In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On December 29 2017 07:31 Plansix wrote: You are sort of making my argument for me. Of course expertise matters. I would listen to the Oncologist because they got a degree in cancer study and curing it. Anyone in this thread with a PHD in the study of discrimination, both historical and current, can talk about it all they want the topic. But I don’t think anyone has that degree. I don’t. My degree is in US history and it is not a PHD.
Meh, this is a pretty terrible advice in general for a reasonably intelligent person... which includes probably most of the people this thread and maybe ~10-20% of the US population (can't speak for other countries).
One issue, especially in fields with little financial incentive to study, is gigantic self-selection bias. For example, pretty much nobody gets their PhD in Racial Issues unless they're actively interested in the topic--and that group tends to be almost exclusively those who feel already strongly about a particular cause.
In industry, on the other hand, it's not really that uncommon for people with PhDs to essentially make a career out of the credential while knowing rather little about what they claim to. I met a comical number of these people when I worked in banking. The entire bank stress testing industry is basically made up of hiring quantitative PhDs to impress regulators, and the standard practices of the industry that everyone (including the PhDs) follows are statistical nonsense. Yes, it's just as terrifying as it sounds. I have absolutely zero doubt that this sort of "credential-boosted bullshitting for profit (or other personal gain)" happens in many more places than the one I have personal experience with.
Worse, the usefulness of a PhD in a broad field in determining whether someone is knowledgeable in a specific topic within the field when measured against smart and motivated people in the same field without a PhD is pretty close to "not really useful at all." More concretely, someone who studied "5th Century BCE Athens" for his dissertation to get his History PhD might not really know more about WW2 then a comparably intelligent person who is interested in WW2 as a side hobby, but studied rocket engineering in school instead so he could get his job at NASA. Since most debates revolve around specific topics, knowing that somebody has a "History PhD" doesn't really tell you how much more reliable he is in your discussion than the guy he's debating (assuming the guy seems reasonably/sufficiently intelligent, informed, etc.).
As an individual taking the counsel of experts (PhDs or not), there's other issues as well. "Experts" often disagree, and you as an individual still have to make decisions on what to believe and what actions to take. Your "expert" might not care all that much about you and give you lazy advice.
The anti-intellectualism of the right is certainly harmful, but the (academic) intellectual fetishism of the left is certainly harmful as well. Credentialism is not and never will be a substitute for solid and disciplined thinking, and an obsession with formal education and degrees is a significant hindrance to sufficiently intelligent people (as I said above, probably at least 10-15% of Americans).
A Ph.D. isn't a golden ticket to automatically knowing more about any topic. Education level doesn't directly correlate with intelligence. I've met plenty of MD's that were quite disappointing in their ability to think critically.
That said, your post displays a disappointing lack of understanding in the educational process. Take that History Ph.D. for instance. I would initially trust him on most history topics more than random Joe Schmoe that reads WWII history as a hobby because that Ph.D's near-decade of education has taught him to critically analyze history and properly understand and vet sources in a way that the hobbyist has probably never done. This is especially true in the field of history, where most lay-students generally only read "pop" history books that you find in Barnes & Noble or other bookstores that aren't written with the same scholarly rigor as sources used in academia. Of course, this could turn out to not be true (maybe Joe Schmoe is a really dedicated student and the Ph.D. really never spent any of their time studying WWII, so their knowledge is slim), but the initial premise stands; all things are not equal between someone with a lower education and someone with a Ph.D. when it come's to a certain field until proven otherwise.
The point (and true benefit) of a quality education isn't the simple memorization of facts pertaining to the field; it's learning the ability to critically think and analyze, find high quality sources pertaining to the topic, and properly synthesize all of this information to come to an informed conclusion.
This is by no means a hard and fast rule (plenty of people are still stupid or otherwise get junk Ph.D's), but there isn't a real problem with progressives "fetishizing" education or credentials. The only time I ever see conservatives bring that up is when they rely on woefully unqualified sources and, when it is pointed out that their sources are total crap, they start screaming about how progressives and intellectuals are so "elite".
