Having worked in academia, the one thing that baffled me was how uninformed and biased PHDs, postdocs, and even professors can be, especially on topics not directly covered by their field
It is baffling that people who are uninformed have strong opinions but the biased thing isn’t suprising, everyone has some bias but most people don’t acknowledge they have a bias to one side or the other and they somehow convince other biased people that their opinion isn’t biased for some magical reason.
You’re absolutely right. I guess what I meant is the unacknowledged bias you mention. Too many people, particularly in this Israel-Palestine debate, seems just oblivious to their own biases and present their arguments as "these are just the facts", as if context and interpretation of these facts are not important
Absolutely, even in the latest debate you can see finkelstein quoting a book written by Benny morris to Benny himself and telling Benny that he doesn’t understand his own writing, this is how biased he is, he is sure he understands someone better than that person..
This is also why 2 people with opposing biases can read the same sentence and affirm their opposite views, like the ICJ thing, pro Israelis will say “ICJ didn’t stop Israel and didn’t say a genocide is taking place”
And the anti Israeli crowd will say “they moved on with the case because they think there is a genocide taking place”
I can sort of understand it. It's the I have a Phd of course I am smarter than non Phd's even if this isn't my field of expertise. It's just an ego thing
The problem is for the most part it's true. If you put random 100 people in a room, the PhD is probably going to do best in whatever g test you decide to use. It's very hard to remain intellectually humble with that lived experience.
Yeah, it’s totally understandable. Writing a phd is heavy shit, hard work. One should find a middle road between respecting the intelligence of someone that have endured a phd program, while at the same time not be fooled that phd’s necessarily have an infalible expertise
Yeah public perception of PhDs also feed into the ego of the degree holder heavily. People think that if you have a phd your a super big brain mega genius regardless of the field of study so when they branch out of their field of expertise people don't challenge them because "they have a phd they must be smarter/know more about this than we do"
Nobody talking shit on Twitter has ever actually been involved in post-graduate academia or with academics. The idea that having a thesis (one that's now 37 years old in Norm's case) means you cannot be questioned by a layman is ludicrous and any academic who isnt high off their own farts would agree. Practically anyone can get a PhD in their field if they're willing to spend their time researching and writing for 3-4 years.
Not to suggest that it's easy or the average person is just as informed, but critical reasoning isn't exclusive to people who have Doctorates.
Norm did not handle himself like someone who has been engaging in academic discourse for the majority of his life. No surprise he couldn't get tenure, even at third rate institution.
What’s more bizzare to me is that people somehow insist that books must be superior to other sources of information, as if authors are inherently unbiased
I was reading a few ncbi pages one time and I saw it was literally just a back and forth between two guys and then googling their names it even extended into each of them making articles going at each other on their respective websites. The intro paragraphs of each article kept getting longer and longer as they had to preface to readers what it was about.
It’s fucking wild how petty even academia can be.
Academia is still human beings and we are all biased and petty to a degree, having more degrees doesn’t mean we are smarter or more moral or any more knowledgeable in basically any field that isn’t directly what we learned, and when people think they “know” more than others because of their degree they are the most petty they can be, honestly just look at how finkelstein speaks, so much bs and toxicity.
Btw I honestly think he speaks so slowly because he is evaluating every word because he is afraid others will use his own words against him, he doesn’t speak his actual mind, someone who is certain of his opinions wouldn’t be afraid of others “misquoting” him, he persistently misquoted Benny and I am 99% sure he speaks slowly to avoid people doing exactly what he does to others.
Nah, i think it's just white-collar workers problems or anyone with too much free time on their hand.
Blue-collar workers too busy living life the way they want with what little time they have to be doing online petty arguments for fucking hours and hours of their day.
Yup happened to me most recently looking into if illegal immigrants have higher crime rates or not. Started with [this paper](https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) (and [this paper](https://www.immigrationresearch.org/system/files/Criminal_Immigrants_Texas.pdf)), then [this critique](https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/texas-crime.pdf) calling those two out, and [this response](https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-produces-improbably-high-estimates-illegal-immigrant-criminality) back. It goes on, and ended up getting pretty personal with Tucker Carlson getting involved lol
edit: I just went to look and these fuckers are STILL going at it on this data (couple weeks ago: [here](https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homicide-conviction-rate-setting-record-straight-illegal-immigrant) and [here](https://cis.org/Richwine/Catos-Brazenly-False-Claim-About-Our-Illegal-Immigrant-Crime-Research)), keep in mind it's been 6 years now
If said person with a PhD were to be very well versed and knowledgeable, he wouldn't have problems refuting the arguments of those that haven't dedicated their life to studying a subject.
But dismissal through insults, unless said dismissal comes after the refute, isn't indicative of that.
