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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 5,181
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LOL. Good point, mithawk. It also doesn't begin to address the more subtle sort of opinion-slyly-expressed-as-expertise/fact, such as those which are periodically expressed by N. Christakis, referenced on the previous page. I knew that I recognized that name from a hack bit that he published a few years ago.
DOCTOR Christakis is one of those individuals who is primarily a great believer in the origins of his own opinions as some kind of supreme validation of those same opinions. In my own opinion, naturally. I definitely apply a bias filter to anything related to him, and remember that he seems to have a predilection for seeking media attention with outrageous and provocative actions or statements on a semi-regular basis.
Just noting that. He's the Ivy League's answer to Howard Stern, quite bluntly. While I'm not innately feeling the need to be protected from such shenanigans, I also recognize that people like him can (and quite probably DO) cause some harm in the way of collateral damage in their Quixotic engagement in the culture wars. Oh well.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Nov 2011
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Howler,
I recognized the name as well, but couldn't place it. What was the hack bit he published a few years ago?
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Joined: Nov 2011
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stemfun,
That was an informative article. It didn't come out and say it, but the measured IQ differences among different groups has much more to do with culture than with race.
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Joined: Feb 2011
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Howler,
I recognized the name as well, but couldn't place it. What was the hack bit he published a few years ago? BMJ. 2008. I'm still not exactly over my angst that BMJ even saw fit to publish what was essentially the ranting of a petulant parent, albeit from the pen of a Harvard professor who used his connections and credentials to get it into print. It was appallingly ill-informed, (and frankly, I personally consider it extremely unprofessional to have used one's credentials that way) and a fair number of actual expert researchers and physicians in the field slapped him pretty hard in response, but the damage was done. The media latched onto the original because it was so-- provocative. Seems to be a trend. 
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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The Rise of the College CrybulliesBy ROGER KIMBALL Wall Street Journal November 13, 2015 For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.
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What is happening? Is it a reprise of the late 1960s and 1970s, when campuses across the country were sites of violent protests? In my book “Tenured Radicals: How Politics Have Corrupted Our Higher Education,” I showed how the radical ideology of the 1960s had been institutionalized, absorbed into the moral tissues of the American educational establishment.
As one left-wing professor wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.”
“Tenured Radicals” provides an account of that reshaping, focusing especially on what it has meant for the substance of a college education. The book includes a section on “academia and infantilization.” But when I wrote in 2008, the rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “microaggressions” and “trigger warnings” had not yet colluded to bring forth that new academic phenomenon, at once tender and vicious, the crybully.
The crybully, who has weaponized his coveted status as a victim, was first sighted in the mid-2000s. He has two calling cards, race and gender. By coincidence Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, was involved in the evolution of both.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Howler,
I recognized the name as well, but couldn't place it. What was the hack bit he published a few years ago? BMJ. 2008. I'm still not exactly over my angst that BMJ even saw fit to publish what was essentially the ranting of a petulant parent, albeit from the pen of a Harvard professor who used his connections and credentials to get it into print. It was appallingly ill-informed, (and frankly, I personally consider it extremely unprofessional to have used one's credentials that way) and a fair number of actual expert researchers and physicians in the field slapped him pretty hard in response, but the damage was done. The media latched onto the original because it was so-- provocative. Seems to be a trend. The email that sparked the Yale controversy is at https://www.thefire.org/email-from-...ege-yale-students-on-halloween-costumes/ . I don't think its contents justify the vitriolic reactions of some of the Yale students.
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Joined: Nov 2012
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Howler,
I recognized the name as well, but couldn't place it. What was the hack bit he published a few years ago? BMJ. 2008. I'm still not exactly over my angst that BMJ even saw fit to publish what was essentially the ranting of a petulant parent, albeit from the pen of a Harvard professor who used his connections and credentials to get it into print. It was appallingly ill-informed, (and frankly, I personally consider it extremely unprofessional to have used one's credentials that way) and a fair number of actual expert researchers and physicians in the field slapped him pretty hard in response, but the damage was done. The media latched onto the original because it was so-- provocative. Seems to be a trend. Are you talking about his paper on happiness and social network? What is so objectionable about that? I don't have an opinion. Just curious.
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No, I refer to his armchair diagnosis of mass psychogenic illness, because apparently in addition to his other credentials, he's picked up degrees in both pediatric immunology (and outrage) on the side as well. Well, maybe they were honorary degrees. Or independent study or something.  I have no opinion about his wife one way or the other, but there is such a thing as being insensitive to the point of creating a hostile learning environment, surely.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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No, I refer to his armchair diagnosis of mass psychogenic illness, because apparently in addition to his other credentials, he's picked up degrees in both pediatric immunology (and outrage) on the side as well. Well, maybe they were honorary degrees. Or independent study or something. I have no opinion about his wife one way or the other, but there is such a thing as being insensitive to the point of creating a hostile learning environment, surely. Something that he wrote 7 years ago is irrelevant to what happened at Yale last week. He was calm in spite of being surrounded by an angry mob. He mentioned creating an "intellectual space" at Yale; he was cut off by a pugnacious pseudo-oppressed child of privilege who told him that his job was not about intellectual spaces, but rather to create a home for us! He told the students that while he disagreed with what they were saying, he supported their right to say it completely, that freedom of expression is a cornerstone of our democracy, and that people who disagree with the students also have a right to speak. They shouted him down. Who was creating the hostile environment? The calm professor who was calmly trying to discuss basic principles of American constitutional law, or the mob? The dominance of PC ideology started when I was in college in the mid/late 80s. It was appalling then, and it's far worse now. My eldest will be going to college soon, and I wonder about spending a king's ransom to send him to places where dressing up like a mariachi band is considered to be racist, where administrators kowtow to spoiled children throwing tantrums, and where dissent from PC groupthink is increasingly not tolerated in the name of "sensitivity." Now I have to write this part so that I won't get e-lynched: I'm not talking about very real problems with racism in this country. I've spent some time in the deep south, and am appalled at the ubiquitous casual racism I see there. And I know it happens all over this country. I'm not talking about that here, nor the very real need to protest it. Okay?
Last edited by Val; 11/16/15 10:15 AM.
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