On December 29 2017 22:08 iamthedave wrote: On the right wing intellectual front, I've frequently had people point me toward Milo as a conservative intellectual, especially on issues of gender. Just because we see through his bullshit doesn't mean everybody else does. Tomi Lahren seems to get a lot of credit, though I don't see it from listening to her. Ben Shapiro seems to be the real go-to guy, and he's alright. He seems to engage in a little bad faith from time to time and a rigorous addiction to unexamined statistics (here's the number, let's not talk about the reasons those numbers are that way), but I agree with him sometimes.
There's Peter Hitchens as well, I'd say, though he's UK-based.
But to throw another log on the fire, the GOP is constantly sneering at educated people. Part of Trump's actual appeal is that he sounds like a moron when he talks. Some right wing folk in America seem to have a bizarre fear of edumacated people and their fancy words and concepts.
As for the rise of White Identity Politics; can't we quite clearly look at President Obama as a big trigger? Dem uppity black folk dun got in the white house! They're comin' for us!!!!! /s
Ask Ben Shapiro what the cause of any problem is and he will say 'The Left'. The guy is clueless and one note, as well as being a pretty awful racist. He speaks eloquently enough (nothing special) and I think some people confuse this with intelligence. His arguments and sticking points in debate are usually pretty uninteresting and lame.
Trump continues to dominate the news cycle but I wish he were a little more subtle sometimes. GWB paid attention to the news but much less than the new president does. Sometimes I feel like Hubert Humphrey is in office
There are so many other nouns that can be used to describe folks that disagree with Ben Shapiro, it is hard to see his use of “the Left” as anything other than lazy pandering.
I also don’t know what lever I tripped to cause me to see him all the time in Youtube ads, but I want to flip it back.
The Republicans, in terms of the House committees, they come out, they’re so angry because there is no collusion. So, I actually think that it’s turning out — I actually think it’s turning to the Democrats because there was collusion on behalf of the Democrats. There was collusion with the Russians and the Democrats. A lot of collusion.
You missed the part early on when he said the Democrats are saying there was no collusion between his camp and Russia. He saw them on TV saying it about him, so he is cool. But then Alan Dershowitz said even if there was collusion, it isn’t a crime. But also no collusion, so not like it matters.
I think long dead playwright Billy said something about protesting too much.
That and I think a very large portion, thanks to the US media, only think locally.
With unusually frigid weather gripping much of the Eastern United States this week, President Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to cast doubt on the reality of climate change, but he appeared unaware of the distinction between weather and climate.
Indeed, parts of the East Coast are bracing for record-breaking New Year’s Eve temperatures. New York City is forecast to experience its coldest New Year’s temperatures since the 1960s. But Mr. Trump’s tweet made the common mistake of looking at local weather and making broader assumptions about the climate at large.
Climate refers to how the atmosphere acts over a long period of time, while weather describes what’s happening on a much shorter time scale. The climate can be thought of, in a way, as the sum of long periods of weather.
Or, to use an analogy Mr. Trump might appreciate, weather is how much money you have in your pocket today, whereas climate is your net worth. A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, anymore than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.
On Thursday, parts of the United States were roughly 15 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit colder than average for this time of year. But the world as a whole was about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average from 1979 to 2000.
And while climate scientists expect that the world could warm, on average, roughly 2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century — depending on how quickly greenhouse-gas emissions rise — they don’t expect that to mean the end of winter altogether. Record low temperatures will still occur; they’ll just become rarer over time.
One 2009 study found that the United States saw roughly as many record highs as record lows in the 1950s, but b y the 2000s there were twice as many record highs as record lows. Severe cold snaps were still happening, but they were becoming less common.
“Of course it sometimes gets very cold,” said Todd D. Stern, the United States climate change envoy under President Barack Obama. “Five minutes’ worth of education would tell you that what matters are global averages, and those are going implacably up.”
Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Mr. Trump’s line of reasoning recalled a February day in 2015 when Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that the Earth was not warming.
The president’s tweet also took an implicit swipe at the Paris climate accord, which Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon. In announcing that the United States would withdraw from the agreement among almost 200 nations to collectively rein in greenhouse-gas emissions, Mr. Trump lobbed a similar charge that the deal put a burden only on America.
The United States under Mr. Obama pledged $3 billion over four years to the Green Climate Fund, aimed at helping countries build resilience to extreme weather and develop clean energy. Japan has paid about $1.5 billion into the fund, Britain $1.2 billion and France and Germany about $1 billion each. Developing countries like Mexico, Chile and Indonesia also have contributed.
Mr. Trump, who once called climate change a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese, has recognized its threats where some of his properties are involved. Last week a council in Ireland gave a golf resort owned by the president approval to build two sea walls. An early application for the construction cited the threat of global warming.
Mr. Trump has made a habit of airing his climate skepticism on Twitter, posting comments on “climate change” or “global warming” more than 100 times since 2011. Thursday’s tweet appeared to be the first time he addressed the issue head-on since becoming president, however. The last time he fired off a tweet on global warming was more than two years ago, when he declared:
The climate may be changing, but some jokes stay the same.
On December 29 2017 22:08 iamthedave wrote: On the right wing intellectual front, I've frequently had people point me toward Milo as a conservative intellectual, especially on issues of gender. Just because we see through his bullshit doesn't mean everybody else does. Tomi Lahren seems to get a lot of credit, though I don't see it from listening to her. Ben Shapiro seems to be the real go-to guy, and he's alright. He seems to engage in a little bad faith from time to time and a rigorous addiction to unexamined statistics (here's the number, let's not talk about the reasons those numbers are that way), but I agree with him sometimes.
There's Peter Hitchens as well, I'd say, though he's UK-based.
But to throw another log on the fire, the GOP is constantly sneering at educated people. Part of Trump's actual appeal is that he sounds like a moron when he talks. Some right wing folk in America seem to have a bizarre fear of edumacated people and their fancy words and concepts.
As for the rise of White Identity Politics; can't we quite clearly look at President Obama as a big trigger? Dem uppity black folk dun got in the white house! They're comin' for us!!!!! /s
Ask Ben Shapiro what the cause of any problem is and he will say 'The Left'. The guy is clueless and one note, as well as being a pretty awful racist. He speaks eloquently enough (nothing special) and I think some people confuse this with intelligence. His arguments and sticking points in debate are usually pretty uninteresting and lame.
I've heard some people talk about Ben Shapiro in elegaic terms. He's a constant rejoinder when an eloquent left-wing speaker is talking. 'Five minutes in a debate with Ben Shapiro and they'd be squealing' and the like (admittedly they often say the same about Milo). I'm not sure I agree, but I don't know how many actual debates Ben has ever engaged in. He doesn't strike me as the rebirth of Christopher Hitchens or anything, that's for sure.
On December 29 2017 22:08 iamthedave wrote: On the right wing intellectual front, I've frequently had people point me toward Milo as a conservative intellectual, especially on issues of gender. Just because we see through his bullshit doesn't mean everybody else does. Tomi Lahren seems to get a lot of credit, though I don't see it from listening to her. Ben Shapiro seems to be the real go-to guy, and he's alright. He seems to engage in a little bad faith from time to time and a rigorous addiction to unexamined statistics (here's the number, let's not talk about the reasons those numbers are that way), but I agree with him sometimes.
There's Peter Hitchens as well, I'd say, though he's UK-based.
But to throw another log on the fire, the GOP is constantly sneering at educated people. Part of Trump's actual appeal is that he sounds like a moron when he talks. Some right wing folk in America seem to have a bizarre fear of edumacated people and their fancy words and concepts.