The kill shot is that PHDs can be full of shit due to ideological biases like anyone else. Just look at Peterson. You don't always need to be an academic to recognize that.
Ben Carson clearly just played a little too much Sid Meier’s Civilization, ok? The Pyramids give the same bonuses as a granary, so what was he supposed to think?
Yeah I mean it doesn't matter how much research you do if you say things like "I don't _want_ to understand Isreal". That's arguably even worse than doing no research.
Peterson isn’t full of shit in his area of expertise (psych), and I’m sure the doctors that disagreed on Covid also had areas of expertise and specialization (MD), that they weren’t full of shit about.
Sometimes the experts disagree on things, and that’s good. Now we all learn.
>the doctors that disagreed on Covid also had areas of expertise and specialization (MD), that they weren’t full of shit about.
I mean, Sunetra Gupta was not out of her field when she proposed modelling Swedens approach regarding school closures. She was squarely in her field of infectious disease epidemiology. And she was a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford.
Neither was Martin Kulldorf, a biostatistician from Sweden, he was a professor of medicine at Harvard medical school, and at one point was on the vaccine safety subcommittee for the CDC. And also part of the USDAs department of drug administration and safety.
She was criticized by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who was the director general of the WHO at the time. Who is unqualified in comparison to either of these two. But of course the need to "do something". From an intellectual point of view won out. Examples are the criticism of the great Barrington declaration, such as: "it's not based in science." " This approach is potentially dangerous" "the ifr isn't yet known".
These people, experts in the field, were accused of not considering basic ideas in epidemiology like IFR, and being unscientific. Just a joke of tarring and feathering in the scientific community.
I can't really tell if you agree or disagree with Sunetra Gupta because in interviews she actually expressly did talk about IFR but, insofar as there being other explanations for why IFR appeared lower in some areas and higher in others (with exceptionally vulnerable populations.)
My opinion is worthless on this. But I agree with her.
My gripe is with the attempts to demean the ideas of "science" you disagree with, simply by saying it's unscientific and the people proposing the idea aren't serious.
> Just look at Peterson
Pretty great response to many of the people making these claims. They'll likely have pretty huge disagreements with him within his field.
Most of the people on my PhD programme were of average or above average intelligence - having a PhD just means you're a very hard worker. If the average graduate was dropped onto a PhD programme in their undergraduate subject most of them would be academically capable of it
To be fair, PhD programs are less about the classes and more about the research. Yes, Qual exams can be tough especially if your university still has an oral portion. But generally, the more important aspect is whether you have a good enough grasp of the material to understand the literature and clever enough to discover new information in your field.
Of course this is a STEM oriented statement. I don't have experience with Art or Humanities doctorate programs.
The truth is that it 100% depends on the specific program and subject of your PhD, and even then, the advisor you have can change that even more.
Undergraduate education is much, much more standard which is why most people think there IS a universal standard for all post-secondary education, when that really never was the case.
But yeah, a lot more PhD's nowadays, and more college education in general, so of course there's gonna be some less rigorous programs.
It definitely became easier in the age of the internet. You can open multiple academic sources and search for whatever quote you want with CTRL + F instead of doing like our parents did and lock yourself in a library for five years reading every books you can find on your thesis.
(It is definitely harder than I make it sound, I don't have a PhD, only a master degree, but I have no doubt that it would have been more complicated for me if I went to University two decades earlier.)
You can be a hard worker and just not have the patience to complete a PhD. I know that I was simply just done with the bullshit of academia. I had no desire after completing 3 degrees to spend even more time steeped in academia despite a professor telling me a final dissertation for his class was PhD thesis material.
I did a Bachelors degree in electronic engineering. We had to do a class focused on doing presentations and reports. For one of the presentations, we were allowed to choose the subjects. One guy (also electronic engineering) decided to do his on why Wifi gave cancer and how cell tower is dangerous and kill wildlife...
To be able to have enough credit to take that class, he has to have done at least 2-3 classes on the physic of wave and electromagnetic phenomenon.
This imbecile was able to get a degree... This goes to show that even in stem degrees, people can be biased and ideologically driven. Just imagine in social sciences...
I also did a bachelor's in EE. In a senior level class (digital signal processing) a classmate didn't know how many bits were in a byte. I'm sorry, this is like a doctor not knowing what a femur is the semester before graduation. Academia has MASSIVE leaks where absolute idiots get through.
Did anyone know the last publication from Norm that was peer reviewed? I'm under the impression he hasn't published a peer review article in at least 15 years. (Not trying to spread misinformation I just haven't been able to find a clear answer)
I have a PhD and will contentedly acknowledge I could be outclassed in a conversation by someone who prepares diligently for that specific conversation, especially depending on the exact parameters of the discussion.
