Career Advising Day
Attention Conservation Notice:
Another thousand-odd-word rant about reactionary idiots pretending to be
scientists.
Contemplating the writings
of the now-deservedly-forgotten
Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, the late, great Peter
Medawar was driven to observe that "Just as compulsory primary education
created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of
secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of
people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been
educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought." (Whether
that is a trained incapacity is itself
a nice
question.) Some of those people, owing to those tastes, pursue careers in
academic research; the problem for them is that they are not actually very good
at what they are supposed to do, which is come up with novel, insightful,
important, precise, and accurate findings. Suppose that you are such
a person, and that you do not want to switch to some other line of work to
which you might be better suited. What to do?
Perhaps the best thing which could happen to you would be to run across a
new and controversial theory which speaks to you at a deep level, both
intellectually and temperamentally. If you are what William
James called
"tender-minded", like Teilhard de Chardin, then Medawar has already mapped out
your trajectory, though nowadays
the Templeton
Foundation would likely be involved. If instead you are what James called
"tough-minded" — "materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic,
sceptical" — then edification-through-obfuscation is not an option, but
it wouldn't even occur to you. Instead, you take your theory and you write
papers about it, where you make claims about lots of hot-button
topics, especially sex and current political controversies. The
papers seem to carry the signs of rigor, but are actually deeply fallacious
— maybe you see this, but are so convinced the conclusions are right you
don't care, or maybe you're so convinced of the conclusions you can't
see the errors. (There
is some peer-reviewed
venue where you can publish almost arbitrarily sloppy papers, so getting
into print won't be a problem.) Then — and this is the key — you
start promoting your papers, and find that more salacious and
provocative your spin on them, the bigger the response. Your
possibly-unconscious shamelessness about publishing rubbish will not only give
you an advantage in sheer publications over other mediocre scholars who happen
to have an intellectual conscience, but will also get you media attention. The
reason it will get you media attention, and credibility with the media, is that
they will see your institutional affiliation and your peer-reviewed papers, and
so you become not just another crank but a Serious Scholar Contributing to the
Debate. The whole package — carelessness, provocation and publicity
— is
wonderfully
self-reinforcing, so you write even more careless papers, with yet more
provocative conclusions, which you push even harder. (As a wise
woman once
said, "No one ever forgets how to do something that's worked for them in
the past.") With a bit of luck, book contracts, magazine columns, etc., will
follow in their train. Your career becomes like two drunks supporting each
other as they stagger down the street: neither crappy academic research nor
media presence could stand up on their own, but together they can lurch and
shamble in glorious, glorious inebriated freedom, bellowing about the fierce
joys to be found in facing what's revealed by the harsh light of your
pseudo-scientific prejudices.
Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished others, I give
you Dr. Satoshi
Kanazawa of the London School of Economics,
the Fenimore
Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged
an inability to
do data analysis
or
understand psychometrics
into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets
to advocate
genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11. He seems to mean it, rather
than be
fukayaming.
His argument — to the extent that it is an argument and not just a
wish-fulfillment fantasy — has to do with
his earlier
attempt to explain "why most suicide bombers are Muslims". Leave to one
side whether his attempted explanation is coherent, two things strike one on
reading that. The first is his near-total disconnection from the literature
on, precisely, the causes and motivations of suicide bombing — no
Sageman,
no Pape,
the only mention
of Scott
Atran
(an actual
evolutionary psychologist,
and very
aware of the problems with the kind of crude ad hominid argument
Kanazawa pushes) basically misses Atran's point, etc. The second is that the
fact he is trying to explain something which isn't true: the tactic was
pioneered by
the decidedly
non-Muslim
Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This is well-known to anyone even slightly
interested in understanding this horrible practice; Kanazawa doesn't even try
to explain it away. But facts like these don't matter when the real goal is
some combination of, on the one hand, constructing and projecting
a fantasy
ideology, and, on the other, sheer self-promotion.
I don't know of any systematic data on whether James's distinction between
tender-minded and tough-minded thinkers really holds up, but at the level of
casual empiricism it's pretty persuasive, and I fall very much on the
tough-minded end of the spectrum. I find that sort of
position persuasive, but at the same time it takes only a minimal
amount of self-knowledge (certainly that's all I've got) to realize
that it exposes one to certain characteristic errors or temptations. One of
them is self-congratulation at being, precisely, so tough-minded. And one
prominent expression of that is a delight in one's superior ability to
perceive things as, supposedly, they really are, stripped of sentimental
ornament; more than that, a delight in imagining how the tender-minded will be
shocked by having to confront these realities. It is especially a delight in
reductionism, not as a productive if
not inevitable explanatory strategy, but as a series of "nothing-but"
claims. This is one of our characteristic forms of wishful thinking,
just as much devising imaginary consolations for real sufferings is a
characteristic of the tender-minded. With these thoughts in mind, I invite you
to read the conclusion of Kanazawa's article on suicide bombers:
Maybe the Muslim suicide bombings are not "terrorist" acts, as the term is
usually used. Maybe it has nothing to do with Israel or the American and
British troops. Maybe it's all about sex, as everything else in life is. Men
do everything they do in order to get laid (Kanazawa, 2003). Maybe young
Muslim men are no exceptions.
Satoshi,
mon semblable,
mon frère: whoever they are, I really hope the sex is worth it.
Obligatory disclaimers:
- I am agnostic, and uninterested, as to whether Kanazawa, like one
of Thorndike's cats,
developed these habits by trial, error, and environmental reinforcement, or
whether, like one
of Köhler's chimpanzees, it
came to him in a flash of insight that he could reach the
seemingly-unobtainable prize, if only
he stacked publicity atop bullshit.
- Of course, Kanazawa has a perfect right to express whatever opinions and
beliefs he might have (within the usual limits of the laws of libel, etc.).
Moreover he ought to have the right to pursue whatever lines of inquiry seem to
him most promising. Reciprocally, the rest of us have every right to criticize
his research as idiotic, ideological rubbish.
- I actually think there is a lot to be said in favor
of evolutionary
psychology, but if anything that only makes it more important to stomp on
things like this.
- I cheerfully admit that "I hope we catch the bastards who did this and nuke
them till they glow" was one of my first reactions to seeing the pictures from
9/11. (The very first was that I was being shown some kind of disgustingly
tasteless viral marketing for a disaster movie.) This sort of reaction is not
a sound basis for making policy, and I leave it as an exercise to explain why
on evolutionary grounds. I would still like to see us catch the bastards who
did this, however.
Credits: Kanazawa's blog found via
the appropriately
dumbfounded reaction
of Michael Meadon. I owe
the insights, and much of the phrasing, of my second paragraph to a
correspondent who prefers to keep their name out of this.
Learned Folly;
The Continuing Crisis;
The Natural Science of the Human Species;
The Running-Dogs of Reaction