As for the rise of White Identity Politics; can't we quite clearly look at President Obama as a big trigger? Dem uppity black folk dun got in the white house! They're comin' for us!!!!! /s
Ask Ben Shapiro what the cause of any problem is and he will say 'The Left'. The guy is clueless and one note, as well as being a pretty awful racist. He speaks eloquently enough (nothing special) and I think some people confuse this with intelligence. His arguments and sticking points in debate are usually pretty uninteresting and lame.
I've heard some people talk about Ben Shapiro in elegaic terms. He's a constant rejoinder when an eloquent left-wing speaker is talking. 'Five minutes in a debate with Ben Shapiro and they'd be squealing' and the like (admittedly they often say the same about Milo). I'm not sure I agree, but I don't know how many actual debates Ben has ever engaged in. He doesn't strike me as the rebirth of Christopher Hitchens or anything, that's for sure.
this is pretty much all you need to know about shapiro, imo. i don't find him particularly compelling as a public speaker (as a writer he's somewhat better, though i guess that's the case for most people). he just happens to browbeat people in a way that seems slightly more intellectual than milo. his particular style of oblique condescension does seem to be catching on with members of the right - a lot of the conservatives who post here do so in a way that reminds me of him.
The only debate I've seen Shapiro in was a total farce. It was Cenk Uygur vs Shapiro. Every time he said something about how awful the left is, the crowd cheered and shouted. It was a microcosm of the whole political scene right now. Cenk's fans were equally insufferable.
On December 29 2017 22:08 iamthedave wrote: On the right wing intellectual front, I've frequently had people point me toward Milo as a conservative intellectual, especially on issues of gender. Just because we see through his bullshit doesn't mean everybody else does. Tomi Lahren seems to get a lot of credit, though I don't see it from listening to her. Ben Shapiro seems to be the real go-to guy, and he's alright. He seems to engage in a little bad faith from time to time and a rigorous addiction to unexamined statistics (here's the number, let's not talk about the reasons those numbers are that way), but I agree with him sometimes.
There's Peter Hitchens as well, I'd say, though he's UK-based.
But to throw another log on the fire, the GOP is constantly sneering at educated people. Part of Trump's actual appeal is that he sounds like a moron when he talks. Some right wing folk in America seem to have a bizarre fear of edumacated people and their fancy words and concepts.
As for the rise of White Identity Politics; can't we quite clearly look at President Obama as a big trigger? Dem uppity black folk dun got in the white house! They're comin' for us!!!!! /s
Ask Ben Shapiro what the cause of any problem is and he will say 'The Left'. The guy is clueless and one note, as well as being a pretty awful racist. He speaks eloquently enough (nothing special) and I think some people confuse this with intelligence. His arguments and sticking points in debate are usually pretty uninteresting and lame.
I've heard some people talk about Ben Shapiro in elegaic terms. He's a constant rejoinder when an eloquent left-wing speaker is talking. 'Five minutes in a debate with Ben Shapiro and they'd be squealing' and the like (admittedly they often say the same about Milo). I'm not sure I agree, but I don't know how many actual debates Ben has ever engaged in. He doesn't strike me as the rebirth of Christopher Hitchens or anything, that's for sure.
Now there's a guy who could debate.
He both plays to his base with one-liners and also engages in spirited debate. I don’t really like his style, so he’s not really for me. But I see a lot of his counterparts on the left get more favorable impressions with leftists, because they agree on a list of Republican ideals and traits worthy of ridicule. When Ben does a zing, of course that’s a cheap shot and factually unsound, but when this leftist personality does one... well we all accept his target is objectively stupid and deserves it! I really do think it boils down to the supposition that the left is largely right and the right is largely wrong. The linked video has a lot of straight conservative canon mixed in with the jabs and ridicule that provokes the same thoughts why most conservatives oppose the ACÁ and campaign finance reform.
