Thank you for this very interesting analysis. As a lifelong academic (my PhD is in biological psychology), my opinion is that much of this is driven by arrogance and intellectual laziness. It's much easier to teach one's political/social points of view about science than to teach the science itself. And it's much easier to get student buy-in when you're simply making things up. I saw the roots of this at The University of Chicago when I was a graduate student in the late 1980's, and I see it now in some of my younger students. It takes no intellectual acumen or effort to concoct a wild story about whiteboards. So, of course it is appealing to do so if you garner accolades. Oddly, I see part of the solution tied to reinforcing academic standards, and having the honesty to call out ridiculousness when it appears (as we do on our Substacks).. Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick
Whatever their philosophical foundations, if any, the key manifestation of "woke" is the claim to a life without responsibility, for the woke, and a life of blame, for the un-woke (i.e. the oppressors).
Excuse my shouting but, THIS IS A DELIBERATE MARXIST REGIME. And by Marxist, I mean a world view that life is only a power struggle between groups, and the only righteous outcome is the supremacy of the proletariat visionaries, measured by the vanquishing of all disagreeable individuals and organizations.
All the expressions of this cultural or Neo-Marxism, from DEI to race, gender, body shape, etc varieties of critical theory are just tactics. Yes, many of the dimwitted woke see these as worthy social ends, but the cabal pushing the core agenda will not stop until they have destroyed all of the core values of our Western enlightenment-based intellectual and cultural systems. Most pertinent here is their goal of crushing what we cherish as science, to be replaced by dogmatic post-modern sophistry, spiced with some indigenous fables.
Perhaps this sounds like tin foil hat paranoia. But the woke have openly told us they planned a long march through our core institutions. And just because many of the marchers are not versant in Marx or Marcuse (or Foucault or Freire) does not mean they do not support the ultimate goal of a totalitarian world.
ps. Welcome back to the unwoke world, Micheal.
pps. Trying to defeat the woke with logic and reasoning will fail, since they reject these (and even the concept of objective truth).
pps. I am in the middle of Weiss' On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, and recommend it highly.
This manical obsession withc Marxism / Communism in the US (and Britain) always confuses me. The "woke" ideology is based on radical construcivism AND protestantic ethics than any Marxistic economic theoreme (some even contrary). Maybe a relict of McCartyiism, maybe MAGA disinformation - whatever. Foucault maybe (he wrote many things) but certainly not Marx.
We can argue about terminology but the essence of classical Marxism and post-modern woke-ism more than overlap: life is a power struggle between oppressors and victims (monetary class or race-sex-gender-other groups), group identity is al that matters (individuals have no rights), objective inquiry, e.g. science is heresy when it challenges (Neo-)Marxist doctrine, and utopia requires totalitarian control of society (by the right people, of course). Economic Marxism failed in the US and elsewhere in the early 20th century, but did destroy millions in places like the USSR and China. Nationalist Marxism, aka fascism, seduced people in the mid 20th century, and induced global turmoil and death. Let's hope cultural Marxism (or whatever you want to call it) dies out before it harms more people.
You just labeled Marxism as a form of fascism. You have in doing so defined yourself as beneath intellectual notice. It was obvious from your first post that you are of the political right but anyone who doesn't know the difference between Marxism and Fascism is below the salt.
So, Wise One, tell us where you think fascism came from. And the legacy of the first fascists, their strategies, and economic goals. BTW, I mean the long history of fascism, not just the pop culture ideas taught in the last 10 years.
"One wonders what the authors make of “blackboards”." Obviously, the switch from blackboards to whiteboards in classrooms was a reaction to the civil rights movement and attempt to reassert white supremacy in the classroom. OBVIOUSLY.
I forgot about green boards! I think they came into widespread usage after I had finished attending school in the 1970s. And I never worked anywhere that had green boards.
“Does anyone actually believe such claptrap?” That is the core question. What in the world are they thinking?
For humans it’s not enough to hold correct beliefs. It’s important to recruit others to collective action around held beliefs, because on the evolutionary scale humans seek social support for survival. A strong mechanism for this recruitment is moralizing perceived threat. This is why all the woke speech sanitizing is presented as a moral imperative. Moral repugnance facilitates emotional recruitment.
A subtlety of this dynamic is that people may intuitively embrace beliefs with compelling moralizing content primarily because of their recruitment potential into coalition--- the moralizing is more primary than the validity of the speech.
