Last night’s debate
Comment of the evening:
Two weeks left; I say, fix bayonets!!
Those picayune military details are hardly Obama’s forte, although that doesn’t keep him from mocking Mitt Romney. Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be: snark, perhaps? It’s sure beginning to look that way.
I didn’t watch the debate and I got back too late to join in the comments. But from my perusal of the blogosphere it seemed that Romney was trying to run out the clock and appear presidential and above the fray, whereas Obama was his now-familiar petty debate self, nasty and small.
That Obama is the same Obama most of us have seen for four long years. For some reason Romney’s personality works to bring out that side of Obama even more than usual, and it’s not a pretty sight.
To Obama, Romney must seem like a big fat hanging curveball right smack in his wheelhouse, and Obama can’t resist taking a good hard swing at it. But apparently the pitch that looks so eminently hittable is really a dancing knuckleball after all.
As myself and one of my colleagues in biology were once discussing, we tend to be slow at processing verbal exhanges such as debates, while the humanities people excell at such. Not surprising, as our training (science vs humanities) are aligned along different means means of analysis.
So, when it comes to the debates, I try to give myself at least a day to process. I’m a bit ahead of my rule here, but what I take away:
1) The Prez was in full snark mode. the London Mail was writing about it not 30 minutes after the debate ended. My unaligned and moderate wife, noted his behavior 15 minutes in, and promptly got up and stopped watching.
2) the debate was essentially a tie in terms of each making “points” up until the last segment on China. BHO made his usual rambling, muddy statements. Romney had very hard, specific, goal oriented plans for dealing with China on economic, military, and cultural levels. He made Obama look like the dope smoking adolescent he really is.
3) More snark.. the line about “we do have aricraft carriers you know where planes land” was so over the top I wondered at that point, and it sticks with me 12 hours later, whether that one line will be Obama’s final undoing.
Again, after watching MSNBC for a while and comparing it to the coverage on Fox News, I believe that the left and the right look for different things in a “debate.” The right looks to facts and declares Romney the “winner” because he seems well versed in, and counters with, the facts underlying a situation as physicsguy above notes. (And this is precisely what I would expect from someone in the hard sciences).
The left, OTH, seems satisfied with any kind of rhetorical rebuttal. It doesn’t matter whether facts are offered, or even if they are incorrect, it seems to be the rebuttal per se that is counted as a point-gaining strike. From this perspective “snark” perhaps even enhances the point-value of the rebuttal.
This makes sense, since the left lives in a world of utopian theory absent the efficacy of their theories.
Occam’s Beard said it best in the post Ah! Those Fickle Women Voters:
IMO this seems to succinctly sum up the difference between the left and the right.
It should be writ in stone.
Neo,
Your last comment perfectly marries the two events which made last night so memorable for me — the wins of Romney and the Giants.
I do believe Obama, the mighty Casey, knows he has struck out.
Jamie Irons
“We have these ships that go underwater”? Maybe Obama needs to spend more time hanging out with Jimmy Carter.
Obama’s forte is b.s.
I think Roger L Simon nailed it when he wrote about this contest being the good father vs. the abandoned son: http://tinyurl.com/8pbugoj
Obama’s entire career is built on his ‘compelling life story’ (remember that overused phrase from 2008?) and his smooth talk – and he never sticks around long enough to witness the (lack of) results. Romney is holding him accountable for the first time. Obama’s taunts couldn’t ruffle a guy who has made a career of dealing with tailing companies; Mitt’s probably dealt with his fair share of Obama-type CEOs. Obama’s done a decent job defending himself in the last two debates (at least well enough for his target audience: people who haven’t been paying attention), but his frequent glare last night really gave it away.
“Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be.”
At the risk of being labeled racist (hey, I’m a white male, so the assumption is that I am, so what the heck . . ) I’ll answer that question, Neo:
Obama is a product of Affirmative Action therefore his “forte” is simply be Black and show up – Job done, awards given, etc.
In reply to Obama’s remarks regarding bayonets and horses, last week a statue of a Special Forces Soldier on horseback was dedicated at Ground Zero in honor of their service in Afghanistan. The Special Forces people rode horses, as mechanized transport was not practical. Guess Obama did not go to the dedication, and is not too familiar with what “his” troops do.
Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be: snark, perhaps?
