? You do realize that "progressive" and "regressive" are polar opposites, right? Do any of these labels have any meaning outside of the right-wing outrage machine?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_left

 Mozzyfuzzy wrote:
If it's common, you wouldn't mind providing some more evidence then?

Or are you just "outraged"?

Nice try at deflection. You know how to use google,, don't you?


It's not up to me to do your research for you just to prove a point in this thread. The information can be found easily online and from a variety of sites.


And no, I'm not "outraged". Just saddened to see our education system sink further down the crapper. First, we had to fight the racists in the education system in the 1950's. Then the wanna-be revolutionaries disrupting and rioting on campuses in the 1960's. Then the Jerry Falwell types in the 1980's. And now, the regressive leftists in the so-called "current year". What next, I wonder?

Well in the UK, I think it's about taking us back to 1970's Socialism, where "Trotskyists" abound.

I don't know what the "right wing outrage machine" is or any of the other buzzword political terms thrown about here. I just find it sad that this is the kind of thing most people will think nowadays when your hear the word "feminism".

Sadly, it's what I think a lot of the time too; there seem to be a lot more people like this out there than ever before claiming to be SJW's (or whatever term for them is in right now) and doing a complete disservice to the point of the movement in bringing the rights of women as close to men as possible.