This is why invoking “the importance of speaking truth to power” always feels a bit feeble to me. Not that I have a better suggestion, but this wokeness contaminating science is such an atavistic tribalism that it feels impervious to reason. I keep thinking that what is needed is some strong, charismatic leadership at the top of academia.
One reason Trump got elected because many people saw that Biden's mental clothes were worn down despite legacy media and the Democratic Party conspiring to conceal that.
You’re a fool if you think this. Trump and his NIH nominee Bhattacharya have always said they’d seek to punish universities that they view as too “woke” by withholding grant funding big if you (and Shermer) are OK with that, your real objection is not to ideological considerations in science funding decisions. What you really want is to impose your ideology on science funding decisions. I’ve yet to see Shermer say word one about this. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-research-grants-woke-b2660318.html
Where has Bhattacharya said this? He is a vast improvement. He is a Stanford University professor who is both a medical doctor and epidemiologist and has a Ph.D. in economics. His 27-page CV lists 152 peer-reviewed articles, 63 non-peer-reviewed articles, eight books and reports, and 15 book chapters. He has applied for and received multiple research grants from the NIH and knows that institution well. Oh, yes, he was also correct about Covid responses and was persecuted for daring to disagree.
The woke are equal parts delusional and evil. I am amazed at the ease with which they subsume institutions and get everyone on lockstep with their madness.
I know there is more to it than gender ideology but it's in gender ideology that the woke movement reaches peak absurdity. And it is with gender ideology that woke is collapsing the fastest, because its absurdity is so direct. There is no epistemological subtlety in "men and women are interchangeable."
Excellent summary! Unfortunately, the number of exhibits of wokeness from each domain — education, scientific publishing, science funding — can be easily extended 100-fold (see, for example, the references at the end of this post: https://hxstem.substack.com/p/merit-based-science-is-effective). The extent of wokeness (Critical Social Justice ideology) in science is massive!
It will take a tremendous effort to reverse this death spiral, and it will not happen unless more scientists will be willing to speak up and to fight the Woke on the ground. As I said in my keynote: "I find the current situation precarious. CSJ ideology is pernicious and it must be stopped. But to stop it, people must act. Currently, the majority is against DEI, but most keep silent. Some say, it is not important, it is just a pillow fight among academics. To this I say, it is not. The ideology is already undermining our research, education, and funding in a major way. Some say, it is a pendulum, it will swing back. To that I want to remind about the USSR. The pendulum that was set in motion in 1917 never came back. Is it coming back now? Let’s not deceive ourselves—politicians in Washington may roll back some of the most outrageous DEI policies, but they won’t fix our universities, our professional societies, our publishing houses. We should do the work ourselves."
Gimme a break — if you think “wokeness” poisons science, wait till every science institution in the federal government is either dismantled by Trump’s minions or turned into laughable pseudoscience propaganda.
Well, my life is now shortened by the time it took to wade through this pile of gibberish.
At no point do you define what "woke" is, and merely use your words to rail and rant against some bizarre implementations of policy.
Being "woke" is the understanding that "the man" does not have your best interest at heart. That "he will use you to advance his own interests, and trample you into the dust in the process". Any other definition is something you are making up to counter a boogieman you have invented.
Perhaps there is some small group of people out there who believe in whatever it is you are trying (unsuccessfully) to describe except in the broadest negative terms, but I struggle to believe that what you are describing represents anything like mainstream thought, or liberal thought or democrat thought of any organized kind.
A better definition of what I (as a liberal thinker) believe, is that people should have equal opportunity, given equal ability.
It is still provably true that people of different gender, colour or beliefs are denied equal opportunity in many areas, and are over-represented in certain negative categories (lifespan, disease outcomes, law enforcement stops, arrests, prosecutions and prison time) all other things being equal. Any mention of these facts is conspicuously absent in your screed, and I challenge you to address them in any meaningful way instead of erecting an elaborate straw man.
Terrific! I was a 40 yr subscriber to SciAm. As I cancelled my subscription I wrote the editor and said it was like reading Psychology Today. Is SciAm bankrupt yet?
I understand the concern of the article. The examples given seem extreme and make me wonder what is really typical. Are there extreme examples on the other side? (Is MAGA the opposite of "woke"?)
