Liberal bias.

[RestlessSoul]

I've not had this issue, not have I heard this as a common criticism.

Yeah, you kind of do have to read it to know it. You don't have to read all of it, but there is no getting out of reading some primary texts if you want to understand someone's ideas.
That is a trap many have fallen into, believing they don't actually have to read it to know it. And then they act like it's a travesty to promote the idea there has never been a Marxist society, something we can say because when you've read Marx and know what he and Engels actually wrote you don't see this going on where people have claimed them, and misunderstandings and fallacies about them run rampant.

Have you read Capital? I've tried, but I doubt many readers have got far with it.

I have a theory that certain texts - James Joyce's Ulysses is another - have only ever been read in their entirety by half a dozen university professors, who have built careers on dissecting and disseminating the unreadable. That doesn't mean those texts haven't had a huge influence on the thinking and philosophy of the cultures from which they emerged.

 

[Augustus]

Academic institutions should hire people that are overly knowledgeable in the topic they are going to be teaching, their political views should not enter into it,

Given that many fields contain a large amount of subjectivity, and that there is no One True Answer to most problems, the degree of knowledge contained within a faculty generally increases with diversity.

If the overly knowledeable people tend to be more left wing, so be it.

This is a very common conceit held by Progressives

I for one don't think we need to be hearing far right wing teachers teach the history of slavery, for instance.

Yet it is great to hear from Marxist teachers of history who were still apologists for the Soviet Union 1980s?

A balanced historical education would contain views from across the political spectrum. Obviously not neo-Nazis of those who are not academically rigorous, but the idea that being 'left-wing' makes history 'objective and honest' is laughable.

 

[Lyndon]

So would you rather learn about Nazi Germany from fascists, than liberals?

 

[Augustus]

So would you rather learn about Nazi Germany from fascists, than liberals?

Lyndon, only you could read a post that suggest being presented with a range of scholarly viewpoints is a good thing, while explicitly noting this does not include neo-Nazi pseudo history and interpret it as advocating for fascism.

Who do you think is better to learn about Stalin from, a Marxist apologist historian or a moderate, centre-right conservative historian (centre-right by European standards)?

 

[Augustus]

I remember watching a discussion of him with Slavoj Zizek on Marxism, where Peterson confessed that despite having railed against "Cultural Marxists" and "Postmodern Neomarxists" for most of his stint as public intellectual, the first time he actually read the Communist Manifesto was in preparation for that debate.

I repeat for effect - when he was about to debate a fairly infamously Marxist intellectual was literally the first time he had read anything at all that had been written by Marx. He had been ranting and raving against a school of thought that he'd known literally nothing about for years before that.

What an "intellectual titan"!

To be fair, if you want to understand Marcuse and Horkheimer, reading the Communist Manifesto is hardly going to help you all that much.

It might be desirable, but it is not essential.

It might be desirable to read Feuerbach and Hegel to help understand Marx, but it is not necessary to understand him.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

How and when did the news media, the entertainment industry, academia, and science gain a liberal bias? It doesn't make sense that corporate types and celebrities would support a political agenda that considers their wealth, products, content, materialism, power and influence to be "decadent". They've sold out to an ideology that if fully in control would send them to the gulag.

An article from Psychology Today

Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives

 

[Augustus]

An article from Psychology Today

Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives

You wouldn't agree that IQ differences between racial groups would warrant a conclusion that "racial group X are more intelligent than racial group Y", would you?

Such a study would show larger differences than between liberals and conservatives too.

I don't put too much stock in IQ as a metric for intelligence for many reasons, at best it measure a particular type of linear reasoning in simple, abstract situations free of risk, real-world consequences or 2nd+ order effects. This might be why 'intelligent' people often get fooled by buying into things that should work 'in theory'.

But if you do, should we judge all groups as being more or less 'intelligent' based on differences in IQ averages? Or only conservatives and liberals?

 

[F1fan]

Marx is virtually unreadable to be fair. Not because the ideas are unintelligible, but because his use of language is turgid in the extreme. The Communist Manifesto is more accessible than Capital, though thin on content, but that’s almost certainly down to Engels’ input.

Unless you read in the original language then it might be a translation issue.

It’s not necessary to have read Marx in the original, to be familiar with Marxist thought. And it’s not necessary to be a committed socialist, to be persuaded by some of Marx’s ideas.

We were assigned the Communist Manifesto in a college philosophy class and the majority were actually more in agreement with what he said than against it. The lesson was how our own USA culture vilified Communism and this negatively influenced our opinions about the ethics and fairness of socialism.

 

[Augustus]

The history of science is one of constant readjustment to what is known to be true. Look at Galileo's observations and how that made Aristotle's model obsolete. Look at Einstein's Relativity theory and how that changed physics. Genetics has changed how we understand evolution, and anthropology. We can trace how humans moved over the planet over time and can pin point when people moved. Science is constantly becoming more accurate and precise, and we have to understand that work my make old theories and models obsolete.