Debates of the college campus type are obnoxious, as are most speeches. But they serve a purpose at least. If you want a more formal debate someone has to organize it.
And I'll repeat again that that Current Affairs* article should make anyone suspicious if you claim to be on the lookout for "numbers without context."
While I'm not normally inclined to defend everyone the left hates, in this case some is warranted because you'll be seeing more of Shaprio as time goes on, not less. He's not a Victor Davis Hanson or a Thomas Sowell but he's not trying to be. People have different roles, and that is true both left and right.
i listened to one if ben shapiro's podcasts recently and was not impressed. he seems more like the harvard-educated, jewish version of rush limbaugh than anything.
Shapiro website is a perplexing mystery. It asks if I want to turn off ads, but does not have ads running. I turned off ad block just to see. It also seems to have a trending topics section. But every time I have ventured there, the trends are always "Race, Gender, Abortion and Trump."
I really want to know how these folks fund their media productions. I can assume some ultra rich conservative is bankrolling them, but I want to know the nitty-gritty details.
The "elitist" complaints that are lobbed at intellectuals stem from a prevailing attitude that those who don't prioritize a decent education are incompetent fools (e.g. rednecks, flat-earthers, creationists, etc.). This attitude IMO in turn stems from the idea that reasonable discourse and logic are what drives the mind of a successful human being, and those whose minds are run by anything else are, almost by definition, less successful (i.e. inferior).
This idea, however, is only now in the current era starting to become true. Historically, formal education and those living intellectualist lifestyles correlated very little with successful lives (see: every one in history in a position of power who was an idiot, self-sustaining communities, etc.). If anything, intellectualism was pursued as a hobby by those who had pre-existing power or success.
Tradition (and to a slightly lesser extent respecting elders), on the other hand, has been a cornerstone of civilizations worldwide for millennia. It's been how society has operated and how skills get passed through generations. For rural (self-sustained) communities, this is still the case. Bob the general store owner and Bill the farmer didn't need more than an 8th grade education to learn their trade and now they lead happy lives supporting their families. They got there by apprenticing under their parents, who also happened to have certain other beliefs about the world, "but hey they know better so I should listen".
Thinking based on tradition and emotions has been the modus operandi of humanity since its inception, and IMO it's almost foolish to assume those stuck in this way of thinking should "snap out of it" and get on board with reason/logic dictated lives (despite how right it actually is). More effort needs to be spent by intellectuals going to rural/GOP communities to show them exactly why they should abandon what's worked for them for generations.
The problem with Shapiro is that he's either 1) incredibly intellectually dishonest, or 2) the bar for a conservative sounding intelligent is so low that he passes it, even though his arguments almost all fall flat on their faces.
I only had time to watch the first few minutes of that debate video, but right off the bat Shapiro completely whiffs on the healthcare argument. First off, he states as an assumed fact that you can only have 2 of quality-affordability-accessibility, which he doesn't support with any kind of evidence or logical thinking whatsoever. Second, he makes some arbitrary statements about what a right is and what the effect on healthcare is if you call it a right. Third, he uses the time-tested tactic of picking only the worst possible examples to argue against, which no one in a true intellectual circle would take seriously. He uses the example of South Africa as treating healthcare as a right, yet doesn't mention the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, or any Scandinavian country (let alone another dozen countries that have objectively better healthcare systems while also being universal), which all have universal healthcare systems and completely embarrass the U.S. in terms of healthcare quality, accessibility, and affordability.
He had the same problem in that stupid video that was circulating of him browbeating some student at a college about being transgender. Not only does he brutally abuse the field of psychology by erroneously citing clinical psychology when talking about being transgender, he completely ignored the difference between sex and gender, talking as if there wasn't one and offering absolutely zero argument for why the distinction shouldn't be made.
His arguments are lazy and self-serving and the only thing they accomplish is sounding reasonably eloquent while riling up his base. He's only marginally better than Milo - both are complete hacks that are all flash, no substance.
EPT