I think the course on Black Holes-race and the cosmos is using astronomical terms as a metaphor. It states using art and music in creative ways. Also, recent studies I've seen on transgender care point to positive outcomes. I don't see a reason government should be telling parents, kids, and doctors what to do.
And yet, not one word about how anti science on the right is destroying science. Louisiana, just banned promoting of vaccines in their public health agencies. And it will not be the last state to do this. People, children, will die.
The key insight about trans is "tabula rasa". Trans takes the blank slate to the complete extreme, denying biology, positing the completely idiotic notion that a male brain is found inside a female body. There are thousands of young people whose futures have been destroyed by this insanity.
The question for the next 4 years is "What were you doing when trans was destroying children?" This question will be put to many.
Why is that idiotic? Do you have any scientific data establishing that it's impossible for the formation of the brain and the genitals to occasionally have divergent outcomes, or is this more "trust me, Bro" shite from someone who apparently thinks that our bimodal manifestations of sex are somehow a Platonic form rather than an accident that stuck?
I wanna know how you ever embraced wokeness in the first place. I embraced a few ideas initially, and tentatively, because when you've been liberal (or any other POV) all your life, you don't see the monster in your own basement. But I always knew something was wrong with it--the victimhood obsession, the notion that 'transwomen are women' even though they plainly weren't, but I was new to the subject and hadn't yet identified the misogyny, opportunism, and sexual predation rife in the movement, even as there were more honest transfolk who had transitioned for many good and bad reasons, but none of them rolling back women's rights.
But you're a professional skeptic and I, and probably most folks reading your excellent articles, are amateurs who don't do it professionally. I would be genuinely curious to know more about how much you embraced woke ideas, where you now see how you got it wrong, *why* you initially got it wrong, and what made you 'see the light'.
One notes that Shermer has not made a single complaint about the openly stated intent by Trump and his NIH nominee Jay Bhattacharya to explicitly base grant funding decisions on ideological purity tests and withhold grant funding from universities deemed too “woke.” Basically, he’s not against ideology tainting science. He’s for ideology he agrees with tainting science. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-research-grants-woke-b2660318.html
You see, I’d believe Shermer if he showed equal alarm at all the right wingers, now that they will sun be in power again, salivating at the prospect of imposing their ideology on science policy and research funding related to women’s reproductive health, climate science, the environment, etc., etc. He’s oddly untroubled by this, which is very telling.
This article demonstrates why conservatives are underrepresented in academia. Sherman teaches college students? And has run a magazine about science since 1991? And yet his arguments are nonsensical and are racist pseudo science. It would get a gentleman's 'C' at best if turned in by an undergraduate.
He starts with a couple of straw men. I can't speak for all liberals, but I certainly don't believe humans start as a blank slate. As for that old libertarian canard about "equality of outcomes" I don't know anyone who believes that unless by "outcome" you mean a living wage, food security, a decent place to live, and access to medical care.
But then he starts confusing what he's saying about individuals by applying it to groups, where statistics do apply, and ventures down the path of racist pseudo-science championed by past morons like Charles Murray.
Yup, and then he goes into the usual tropes about gender, sex, and trans people, plus complaints about respecting indigenous cultures. It's really depressing to see just how far Shermer has fallen. I can't believe I used to admire the guy so much back in the day, although in retrospect 20 years ago he "doubted" climate science and human-caused climate change and only grudgingly came around to sort of accepting the science. Seriously, libertarianism causes brain rot with respect to science, and I say this as someone who considered himself libertarian-adjacent, if not outright libertarian, until the early 2000s.
About 20 years ago, he was pretty great about most things. His book on Holocaust denial from around 2000 inspired me, as did his book Why People Believe Weird Things. Everything he's been doing since around 2019-20, though, has been profoundly cringe, and he's been reminding me of the risk of audience capture making you become what you used to despise.
But the "tabula rasa" has been the dominant intellectual lens in psychology for many years. True, that the demonstration of language learning (which occurs very fast in young persons and is not dependent on reinforcement), food aversion (1 trial learning), and others have led to doubt. But "tabula rasa sex function" explains the trans idiocy.
Charles Murray was not a moron. He just has doubters in the idiogencia.
No, it hasn't been the dominant intellectual lens. Your claim is nonsensical. And yes- Charles Murray is a moron. His claims are racist pseudo-intellectual bullshit that were well known to be bullshit when he published them, never mind now that we have the data from the Genome Project.