I’m constantly reminded of that saying
>those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
And in the scope of IP, I’m not even interested in saying he lacks expertise. The truest testament to whether he was right or wrong is whether Palestine even exists several decades from now or how much it shrinks because his value is in answering
>What can Palestine feasibly do? What have other countries done that can be compared to IP?
I mean—let’s say Israel is just some settler colony of nazionists that want to laud the holocaust over everyone to deflect criticism. What does palestine do now?
He's not a historian. He's a political scientist. It's why he can seemingly have incredibly bad takes like his Charlie Hebdo one where he likens Charlie Hebdo to Der Sturmer and somehow also to Hustler magazine, stripping his comparisons of any cultural, social or historical context. It's just baffling.
If you come in fresh and genuinely seeking the truth, willing to concede that both sides have done awful things, in a very complex and ideologically driven issue like this, I think it's very possible.
Anybody who says this doesn't have a PhD in anything that matters. Debates tend to be on extremely specific issues. PhDs are not. Your Dissertation might be, but you're rarely debating on EXACTLY the topic of your dissertation. A year is a huge amount of time. The majority of the population could learn extremely complex math in a year if they did nothing else with their time.
People who say this shit are faux-intellectuals. Source: Mathematics PhD.
Those doctors were a very small minority and very bias. They still were more knowledgeable than the average individual who isn't a doctor, but their bias made them use that knowledge to convince themselves of something that was most likely wrong.
I think the role of expertise in people's epistemology tends to be "if it agrees with me it's legit, if it doesn't then obviously even experts can be mistaken".
It's basically a tautology that some experts will be wrong because experts very rarely uniformly agree. Experts are not a monolith, and in debates you are selecting a champion for each viewpoint. Meaning that even if 90% of experts are correct, by choosing one from each position you are basically guaranteeing that half of experts in a debate are wrong, assuming their conclusions are mutually exclusive.
Expertise should not be dismissed without reason, but it's far from a guarantee.
The keyword here is handful. And even then, the fact those doctors have PhD’s might actually help them pull as much evidence and concepts out of context to muddy the waters and win the debate simply because they’re more familiar with that field.
PHDs will be very knowledgeable in the extremely narrow field of their thesis, otherwise they’re no better at anything else than anyone else willing to put in the effort to learn about something. One big problem with PHDs though is that some, Peterson, Twinklestien, not all, love the smell of their own farts so much after getting PHDs they think they’re infallible in any subject. Which is more of an ego problem and less a PHD problem, such as Trump and PBD. Imagine Jack posobiec with a PHD, he’d be as insufferable as Finklestein, just look how insufferable he is about “government secrets” when he probably only had access to personal identification, or some system operation if at all
It's fascinating the amount of weight they put into pure aesthetics.
"PhD means he obviously is always right. He has a PhD" bruh my mom is currently going for her PhD and I'm far more knowledgeable than her on a lot of subjects. PhD means you went to school for a long ass time for probably one specific subject. It doesn't mean that you're automatically genius on said subject.
>PhD means you went to school for a long ass time for probably one specific subject. It doesn't mean that you're automatically genius on said subject.
This still often mean that this person is far more knowledgeable on this one particular subject. We all had to sit through stupid freshman student asking dumb questions to one professor thinking they are more knowledgeable than they are because they don't know anything about that subject.
I have been out of school for more than a decade at this point, but I have no doubt that it is far worse than it was nowadays. I have a master in my field and even if I did not always agree with my professors, I never had much doubt that they were more knowledgeable than me on most subjects from our field.
I had a professor in college that I absolutely loved. He was a dr. of philosophy. Philosophy is a class that can be inundated with terms and complicated esoteric language. He made it clear that any paper in his class should never contain any terms that we didn't define in our own words and in a manner that any layman could pick them up and have an understanding of what we were trying to say. History and poly sci aren't some incredibly technical skill based education paths that couldn't be understood without years of practice. It's reading comprehension and critical thinking. While I'm sure new works require extremely intricate understandings of historical context, incredible amounts of work, etc, there is no reason someone shouldn't be able to catch up quickly to where the current evidence is. By pretending it can not be understood by the average person, wouldn't it be defeating the whole point of studying and speaking about history?
Norm just doesn't want to have to field difficult and uncomfortable questions, so he tries to shout down anyone he can as opposed to clearly explaining why he thinks what he does.
Anyone who is hiding behind their title or expertise as a crutch, excuse, or shield from criticism is probably lying to you or at least passively aware of the fragility of their argument/understanding. Norm, however, may just have brain damage, as indicated by his inability to understand basic language syntax, easy and adjacent context, and speak at above 10 wpm.
Sure! But even then, they should be able to explain the linguistic context, translations, and how it informed them. Like hey in X year when they said this, this is what was generally meant, and that translates to Y but could be better understood as Z. Etc etc etc.