Posing.
As a soldier in the later 90s, I was issued bayonets. But that was when the Army was still using M16A2s. I don’t know whether bayonets are still issued with the smaller M4s.
But even if bayonets are no longer standard issue, combat knives will never go out of style for soldiers. Just picture what a hunter and/or survivalist takes into the field. It has a lot in common with what a soldier will take. When I served, most every soldier had a knife and/or a multi-tool clipped onto his belt whenever he wore BDUs.
“Romney was trying to run out the clock and appear presidential and above the fray, whereas Obama was his now-familiar petty debate self, nasty and small.”
We have a winner!
I must say, and I hate to, but Obama did not say we don’t use horses or K-Bars, just not so much.
This is similar to Biden asking if anyone knew anyone who served in Iraq or Iran. The four idiots behind him probably raised their hand in response to Iraq.
Then again, I almost served in Iran, and I knew the guys who went when I was assigned elsewhere.
As myself and one of my colleagues in biology were once discussing, we tend to be slow at processing verbal exhanges such as debates, while the humanities people excell at such. Not surprising, as our training (science vs humanities) are aligned along different means means of analysis.
Physicsguy, the difference may be more profound than a matter of technique. Scientists (ideally) conduct tight closely-reasoned analysis to draw a conclusion, because (especially in the physical sciences) your answer is either right or wrong, and one misstep guarantees the latter.
Humanities people do nothing of the kind. Theirs is a more impressionistic approach, because they’re accustomed merely to coming up with a novel (sorry) take on something, and displaying their verbal virtuosity to make it seem plausible. It’s almost a game to see who can adopt the most ridiculous, the most outre, thesis possible and defend it.
Needless to say, generating an impression takes a lot less time and effort than conducting an analysis.
This reminds me of one of my grad students who I’d tasked with reviewing a paper I’d received as a referee (I’d already sent off my review; I used to do this as a training exercise for my grad students.)
Anyway, he took the paper, left, and came back a bit later.
“Well?” I asked.
“The paper is good,” he replied.
From a tactical point of view, I thought Romney succeeded, and I understand his choice to avoid a detailed treatment of the disaster in Benghazi, but I was disappointed that his commitment to a persona of “peace with strength” prevented him from emphasizing the truly dire situation with Iran.
The Islamists will probably have nuclear weapons within a year, and will quickly threaten the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia. This will result in Iranian control of the area’s oil and gas supplies — including the eastern, Shia, part of Saudi Arabia. After taking control of the region’s oil, they will try to crash western economies, then destroy Tel-Aviv and American cities.
Obama has wasted four years, and the mullahs will laugh at Romney’s idea of indicting their president for genocide.
Apologies for the rant, but this is what we face in the next few years. It’s the most critical foreign policy issue of the post-Enlightenment era, and Romney missed an opportunity to address it. Instead, he played it safe.
Eric,
They still issue bayonets, although I doubt they’d be very useful with an M4. Every unit I’ve been in keeps them locked up since bayonets are sensitive items, whereas you can order any other type of knife you want class IX.
Occam’s Beard,
So the pointed question becomes, do the humanities (and by extension, the social sciences) attract people with sloppy thinking skills, or do they create sloppy thinking skills in those they attract?
I had the absolute pleasure of getting advanced degrees in a rather unmarketable field, the history of art. Like the humanities, it can be prone to all manner of speculation on the basis of the most flimsy evidence. One character that distinguishes it from fields such as literary critique, however, is that it can have a real evidentiary basis.
In my specialty (medieval hand-painted books from the turn of the first millenium—as I said, unmarketable) it was possible to actually create families of illustrations based upon parent/copy relationships and in doing so actually trace and approximately date the migration of motifs from place to place. To do this, to track the transmission or evolution of a visual motif, style or iconographic scheme, requires that hard visual evidence exist. An investigation like this has an almost forensic quality to it and seems to blend the evidentiary character of hard science with the interpretive quality of the humanities.
IMO it’s a highly underrated field. I credit this training as having honed my critical thinking and research skills beyond a simple humanities “bull$h*t” level; not that all humanities critiques and social science theories exist at that low level, but certainly many do.
That brings me full circle and prompts my initial question about sloppy critical thinking skills.