Only a complete moron like you, David, who obviously knows nothing about the federal grant process would raise such a bullshit issue. The ONLY approach to grants should be "base" in that it reflects merit and scientific need.
I guess my lack of knowledge of how NIH and other federal research grants are awarded must be why I’ve had a few (including one NIH R01) and served on NIH study sections (and other review panels). How else would I know enough to write a post like this? 🙄 https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-nih-study-sections-a-waste-of-time/
Recently, though? I assure you that none of the stuff Shermer rants about came up during the September NIH study section meeting I participated in. The discussion was just science and whether the facilities and investigators were capable of doing the work proposed. I’ve never seen anything anywhere close to what Shermer describes, in NIH and DoD study sections, at least. You and Shermer appear to spend too much time in right wing fever swamps online. The most “woke” thing about the whole meeting was that they included a mandatory (and brief) online training module on implicit bias in the orientation materials. I had no problem with it.
I do remain amused that, because I disagreed with you, you immediately called me a “moron” and leapt to the conclusion that I had no experience with grant reviews by federal agencies like the NIH, though. Very revealing, and not in a good way.
One last thing. Shermer was never “woke.” He might think he was, but I followed his work back in the day and even occasionally socialized with him at skeptic conferences ten to fifteen years ago. He was not “woke.” In fairness, I wasn’t either back then. I’m probably not even that “woke” now, but I am very good at recognizing bullshit, and there’s a lot of it in Shermer’s “Why I Am No Longer Woke” series so far.
Thank you for this very interesting analysis. As a lifelong academic (my PhD is in biological psychology), my opinion is that much of this is driven by arrogance and intellectual laziness. It's much easier to teach one's political/social points of view about science than to teach the science itself. And it's much easier to get student buy-in when you're simply making things up. I saw the roots of this at The University of Chicago when I was a graduate student in the late 1980's, and I see it now in some of my younger students. It takes no intellectual acumen or effort to concoct a wild story about whiteboards. So, of course it is appealing to do so if you garner accolades. Oddly, I see part of the solution tied to reinforcing academic standards, and having the honesty to call out ridiculousness when it appears (as we do on our Substacks).. Thank you again. Sincerely, Frederick
Whatever their philosophical foundations, if any, the key manifestation of "woke" is the claim to a life without responsibility, for the woke, and a life of blame, for the un-woke (i.e. the oppressors).
Excuse my shouting but, THIS IS A DELIBERATE MARXIST REGIME. And by Marxist, I mean a world view that life is only a power struggle between groups, and the only righteous outcome is the supremacy of the proletariat visionaries, measured by the vanquishing of all disagreeable individuals and organizations.
All the expressions of this cultural or Neo-Marxism, from DEI to race, gender, body shape, etc varieties of critical theory are just tactics. Yes, many of the dimwitted woke see these as worthy social ends, but the cabal pushing the core agenda will not stop until they have destroyed all of the core values of our Western enlightenment-based intellectual and cultural systems. Most pertinent here is their goal of crushing what we cherish as science, to be replaced by dogmatic post-modern sophistry, spiced with some indigenous fables.
Perhaps this sounds like tin foil hat paranoia. But the woke have openly told us they planned a long march through our core institutions. And just because many of the marchers are not versant in Marx or Marcuse (or Foucault or Freire) does not mean they do not support the ultimate goal of a totalitarian world.
ps. Welcome back to the unwoke world, Micheal.
pps. Trying to defeat the woke with logic and reasoning will fail, since they reject these (and even the concept of objective truth).
pps. I am in the middle of Weiss' On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, and recommend it highly.
This manical obsession withc Marxism / Communism in the US (and Britain) always confuses me. The "woke" ideology is based on radical construcivism AND protestantic ethics than any Marxistic economic theoreme (some even contrary). Maybe a relict of McCartyiism, maybe MAGA disinformation - whatever. Foucault maybe (he wrote many things) but certainly not Marx.
We can argue about terminology but the essence of classical Marxism and post-modern woke-ism more than overlap: life is a power struggle between oppressors and victims (monetary class or race-sex-gender-other groups), group identity is al that matters (individuals have no rights), objective inquiry, e.g. science is heresy when it challenges (Neo-)Marxist doctrine, and utopia requires totalitarian control of society (by the right people, of course). Economic Marxism failed in the US and elsewhere in the early 20th century, but did destroy millions in places like the USSR and China. Nationalist Marxism, aka fascism, seduced people in the mid 20th century, and induced global turmoil and death. Let's hope cultural Marxism (or whatever you want to call it) dies out before it harms more people.