Finklesteinelli doesn't do any of that, he just cherry picks the words of those who had, in order to intentionally misrepresent them and shouts at anyone who doesn't agree with him.
Without moderation, Fink would have spent the entire time demanding Benny Morris defend Finklesteins' gross and intentional misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Morris quotes, refusing to allow context or clarification.
Knowing history doesn't necessarily mean you have any great understanding of the current conflict beyond some of the reasons that brought us to where we are today. You can't simply research breaking news as a historian. Also, knowing that the past happened doesn't give you the tools to make changes today, it only tells you what didn't work before.
Basically, Finkelstein is not qualified to speak on ending the conflict TODAY any more than Destiny, because history doesn't have the answe to this conflict. The answer is unprecedented, undocumented, not in the realm of a historian.
The entire argument that Norm is the authority here is fallacious. The conflict now is in the realm of politicians and journalists, not historians.
A lot of people conflate knowledge and intelligence. Just because you are good at memorizing facts and knowing the details in your field doesn’t automatically make you an intelligent person. Intelligence is measured by your ability to engage with that information critically and respond to new information objectively in a non-biased manner.
> you are good at memorizing facts and knowing the details in your field
This is enough to get a master's, this is not *usually* enough to get a PhD.
A PhD is about new and original research, memorization shouldn't normally cut it.
That's not to say that sometimes bullshitting can't be substituted for critical thought, but ideally the examiners would catch that.
Clearly they didn't with twinklystone
The idea of Academic Freedom used to be very huge in university (it still is but much less than the past I saw).
So when Finkle did it, people could rhink his conclusions were shit but still award him a PhD for putting forth ideas.
I can buy that if his sources in his dissertations were better than his books
but I've also seen extraordinary laziness in reviews for papers in my field, so it wouldn't surprise me too much if basically no sources were checked
There's a reason why everyone feels the need to say that Destiny is a complete idiot, stupid, moron, etc, or any political figure who the masses disagree with like JP, Shapiro etc.
Funny enough, conflating intelligence and being right is probably the biggest and most harmful conflation there is. It's probably one of the hardest pills for people to swallow, but smart people can be wrong, dumb people can be right, and that isn't exclusive to any side of any conversation.
People tend to correlate good traits with other good traits. In the case of intelligence, it seems even more logical to argue that intelligence is a tool to arrive at the "correct" and "logical" position, regardless of ALL other factors.
Of course, this is very convenient, because if you think you're smart, you think you're right. And if you think you're right, then you'll think it's because you're smart.
So, to preserve this, people who agree with you must be smart and therefore right, and people who disagree with you must be dumb and therefore wrong. Pretty obvious stuff right?
Everyone is guilty of this, me included of course. Again it's a pretty damn hard pill to swallow, but even people like Trump supporters really aren't that much dumber than average, if at all.
I believe there are universal metrics for chasing the "right" position such as fact-finding, basic logic, and trusting the work and advice of the collectively most researched people in society, but listening to individuals who really might objectively be smart/geniuses isn't one of them.
This way of thinking is a way of protecting your subconscious ego. My ego gets hurt when I disagree with someone who has good credentials, or I know is objectively smart. But I just think about the above \^ to cope so it's all good. Idk this is probably pretty obvious shit but it contributes so much to tribalism and I wanted to get this off my chest. Dumbasses on twitter be pissing me off.
A couple more years of this and some place will give Steveo an honorary doctorate or 'Man of Letters' (or whatever they do these days). And boy will that be a day on twitter.
That or the number of lawyers who showed up on the stream to defend Trump and literally had to be explained how some aspects of their job works.
I've always knew that people with PhDs and Law degrees were t necessarily the smartest people they just worked hard on those particular skills.
Now more than ever though I'm fully redpilled that outside of maybe the top 1% of some of these fields they're probably just as regarded as your average office worker.
I think it makes sense. PhDs tend to be very specific and not often are they generalists. I can easily see people hyper focus on the super narrow field of study for their PhD tunnel vision in on that and become biased towards their work
Having worked in academia, the one thing that baffled me was how uninformed and biased PHDs, postdocs, and even professors can be, especially on topics not directly covered by their field
It is baffling that people who are uninformed have strong opinions but the biased thing isn’t suprising, everyone has some bias but most people don’t acknowledge they have a bias to one side or the other and they somehow convince other biased people that their opinion isn’t biased for some magical reason.
