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Tom Love's avatar

When the Fed shows median Inheritance is only $2,700 more for whites than blacks, despite being 10 years older on the median - it’s hard to justify the massive societal changes we are seeing. When we see people citing wealth or income differences that are not adjusted for basic measures like age and marriage, much less spending, studying, working and investing habits, we have no chance at identifying racial bias in today’s outcomes. In today’s culture, like with racial bias in police shootings - the narrative trumps the facts - and we as a society are beholden to narrative. Thank you both for pounding the drum on reality in a time when many will or cannot

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Thomas Payne's avatar

Question for Dr. Loury and Dr. McWhorter:

Pseudoscience is a problem in America, from claims on supplements, crystal healing, chiropractic medicine, and so on. Why is this so prevalent in America, and do we teach pseudoscience in Academia?

I ask this because at the beginning of graduate school (plant molecular biology) I assumed most of my classmates would be relatively rational, evidence-based people but soon noticed many of my fellow students believe in a lot of woo/quackery. Also, the departments seemed to have a pattern in the woo they believed e.g. Ecologists were into hippy, mother earth, natural is better beliefs. Yet, most of these people graduated by producing and defending an evidence-based thesis. So what does this mean about Ph.D.'s ,are they hyper-focus people in a particular field, where critical thinking is not required? Or is it that Ph.D. standards have been lowered to the point anyone can get a Ph.D. title? Or is that Ph.D.'s are human and succumb to the foils and cognitive biases like everyone else?

This line of thought also made me wonder about Academia itself. For instance, the word theory gets thrown around a lot, e.g. Critical Race Theory, Literary Theory, and Theory Social Construction of Truth. Yet, these theories do not fit the definition of scientific theories where it's a model that has been rigorously verified by independent experiments and often has the power to predict outcomes. Personally, many of these soft sciences and humanities teach pseudoscientific information but are accepted because they have veneer truth due to coming from Academia. Do you agree with this assessment? How much of pseudoscience is taught and Academia, and should we remove these types of fields from it? Another way of putting it is, what is the benefit of degrees like "Gender Studies?" What kind of occupation do they produce besides more professors in said field? Having gender studies degree as a field makes less sense to me because sex, gender, behavior, etc are STEM fields, subjects that require vast biological knowledge rather than philosophical apologetics. Anyway, I am rambling. I respect you both a great deal.

Much love fellow humans.

Thomas Payne

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