So the pointed question becomes, do the humanities (and by extension, the social sciences) attract people with sloppy thinking skills, or do they create sloppy thinking skills in those they attract?
A bit of each, probably. Having said that, I wouldn’t characterize those in the humanities necessarily as having sloppy thinking skills, but rather ones in which painstaking, rigorous analysis remains a vestigial and little-appreciated skill. Their imaginative skills can be and often are highly developed, and those probably derive from their tendency to work from impressions (“poetic truth”), rather than remaining firmly tethered to the earth, with a death grip on the evidence.
No one would want to see a movie written, produced and directed by scientists and engineers, any more than anyone would want to cross a bridge designed and built by those in the arts.
It takes all kinds to fill the freeway…
The tide has definely turned in Romenys favor.
When? When Obama said in 2nd debate … get the transcript!
This was loosely taken as get my record and when electorate did … Obama was sunk.
OB,
“I wouldn’t characterize those in the humanities necessarily as having sloppy thinking skills . . . .”
Certainly not everyone in the humanities to be sure. I understand and agree with you point about “filling the freeway.” Still, having been there I think that there is more room for sloppy thinking in the humanities and social sciences than there is in the applied sciences. And I make that distinction as opposed to the theoretical sciences which can sometimes dissapear into the world of pure theory (string threory, quantum mecanics, etc.). After all, even if one’s economic theory has been proven a failure time and again, one can always claim that the stimulus just wasn’t big enough. One can deny that the economic bridge has failed because it is an ephemeral theory with real-world impact, whereas the bridge that failed is a real-world object with real-world impact.
You may want to look up the work of Prof. Robert Maranto currently of the University of Arkansas (formerly of Villanova) who has published much on this very topic. He has an op ed in the Washington Post Dec 9, 2007 and I believe has a recent book out on this topic.
cornflour, your vivid description may even be an understatement. The Gulf states and Saudia Arabia will also likely want to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
When Bush 41 saw that Clinton/Gore were gaining on him he said, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.”
Very true, but very unpresidential. He lost.
Steve,
For better or worse, I think it’s too late for an arms race in the Gulf. Once Iran has nuclear weapons, it will use them to retain a regional monopoly.
If Saudia Arabia tried to arm itself, then Iran would destroy Riyadh, and the Saudi government would collapse. The UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain would quickly consent to becoming part of the Iranian sphere of influence.
“For some reason Romney’s personality works to bring out that side of Obama even more than usual, and it’s not a pretty sight.”
I have a theory as to what it is that sets Obama off when he’s around Romney. Two anecdotal tales. The first is about the kid who asked the first question in the town hall said when interviewed afterwards about Romney: “I felt like he was starring into my soul.” The second was a comment from a personal acquaintance when I asked him about his meeting with Romney: “He looks right into your eyes when you talk to him and it feels like you are the only two in the room.”
I think what unglues Obama is Romney’s eye contact. The thing that strikes me about the debates and especially the first one is that Obama, Biden and even Ryan more typically addressed the moderator when they spoke. Romney looks at and speaks to Obama.
It would be very disconcerting to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an ad plan besmirching someones character then be confronted with them intently looking at you in the eyes. It doesn’t help if you began erroneously believing your own press.
I don’t think Obama had been prepped for Romney’s gaze the first time then he obviously worked on it for the other two and got a little better. But avoiding someones eyes is about the best way I know to appear “disengaged.”
T, you have underscored the crucial criterion: falsifiability. Mother Nature is a cruel taskmistress, and awards no stars for participation or effort. Your predictions (as opposed to hypotheses, which cannot be proven, only disproven) are either right (i.e., borne out by experiment), or wrong. And mostly they’re wrong.
Consequently, experimental research is a frustrating endeavor, because at least 90% of the time, even in controlled laboratory conditions, with pure solvents and reagents, and taking the greatest care, you’re proven wrong. (Cf. AGW proponents’ certainty in their predictions. Don’t make me laugh.) Ability to withstand that frustration (and not to start flailing wildly, but rather to continue working systematically) is a crucial personality trait for experimentalists.
Lack of falsifiability drives my low regard for economics, and my utter disdain for AGW. What would it take to destroy, irrevocably and forever, Keynesian economics, or AGW? In science, one experiment will do that handily, and often does.
I don’t often have the time to really read all of the comments here, but glad I did today.