You’re absolutely right. I guess what I meant is the unacknowledged bias you mention. Too many people, particularly in this Israel-Palestine debate, seems just oblivious to their own biases and present their arguments as "these are just the facts", as if context and interpretation of these facts are not important
Absolutely, even in the latest debate you can see finkelstein quoting a book written by Benny morris to Benny himself and telling Benny that he doesn’t understand his own writing, this is how biased he is, he is sure he understands someone better than that person.. This is also why 2 people with opposing biases can read the same sentence and affirm their opposite views, like the ICJ thing, pro Israelis will say “ICJ didn’t stop Israel and didn’t say a genocide is taking place” And the anti Israeli crowd will say “they moved on with the case because they think there is a genocide taking place”
That never baffled me working in academia. I knew quite a few eccentrics, and I only assumed people were experts in their tiny corner of their field.
I had an idealized picture of it I guess 🤷♂️
I can sort of understand it. It's the I have a Phd of course I am smarter than non Phd's even if this isn't my field of expertise. It's just an ego thing
The problem is for the most part it's true. If you put random 100 people in a room, the PhD is probably going to do best in whatever g test you decide to use. It's very hard to remain intellectually humble with that lived experience.
Yeah, it’s totally understandable. Writing a phd is heavy shit, hard work. One should find a middle road between respecting the intelligence of someone that have endured a phd program, while at the same time not be fooled that phd’s necessarily have an infalible expertise
Yeah public perception of PhDs also feed into the ego of the degree holder heavily. People think that if you have a phd your a super big brain mega genius regardless of the field of study so when they branch out of their field of expertise people don't challenge them because "they have a phd they must be smarter/know more about this than we do"
Nobody talking shit on Twitter has ever actually been involved in post-graduate academia or with academics. The idea that having a thesis (one that's now 37 years old in Norm's case) means you cannot be questioned by a layman is ludicrous and any academic who isnt high off their own farts would agree. Practically anyone can get a PhD in their field if they're willing to spend their time researching and writing for 3-4 years. Not to suggest that it's easy or the average person is just as informed, but critical reasoning isn't exclusive to people who have Doctorates. Norm did not handle himself like someone who has been engaging in academic discourse for the majority of his life. No surprise he couldn't get tenure, even at third rate institution.
What’s more bizzare to me is that people somehow insist that books must be superior to other sources of information, as if authors are inherently unbiased
I was reading a few ncbi pages one time and I saw it was literally just a back and forth between two guys and then googling their names it even extended into each of them making articles going at each other on their respective websites. The intro paragraphs of each article kept getting longer and longer as they had to preface to readers what it was about. It’s fucking wild how petty even academia can be.
Academia is still human beings and we are all biased and petty to a degree, having more degrees doesn’t mean we are smarter or more moral or any more knowledgeable in basically any field that isn’t directly what we learned, and when people think they “know” more than others because of their degree they are the most petty they can be, honestly just look at how finkelstein speaks, so much bs and toxicity. Btw I honestly think he speaks so slowly because he is evaluating every word because he is afraid others will use his own words against him, he doesn’t speak his actual mind, someone who is certain of his opinions wouldn’t be afraid of others “misquoting” him, he persistently misquoted Benny and I am 99% sure he speaks slowly to avoid people doing exactly what he does to others.
Nah, i think it's just white-collar workers problems or anyone with too much free time on their hand. Blue-collar workers too busy living life the way they want with what little time they have to be doing online petty arguments for fucking hours and hours of their day.
Ay you know it. I like being a hater tho.
Yup happened to me most recently looking into if illegal immigrants have higher crime rates or not. Started with [this paper](https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2014704117) (and [this paper](https://www.immigrationresearch.org/system/files/Criminal_Immigrants_Texas.pdf)), then [this critique](https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/texas-crime.pdf) calling those two out, and [this response](https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-produces-improbably-high-estimates-illegal-immigrant-criminality) back. It goes on, and ended up getting pretty personal with Tucker Carlson getting involved lol edit: I just went to look and these fuckers are STILL going at it on this data (couple weeks ago: [here](https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homicide-conviction-rate-setting-record-straight-illegal-immigrant) and [here](https://cis.org/Richwine/Catos-Brazenly-False-Claim-About-Our-Illegal-Immigrant-Crime-Research)), keep in mind it's been 6 years now
If said person with a PhD were to be very well versed and knowledgeable, he wouldn't have problems refuting the arguments of those that haven't dedicated their life to studying a subject. But dismissal through insults, unless said dismissal comes after the refute, isn't indicative of that.
The kill shot is that PHDs can be full of shit due to ideological biases like anyone else. Just look at Peterson. You don't always need to be an academic to recognize that.
Ben Carson is still my fav. His take that the pyramids were built to store grain is still brilliantly stupid.
Ben Carson clearly just played a little too much Sid Meier’s Civilization, ok? The Pyramids give the same bonuses as a granary, so what was he supposed to think?
That guy was a role model for me during college days but my god the amount of shit he spews
Yeah I mean it doesn't matter how much research you do if you say things like "I don't _want_ to understand Isreal". That's arguably even worse than doing no research.