You just labeled Marxism as a form of fascism. You have in doing so defined yourself as beneath intellectual notice. It was obvious from your first post that you are of the political right but anyone who doesn't know the difference between Marxism and Fascism is below the salt.
So, Wise One, tell us where you think fascism came from. And the legacy of the first fascists, their strategies, and economic goals. BTW, I mean the long history of fascism, not just the pop culture ideas taught in the last 10 years.
Congratulations Hans, you just made his point!
Marx never wrote a word about identity politics.
Hey, Chris, try to keep up and read all the words.
"One wonders what the authors make of “blackboards”." Obviously, the switch from blackboards to whiteboards in classrooms was a reaction to the civil rights movement and attempt to reassert white supremacy in the classroom. OBVIOUSLY.
What about the greenboards? They were common when I was in university. Do they make racist comments about the little green men from space?
I forgot about green boards! I think they came into widespread usage after I had finished attending school in the 1970s. And I never worked anywhere that had green boards.
“Does anyone actually believe such claptrap?” That is the core question. What in the world are they thinking?
For humans it’s not enough to hold correct beliefs. It’s important to recruit others to collective action around held beliefs, because on the evolutionary scale humans seek social support for survival. A strong mechanism for this recruitment is moralizing perceived threat. This is why all the woke speech sanitizing is presented as a moral imperative. Moral repugnance facilitates emotional recruitment.
A subtlety of this dynamic is that people may intuitively embrace beliefs with compelling moralizing content primarily because of their recruitment potential into coalition--- the moralizing is more primary than the validity of the speech.
This is why invoking “the importance of speaking truth to power” always feels a bit feeble to me. Not that I have a better suggestion, but this wokeness contaminating science is such an atavistic tribalism that it feels impervious to reason. I keep thinking that what is needed is some strong, charismatic leadership at the top of academia.
I think there’s hope after the election of Trump. Some people are finally seeing that the emperor has no clothes.
One reason Trump got elected because many people saw that Biden's mental clothes were worn down despite legacy media and the Democratic Party conspiring to conceal that.
You’re a fool if you think this. Trump and his NIH nominee Bhattacharya have always said they’d seek to punish universities that they view as too “woke” by withholding grant funding big if you (and Shermer) are OK with that, your real objection is not to ideological considerations in science funding decisions. What you really want is to impose your ideology on science funding decisions. I’ve yet to see Shermer say word one about this. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-research-grants-woke-b2660318.html
Where has Bhattacharya said this? He is a vast improvement. He is a Stanford University professor who is both a medical doctor and epidemiologist and has a Ph.D. in economics. His 27-page CV lists 152 peer-reviewed articles, 63 non-peer-reviewed articles, eight books and reports, and 15 book chapters. He has applied for and received multiple research grants from the NIH and knows that institution well. Oh, yes, he was also correct about Covid responses and was persecuted for daring to disagree.
I literally included the link to the news story in which he said that. Then there’s this WSJ journal. https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/jay-bhattacharya-national-institute-health-grants-cancel-culture-645101f5
The woke are equal parts delusional and evil. I am amazed at the ease with which they subsume institutions and get everyone on lockstep with their madness.
I know there is more to it than gender ideology but it's in gender ideology that the woke movement reaches peak absurdity. And it is with gender ideology that woke is collapsing the fastest, because its absurdity is so direct. There is no epistemological subtlety in "men and women are interchangeable."
Excellent summary! Unfortunately, the number of exhibits of wokeness from each domain — education, scientific publishing, science funding — can be easily extended 100-fold (see, for example, the references at the end of this post: https://hxstem.substack.com/p/merit-based-science-is-effective). The extent of wokeness (Critical Social Justice ideology) in science is massive!
It will take a tremendous effort to reverse this death spiral, and it will not happen unless more scientists will be willing to speak up and to fight the Woke on the ground. As I said in my keynote: "I find the current situation precarious. CSJ ideology is pernicious and it must be stopped. But to stop it, people must act. Currently, the majority is against DEI, but most keep silent. Some say, it is not important, it is just a pillow fight among academics. To this I say, it is not. The ideology is already undermining our research, education, and funding in a major way. Some say, it is a pendulum, it will swing back. To that I want to remind about the USSR. The pendulum that was set in motion in 1917 never came back. Is it coming back now? Let’s not deceive ourselves—politicians in Washington may roll back some of the most outrageous DEI policies, but they won’t fix our universities, our professional societies, our publishing houses. We should do the work ourselves."