Apparently Juan Williams, who embodies leftist thinking as well as anyone, was impressed by Obama’s zingers. I doubt that people who took the trouble to tune in for the fourth debate of the campaign were keeping a zinger count. I give those potential voters credit for tuning in because they were looking for a President for the next four years.
One thing that Obama proved was that he has no idea how a fleet works. He probably doesn’t know how many ships we have, or how many are deployed at any time, much less where. Nor how many it takes to keep a force of a particular size forward deployed. He may not understand that a ship, no matter how modern, can only be in one part of the world at any given time; nor the time and effort it takes to move a ship, or force from one part of the world to another. Complicated concepts for a community organizer to be sure. I was relieved that he did know that aircraft land on carriers, and that it is submarines that deliberately go beneath the water. That may indicate progress in his education.
Remember when everyone–including humanities people–used to study something called Logic 101? And it was considered a course in philosophy? Now we have “Critical Thinking,” which is social-science based, teaching the students only to apply the appropriate term (racist, patriarchal, homophobic, etc.).
Remember when everyone—including humanities people—used to study something called Logic 101?
Ah, affirming the antecedent, denying the consequent…
Good times, good times.
Oldflyer:
I was in the Navy a long, long time ago, but when I was, there were a lot of more or less conventional type ships around a carrier to protect it.
In a Navy, “size does matter”.
“Mother Nature is a cruel taskmistress, and awards no stars for participation or effort.”
And here I thought we got a trophy or somthin’ (a govt check?) just for showin’ up!
They are carrier “groups” as aircraft carriers are sitting ducks on their own. Also, I wish someone would have pointed out that we basically have one heavy ice breaker. There was an Alaskan town that desperately needed supplies and we did not have our regular ice breakers available. Supplies were delayed. I know it’s not national security, but in a way, it is.
OB,
You wrote: “Lack of falsifiability drives my low regard for economics, . . . ”
It made me think about the following: Economics is like a differential equation. thre are so many changing variables that it’s always easy to find some culprit to blame. That’s also true of science. One can say, well, the beaker was contaminated, there was too much reagent, the temperature was incorrect, etc.
So why can true scientists recognize a failed experiment while an economist might refuse to recognize a failed theory? One possibility might be the social type which inhabits either field. If a scientist sees the scientific process as leading toward a result (positive or negative) then the process is secondary. If, however, economists tend to be process type people, then they might focus on the process, itself, while considering the results secondary.
Isn’t this precisely what Affirmative Action is all about? it creates a process leading to an ideal result, but the result, in practice is nowhere near ideal. That doesn’t matter to the left, though as long as the AA process remains in place (n.B., I realize I swirched gears from economists toliberals).
And this brings us full cycle back to your original comment:
It would be interesting to see the internal polling numbers of the Obama campaign now. They must be atrocious from his perspective.
Obama was obviously playing to his base last night. His petty, snide remarks no doubt would appeal to the middle-school mentality of the left. If he is attempting to consolidate and avoid defections of his base at this point he is in deep, deep trouble.
Romney on the other hand was appealing to the few remaining undecided voters and hoping perhaps to draw a few marginal Obama voters.
I would have enjoyed a complete floor wiping of Obama by Romney last night. But that probably wouldn’t have been advantageous to either his campaign or the best interest of the nation.
A few thoughts. I have always been a concrete thinker type. Hard facts. Zero Nuance. Bio pre-med under grad, grad Finance, and JD. Of the three, the law degree was the hardest to grasp, with Biology and Chemistry the easiest. The JD was the hardest.. Never mastered the art of “Maybe” or the nuanced policy arguments.
As for Obama’s performance, I thought he looked angry, not aggressive. And his typical semi-affable personality was gone. His words were biting, and he had an un-presidential sneer on his face.
Meanwhile, Romney sat there looking like he was sitting a straight flush, but wanted you to go all in on your two pairs.
Some people called it Romney playing it safe. I disagree. I could almost swear Romney wanted Obama to act the way he did. On the split screen, I thought Obama was running for some House or Senate seat. Bizarre…
Cubz- agreed. I’ve been thinking he’s been behaving like a mayoral candidate.
T., speaking as an artist with a strong science bent, having seen people in both fields, I’d say that there’s a little of a “chicken and egg” in there, where the arts foster sloppy thinking, but they also attract it. I know artists that are brilliant and scientists that are… not, so there’s no hard and fast line.