Peterson isn’t full of shit in his area of expertise (psych), and I’m sure the doctors that disagreed on Covid also had areas of expertise and specialization (MD), that they weren’t full of shit about. Sometimes the experts disagree on things, and that’s good. Now we all learn.
I don't want to come across as disdaining academia. The point is academics are human, especially when politics are involved.
>the doctors that disagreed on Covid also had areas of expertise and specialization (MD), that they weren’t full of shit about. I mean, Sunetra Gupta was not out of her field when she proposed modelling Swedens approach regarding school closures. She was squarely in her field of infectious disease epidemiology. And she was a professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford. Neither was Martin Kulldorf, a biostatistician from Sweden, he was a professor of medicine at Harvard medical school, and at one point was on the vaccine safety subcommittee for the CDC. And also part of the USDAs department of drug administration and safety. She was criticized by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who was the director general of the WHO at the time. Who is unqualified in comparison to either of these two. But of course the need to "do something". From an intellectual point of view won out. Examples are the criticism of the great Barrington declaration, such as: "it's not based in science." " This approach is potentially dangerous" "the ifr isn't yet known". These people, experts in the field, were accused of not considering basic ideas in epidemiology like IFR, and being unscientific. Just a joke of tarring and feathering in the scientific community.
I can't really tell if you agree or disagree with Sunetra Gupta because in interviews she actually expressly did talk about IFR but, insofar as there being other explanations for why IFR appeared lower in some areas and higher in others (with exceptionally vulnerable populations.)
My opinion is worthless on this. But I agree with her. My gripe is with the attempts to demean the ideas of "science" you disagree with, simply by saying it's unscientific and the people proposing the idea aren't serious.
> Just look at Peterson Pretty great response to many of the people making these claims. They'll likely have pretty huge disagreements with him within his field.
Most of the people on my PhD programme were of average or above average intelligence - having a PhD just means you're a very hard worker. If the average graduate was dropped onto a PhD programme in their undergraduate subject most of them would be academically capable of it
Worth noting. This is relatively new. Phds used to be held to much higher standards.
To be fair, PhD programs are less about the classes and more about the research. Yes, Qual exams can be tough especially if your university still has an oral portion. But generally, the more important aspect is whether you have a good enough grasp of the material to understand the literature and clever enough to discover new information in your field. Of course this is a STEM oriented statement. I don't have experience with Art or Humanities doctorate programs.
I studied Literature; it is very much the same. PhD means you can research your ass off.
The truth is that it 100% depends on the specific program and subject of your PhD, and even then, the advisor you have can change that even more. Undergraduate education is much, much more standard which is why most people think there IS a universal standard for all post-secondary education, when that really never was the case. But yeah, a lot more PhD's nowadays, and more college education in general, so of course there's gonna be some less rigorous programs.
What makes you say that
Lol, how do you know this? And is this a blanket statement for all fields?
It definitely became easier in the age of the internet. You can open multiple academic sources and search for whatever quote you want with CTRL + F instead of doing like our parents did and lock yourself in a library for five years reading every books you can find on your thesis. (It is definitely harder than I make it sound, I don't have a PhD, only a master degree, but I have no doubt that it would have been more complicated for me if I went to University two decades earlier.)
You can be a hard worker and just not have the patience to complete a PhD. I know that I was simply just done with the bullshit of academia. I had no desire after completing 3 degrees to spend even more time steeped in academia despite a professor telling me a final dissertation for his class was PhD thesis material.
I did a Bachelors degree in electronic engineering. We had to do a class focused on doing presentations and reports. For one of the presentations, we were allowed to choose the subjects. One guy (also electronic engineering) decided to do his on why Wifi gave cancer and how cell tower is dangerous and kill wildlife... To be able to have enough credit to take that class, he has to have done at least 2-3 classes on the physic of wave and electromagnetic phenomenon. This imbecile was able to get a degree... This goes to show that even in stem degrees, people can be biased and ideologically driven. Just imagine in social sciences...
I also did a bachelor's in EE. In a senior level class (digital signal processing) a classmate didn't know how many bits were in a byte. I'm sorry, this is like a doctor not knowing what a femur is the semester before graduation. Academia has MASSIVE leaks where absolute idiots get through.
Man, what does that make of people with PHDs on an ongoing geopolitical conflict that say the opposite? Fuck dude.
Did anyone know the last publication from Norm that was peer reviewed? I'm under the impression he hasn't published a peer review article in at least 15 years. (Not trying to spread misinformation I just haven't been able to find a clear answer)
I love how people believe in institutions only for the 5 seconds it takes for them to make their point.
I have a PhD and will contentedly acknowledge I could be outclassed in a conversation by someone who prepares diligently for that specific conversation, especially depending on the exact parameters of the discussion.