Gimme a break — if you think “wokeness” poisons science, wait till every science institution in the federal government is either dismantled by Trump’s minions or turned into laughable pseudoscience propaganda.
Well, my life is now shortened by the time it took to wade through this pile of gibberish.
At no point do you define what "woke" is, and merely use your words to rail and rant against some bizarre implementations of policy.
Being "woke" is the understanding that "the man" does not have your best interest at heart. That "he will use you to advance his own interests, and trample you into the dust in the process". Any other definition is something you are making up to counter a boogieman you have invented.
Perhaps there is some small group of people out there who believe in whatever it is you are trying (unsuccessfully) to describe except in the broadest negative terms, but I struggle to believe that what you are describing represents anything like mainstream thought, or liberal thought or democrat thought of any organized kind.
A better definition of what I (as a liberal thinker) believe, is that people should have equal opportunity, given equal ability.
It is still provably true that people of different gender, colour or beliefs are denied equal opportunity in many areas, and are over-represented in certain negative categories (lifespan, disease outcomes, law enforcement stops, arrests, prosecutions and prison time) all other things being equal. Any mention of these facts is conspicuously absent in your screed, and I challenge you to address them in any meaningful way instead of erecting an elaborate straw man.
Terrific! I was a 40 yr subscriber to SciAm. As I cancelled my subscription I wrote the editor and said it was like reading Psychology Today. Is SciAm bankrupt yet?
Intellectually bankrupt.
I first read it in January, 1965. There was a Painted Turtle on the cover. I treasured that magazine.
Now? I wouldn't use it as toilet paper.
I understand the concern of the article. The examples given seem extreme and make me wonder what is really typical. Are there extreme examples on the other side? (Is MAGA the opposite of "woke"?)
I think the course on Black Holes-race and the cosmos is using astronomical terms as a metaphor. It states using art and music in creative ways. Also, recent studies I've seen on transgender care point to positive outcomes. I don't see a reason government should be telling parents, kids, and doctors what to do.
And yet, not one word about how anti science on the right is destroying science. Louisiana, just banned promoting of vaccines in their public health agencies. And it will not be the last state to do this. People, children, will die.
In a generation, Louisiana children will be in iron lungs and wheelchairs.
The key insight about trans is "tabula rasa". Trans takes the blank slate to the complete extreme, denying biology, positing the completely idiotic notion that a male brain is found inside a female body. There are thousands of young people whose futures have been destroyed by this insanity.
The question for the next 4 years is "What were you doing when trans was destroying children?" This question will be put to many.
Why is that idiotic? Do you have any scientific data establishing that it's impossible for the formation of the brain and the genitals to occasionally have divergent outcomes, or is this more "trust me, Bro" shite from someone who apparently thinks that our bimodal manifestations of sex are somehow a Platonic form rather than an accident that stuck?
I wanna know how you ever embraced wokeness in the first place. I embraced a few ideas initially, and tentatively, because when you've been liberal (or any other POV) all your life, you don't see the monster in your own basement. But I always knew something was wrong with it--the victimhood obsession, the notion that 'transwomen are women' even though they plainly weren't, but I was new to the subject and hadn't yet identified the misogyny, opportunism, and sexual predation rife in the movement, even as there were more honest transfolk who had transitioned for many good and bad reasons, but none of them rolling back women's rights.
But you're a professional skeptic and I, and probably most folks reading your excellent articles, are amateurs who don't do it professionally. I would be genuinely curious to know more about how much you embraced woke ideas, where you now see how you got it wrong, *why* you initially got it wrong, and what made you 'see the light'.
Whiteboards are racist? What do they say about blackboards?
"Woke" is the church of liberalism.
You’re a buffoon who has no idea what he’s talking about.