I actually meant the degree to which liberal people are overrepresented.

I would guess they are significantly more overrepresented in social sciences than in STEM subjects.

I'm not sure what you are referring to, replication rates? Do you mean repeating experiments for peer review?

Yes, the degree to which published findings are reproduced when other carry out the same experiments.

When published research has a coin toss chance of being false or correct, then this is a major problem.

 

[RestlessSoul]

AOC is an open far left socialist which tells me that view is skewed by personal bias.

Warren is a bit more complicated , but she's left leaning enough to say it's farther than normal. Just a tad under being an open socialist like Cortez is.

Socialism still a dirty word in the US then? You should probably consider getting over that tbh.

Bernie Sanders or AOC wouldn’t be considered remotely extreme in European politics; although over here there has been an alarming drift to the right.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Socialism still a dirty word in the US then? You should probably consider getting over that tbh.

Socialism has led to disaster in every country that embraces it.

I'll pass.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Socialism has led to disaster in every country that embraces it.

I'll pass.

It worked rather well in the U.K. between 1945-1979.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Have you read Capital?

Yes. My copy has many notes and highlights in it.
Just because you had a problem with it doesn't make it some universal problem that makes him unreadable.

I have a theory that certain texts - James Joyce's Ulysses is another - have only ever been read in their entirety by half a dozen university professors, who have built careers on dissecting and disseminating the unreadable.

People want to say similar things about Heidegger's Being and Time, and while that one can be a difficult read at time, it rarely being taught at the undergrad level doesn't mean it's not approachable or can't be done.
Good academic readings often require note taking, highlighting things, and referencing outside materials (dictionaries and encyclopedias being two very commonly needed rescources).
Lenin, he is one author generally regarded as hard to read, but that's because the way he wrote made a lot of his stuff reads like a technical manual filled with facts and data needed to fill in spreadsheets about early 20th century Russian lumber and coal industries. But it's not actually hard to read as in a very difficult reading level, but because it is very dry, bland, dull, and boring. "What is to be Done?" Make sure the reader knows the exact amount of kilometers of railroads in Russia and all the materials and involved, total costs, financing, and where the money is coming from and going to (but looking more like a checkbook than a "follow the money" sort of thing). (Over exaggerated and hyperbole, but not by that much)

 

[F1fan]

Yes, the degree to which published findings are reproduced when other carry out the same experiments.

When published research has a coin toss chance of being false or correct, then this is a major problem.

As I noted before doing experiments on human behavior has many minor variables that can't be controlled or accounted for which is why the minimum standard is set to 95% versus 99.95% in the physical sciences.

Experiments need to predict what might affect results. Sometimes they can't fully predict a subject pool. When you say half fail ithat could be mistaken as meaning it's an utter failure. Let's say an experiement is conducted and has a rate of 95.5% accuracy and succeeds as a theory. But then a second experiment comes back at 04% accurate, so is then deemed outside the minimum. This suggests the hypothesis has merit but there are variables it needs to account for before more testing.

That experiments fail is part of how science works. It's always working for more answers and more precision.

 

[F1fan]

Socialism has led to disaster in every country that embraces it.

I'll pass.

Classic socialism, perhaps. The USA, like many other nations, is mostly a socialist nation. It's a matter of the degree to which the socialist ideas are applied. The USA is very light on the level of socialist ideas it applies, and or society suffers for it.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

AOC is an open far left socialist which tells me that view is skewed by personal bias.

Warren is a bit more complicated , but she's left leaning enough to say it's farther than normal. Just a tad under being an open socialist like Cortez is.

If you think that AOC is "far left," then I suggest taking your personal Overton Window in to get checked out.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

In Canada she would fit in the NDP, our left wing party.

Yeah?

I kinda see her more aligned with the Liberals.

 

[epronovost]

Yeah?

I kinda see her more aligned with the Liberals.

Debatable, but the point remains that she isn't, by the standard of any other liberal democracy an extremist or a member of a fringe ideology.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

When published research has a coin toss chance of being false or correct, then this is a major problem.

That's what peer review and having others repeating the same experiment is for.
What's really problematic is the massive pressure to get published. This is why basically just about everything causes cancer, because those funding the studies tend to not like their investment coming up empty handed, but science does that more than anything. But when people demand results and researches are obligated and mandated to get published or lose their job, coming up empty handed doesn't work so statistics are played with until there is "something."
And deliberately publishing a false narrative to counter emerging studies that are legit but damning for those with certain business interests (the NFL is a great example of an agency that has been a true ******* over this and still refuses to acknowledge the link between playing football and the risk of head trauma).
But, inherently publishing studies that may or may not be accurate, that's just what humans do because we are hopelessly prone to our own biases. This is why we must have others retracing our steps.

 

[Kooky]

To be fair, if you want to understand Marcuse and Horkheimer, reading the Communist Manifesto is hardly going to help you all that much.

And yet, he only ever read the Manifesto, and only in preparation for debating Zizek.
He hadn't even read any of Zizek's own works, IIRC.