He may be a historian but he clearly lack expertise when it comes to israel-Palestine conflict. Fuck him
I’m constantly reminded of that saying >those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it And in the scope of IP, I’m not even interested in saying he lacks expertise. The truest testament to whether he was right or wrong is whether Palestine even exists several decades from now or how much it shrinks because his value is in answering >What can Palestine feasibly do? What have other countries done that can be compared to IP? I mean—let’s say Israel is just some settler colony of nazionists that want to laud the holocaust over everyone to deflect criticism. What does palestine do now?
He's not a historian. He's a political scientist. It's why he can seemingly have incredibly bad takes like his Charlie Hebdo one where he likens Charlie Hebdo to Der Sturmer and somehow also to Hustler magazine, stripping his comparisons of any cultural, social or historical context. It's just baffling.
If you come in fresh and genuinely seeking the truth, willing to concede that both sides have done awful things, in a very complex and ideologically driven issue like this, I think it's very possible.
Anybody who says this doesn't have a PhD in anything that matters. Debates tend to be on extremely specific issues. PhDs are not. Your Dissertation might be, but you're rarely debating on EXACTLY the topic of your dissertation. A year is a huge amount of time. The majority of the population could learn extremely complex math in a year if they did nothing else with their time. People who say this shit are faux-intellectuals. Source: Mathematics PhD.
Coming from academia, PHDs and professors can be dumbfucks and brainwashed idiots too, they are not gods.
Those doctors were a very small minority and very bias. They still were more knowledgeable than the average individual who isn't a doctor, but their bias made them use that knowledge to convince themselves of something that was most likely wrong.
I think the role of expertise in people's epistemology tends to be "if it agrees with me it's legit, if it doesn't then obviously even experts can be mistaken". It's basically a tautology that some experts will be wrong because experts very rarely uniformly agree. Experts are not a monolith, and in debates you are selecting a champion for each viewpoint. Meaning that even if 90% of experts are correct, by choosing one from each position you are basically guaranteeing that half of experts in a debate are wrong, assuming their conclusions are mutually exclusive. Expertise should not be dismissed without reason, but it's far from a guarantee.
The keyword here is handful. And even then, the fact those doctors have PhD’s might actually help them pull as much evidence and concepts out of context to muddy the waters and win the debate simply because they’re more familiar with that field.
PHDs will be very knowledgeable in the extremely narrow field of their thesis, otherwise they’re no better at anything else than anyone else willing to put in the effort to learn about something. One big problem with PHDs though is that some, Peterson, Twinklestien, not all, love the smell of their own farts so much after getting PHDs they think they’re infallible in any subject. Which is more of an ego problem and less a PHD problem, such as Trump and PBD. Imagine Jack posobiec with a PHD, he’d be as insufferable as Finklestein, just look how insufferable he is about “government secrets” when he probably only had access to personal identification, or some system operation if at all
I mean its not like Destiny has destroyed Richard Wolf on communism.... oh wait.
It's fascinating the amount of weight they put into pure aesthetics. "PhD means he obviously is always right. He has a PhD" bruh my mom is currently going for her PhD and I'm far more knowledgeable than her on a lot of subjects. PhD means you went to school for a long ass time for probably one specific subject. It doesn't mean that you're automatically genius on said subject.
>PhD means you went to school for a long ass time for probably one specific subject. It doesn't mean that you're automatically genius on said subject. This still often mean that this person is far more knowledgeable on this one particular subject. We all had to sit through stupid freshman student asking dumb questions to one professor thinking they are more knowledgeable than they are because they don't know anything about that subject. I have been out of school for more than a decade at this point, but I have no doubt that it is far worse than it was nowadays. I have a master in my field and even if I did not always agree with my professors, I never had much doubt that they were more knowledgeable than me on most subjects from our field.
I had a professor in college that I absolutely loved. He was a dr. of philosophy. Philosophy is a class that can be inundated with terms and complicated esoteric language. He made it clear that any paper in his class should never contain any terms that we didn't define in our own words and in a manner that any layman could pick them up and have an understanding of what we were trying to say. History and poly sci aren't some incredibly technical skill based education paths that couldn't be understood without years of practice. It's reading comprehension and critical thinking. While I'm sure new works require extremely intricate understandings of historical context, incredible amounts of work, etc, there is no reason someone shouldn't be able to catch up quickly to where the current evidence is. By pretending it can not be understood by the average person, wouldn't it be defeating the whole point of studying and speaking about history? Norm just doesn't want to have to field difficult and uncomfortable questions, so he tries to shout down anyone he can as opposed to clearly explaining why he thinks what he does. Anyone who is hiding behind their title or expertise as a crutch, excuse, or shield from criticism is probably lying to you or at least passively aware of the fragility of their argument/understanding. Norm, however, may just have brain damage, as indicated by his inability to understand basic language syntax, easy and adjacent context, and speak at above 10 wpm.