One notes that Shermer has not made a single complaint about the openly stated intent by Trump and his NIH nominee Jay Bhattacharya to explicitly base grant funding decisions on ideological purity tests and withhold grant funding from universities deemed too “woke.” Basically, he’s not against ideology tainting science. He’s for ideology he agrees with tainting science. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-research-grants-woke-b2660318.html
You see, I’d believe Shermer if he showed equal alarm at all the right wingers, now that they will sun be in power again, salivating at the prospect of imposing their ideology on science policy and research funding related to women’s reproductive health, climate science, the environment, etc., etc. He’s oddly untroubled by this, which is very telling.
Don't worry, David. He will be troubled when the time comes in the next administration.
TBH, I doubt that he will anymore.
This article demonstrates why conservatives are underrepresented in academia. Sherman teaches college students? And has run a magazine about science since 1991? And yet his arguments are nonsensical and are racist pseudo science. It would get a gentleman's 'C' at best if turned in by an undergraduate.
He starts with a couple of straw men. I can't speak for all liberals, but I certainly don't believe humans start as a blank slate. As for that old libertarian canard about "equality of outcomes" I don't know anyone who believes that unless by "outcome" you mean a living wage, food security, a decent place to live, and access to medical care.
But then he starts confusing what he's saying about individuals by applying it to groups, where statistics do apply, and ventures down the path of racist pseudo-science championed by past morons like Charles Murray.
And that's only the first two paragraphs.
Yup, and then he goes into the usual tropes about gender, sex, and trans people, plus complaints about respecting indigenous cultures. It's really depressing to see just how far Shermer has fallen. I can't believe I used to admire the guy so much back in the day, although in retrospect 20 years ago he "doubted" climate science and human-caused climate change and only grudgingly came around to sort of accepting the science. Seriously, libertarianism causes brain rot with respect to science, and I say this as someone who considered himself libertarian-adjacent, if not outright libertarian, until the early 2000s.
Libertarianism looks great on paper. At least until it comes up against the idea of "externalities", then it falls apart.
I can't say I was familiar with him until his last couple of articles popped into my Substack. I'm not impressed so far.
About 20 years ago, he was pretty great about most things. His book on Holocaust denial from around 2000 inspired me, as did his book Why People Believe Weird Things. Everything he's been doing since around 2019-20, though, has been profoundly cringe, and he's been reminding me of the risk of audience capture making you become what you used to despise.
But the "tabula rasa" has been the dominant intellectual lens in psychology for many years. True, that the demonstration of language learning (which occurs very fast in young persons and is not dependent on reinforcement), food aversion (1 trial learning), and others have led to doubt. But "tabula rasa sex function" explains the trans idiocy.
Charles Murray was not a moron. He just has doubters in the idiogencia.
No, it hasn't been the dominant intellectual lens. Your claim is nonsensical. And yes- Charles Murray is a moron. His claims are racist pseudo-intellectual bullshit that were well known to be bullshit when he published them, never mind now that we have the data from the Genome Project.
Only a complete moron like you, David, who obviously knows nothing about the federal grant process would raise such a bullshit issue. The ONLY approach to grants should be "base" in that it reflects merit and scientific need.
I guess my lack of knowledge of how NIH and other federal research grants are awarded must be why I’ve had a few (including one NIH R01) and served on NIH study sections (and other review panels). How else would I know enough to write a post like this? 🙄 https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-nih-study-sections-a-waste-of-time/
I dunno about you, but I've served on 49 panels for NIMH, NIDDK, NCM, PCORI, and NASA, 2001-2018.
Recently, though? I assure you that none of the stuff Shermer rants about came up during the September NIH study section meeting I participated in. The discussion was just science and whether the facilities and investigators were capable of doing the work proposed. I’ve never seen anything anywhere close to what Shermer describes, in NIH and DoD study sections, at least. You and Shermer appear to spend too much time in right wing fever swamps online. The most “woke” thing about the whole meeting was that they included a mandatory (and brief) online training module on implicit bias in the orientation materials. I had no problem with it.
I do remain amused that, because I disagreed with you, you immediately called me a “moron” and leapt to the conclusion that I had no experience with grant reviews by federal agencies like the NIH, though. Very revealing, and not in a good way.
One last thing. Shermer was never “woke.” He might think he was, but I followed his work back in the day and even occasionally socialized with him at skeptic conferences ten to fifteen years ago. He was not “woke.” In fairness, I wasn’t either back then. I’m probably not even that “woke” now, but I am very good at recognizing bullshit, and there’s a lot of it in Shermer’s “Why I Am No Longer Woke” series so far.