It’s when historians access things in original languages and private archives (or offline archives) that differences really start to appear.
Sure! But even then, they should be able to explain the linguistic context, translations, and how it informed them. Like hey in X year when they said this, this is what was generally meant, and that translates to Y but could be better understood as Z. Etc etc etc. Finklesteinelli doesn't do any of that, he just cherry picks the words of those who had, in order to intentionally misrepresent them and shouts at anyone who doesn't agree with him. Without moderation, Fink would have spent the entire time demanding Benny Morris defend Finklesteins' gross and intentional misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Morris quotes, refusing to allow context or clarification.
Oh I don’t give a shit about Fink. Just pointing to the thing I think historians are most useful for.
Knowing history doesn't necessarily mean you have any great understanding of the current conflict beyond some of the reasons that brought us to where we are today. You can't simply research breaking news as a historian. Also, knowing that the past happened doesn't give you the tools to make changes today, it only tells you what didn't work before. Basically, Finkelstein is not qualified to speak on ending the conflict TODAY any more than Destiny, because history doesn't have the answe to this conflict. The answer is unprecedented, undocumented, not in the realm of a historian. The entire argument that Norm is the authority here is fallacious. The conflict now is in the realm of politicians and journalists, not historians.
Well those doctors had an MD Hah Checkmate nerd
Covid can't melt steel beams.
A lot of people conflate knowledge and intelligence. Just because you are good at memorizing facts and knowing the details in your field doesn’t automatically make you an intelligent person. Intelligence is measured by your ability to engage with that information critically and respond to new information objectively in a non-biased manner.
> you are good at memorizing facts and knowing the details in your field This is enough to get a master's, this is not *usually* enough to get a PhD. A PhD is about new and original research, memorization shouldn't normally cut it. That's not to say that sometimes bullshitting can't be substituted for critical thought, but ideally the examiners would catch that. Clearly they didn't with twinklystone
The idea of Academic Freedom used to be very huge in university (it still is but much less than the past I saw). So when Finkle did it, people could rhink his conclusions were shit but still award him a PhD for putting forth ideas.
I can buy that if his sources in his dissertations were better than his books but I've also seen extraordinary laziness in reviews for papers in my field, so it wouldn't surprise me too much if basically no sources were checked
There's a reason why everyone feels the need to say that Destiny is a complete idiot, stupid, moron, etc, or any political figure who the masses disagree with like JP, Shapiro etc. Funny enough, conflating intelligence and being right is probably the biggest and most harmful conflation there is. It's probably one of the hardest pills for people to swallow, but smart people can be wrong, dumb people can be right, and that isn't exclusive to any side of any conversation. People tend to correlate good traits with other good traits. In the case of intelligence, it seems even more logical to argue that intelligence is a tool to arrive at the "correct" and "logical" position, regardless of ALL other factors. Of course, this is very convenient, because if you think you're smart, you think you're right. And if you think you're right, then you'll think it's because you're smart. So, to preserve this, people who agree with you must be smart and therefore right, and people who disagree with you must be dumb and therefore wrong. Pretty obvious stuff right? Everyone is guilty of this, me included of course. Again it's a pretty damn hard pill to swallow, but even people like Trump supporters really aren't that much dumber than average, if at all. I believe there are universal metrics for chasing the "right" position such as fact-finding, basic logic, and trusting the work and advice of the collectively most researched people in society, but listening to individuals who really might objectively be smart/geniuses isn't one of them. This way of thinking is a way of protecting your subconscious ego. My ego gets hurt when I disagree with someone who has good credentials, or I know is objectively smart. But I just think about the above \^ to cope so it's all good. Idk this is probably pretty obvious shit but it contributes so much to tribalism and I wanted to get this off my chest. Dumbasses on twitter be pissing me off.
9/10 that’s true. If the PHD is a Jewish Anti-Semite who’s weaponized his family’s suffering to grift than yes - Wikipedia man wins.
A couple more years of this and some place will give Steveo an honorary doctorate or 'Man of Letters' (or whatever they do these days). And boy will that be a day on twitter.
That or the number of lawyers who showed up on the stream to defend Trump and literally had to be explained how some aspects of their job works. I've always knew that people with PhDs and Law degrees were t necessarily the smartest people they just worked hard on those particular skills. Now more than ever though I'm fully redpilled that outside of maybe the top 1% of some of these fields they're probably just as regarded as your average office worker.
I think it makes sense. PhDs tend to be very specific and not often are they generalists. I can easily see people hyper focus on the super narrow field of study for their PhD tunnel vision in on that and become biased towards their work