…if anything, the injection of politics into either field has a bigger effect on thinking processes than the science or art field itself.
T Says:
“The left, OTH, seems satisfied with any kind of rhetorical rebuttal. It doesn’t matter whether facts are offered, or even if they are incorrect, it seems to be the rebuttal per se that is counted as a point-gaining strike.”
Yeah, if someone were to write off your statement as bias or snark itself I think they’d be wrong. I noticed the same thing back in 2001-2005 with Mike Moore fans. Any come back argument on their side was treated as serious…. no matter how big a joke it was.
So why can true scientists recognize a failed experiment while an economist might refuse to recognize a failed theory?
Valid experiments are reproducible, and anyone publishing his results has to assume others will try to reproduce them. For this reason no one publishes results until he has replicated them himself, often a number of times, for publishing stuff that no one else can reproduce kills one’s reputation pretty quickly.
The problem with economics is encapsulated in your observation:
Uncontrolled (and indeed, uncontrollable) variables mean that duplicating the exact same situation is a matter of happenstance (or, in fact, in economics, owing to the number of variables, impossible). For this reason, reproducibility cannot be achieved, nor consequently can anything be falsified (one can always attribute contradictory results on some difference, as you point out. (This is fundamental theoretical problem with all observational sciences, btw.)
Owing to biological variability, biology also has this problem, albeit to a lesser extent than economics. The problem is that too many biologists (at least molecular biologists, the group with which I’m most familiar) rather charmingly marvel at mutually exclusive results as reflecting the wonderfully complex nature of life, rather than as an indication of an experiment screwed up by the failure to control a relevant variable (the curmudgeonly, and decidedly unpoetic, view of chemists), or at least an experiment that should be replicated enough times to permit use of statistical methods. This is one reason that the biology literature in general, and the medical literature is particular, is so flaky.
Ah, just figured out why Word Press made me split the above into two. It was this link to the PLoS article re flakiness.
Tesh,
Please also understand that I’m not anti-arts. I hope that I did not give that impression. My family has been deeply involved in the arts and with artists for nigh on 35 years.
My frustration comes from artists (and by extension people in general) who think they have cornered the market on the knoweldge a subject but in reality don’t know what they don’t know. The Hollywood celebrities are a case in point. The have an international media “megaphone” from which to spout their opinions, but their opinions are oftentimes ill informed. Perhaps the great hypocrisy of the past several years was Yoko Ono’s refusal to let Ben Stein use John Lennon’s Imagine in Stein’s film Expelled. Imagine being refused use of a song that heralds “Imagine no possessions . . . .”
The fact is that many artists I’ve known who are working at making a living from their art are well grounded in business ideas (profit/loss, buy low/sell high) if not business tactics (they’re generally not good bookkeepers), but they are more motivated by the social ideas of politics. Many of them, and again many people in general, just don’t understand that it’s the profit of the private sector that allows social programs to exist at all, and that sense is exacerbated by someone like Obama for whom “profit” is a four letter word.
I can only assume Obama has decided to give up on my home state of Virginia with his condescending comments about the Navy and shipbuilding. Those comments did not go over well here in Tidewater Virginia (Norfolk Naval Station & Newport News Shipbuilding).
OB,
Thanks. The distinction between controlled/controlable variables and uncontrolled/uncontrolable variables makes perfect sense. It’s one aspect that I hadn’t thought about.
“For this reason, reproducibility cannot be achieved, nor consequently can anything be falsified . . . .” Then, by extension, the economist’s basic “sin” is not recognizing that the uncontrollable variables make the theory suspect from the get goand therefore the inability to rely on the theory as a Newtonian law.
sorry, didn’t mean to publish yet.
Then, by extension, the economist’s basic “sin” is relying on the theory as a Newtonian law rather than recognizing that the uncontrollable variables make the theory suspect from the get go.
Then, by extension, the economist’s basic “sin” is relying on the theory as a Newtonian law rather than recognizing that the uncontrollable variables make the theory suspect from the get go.
Yep. Effectively, every situation is unique, so no hard precedent exists (or can exist) that can be used for predictive purposes. Only in retrospect can one liken one circumstance to another. Of course, at that juncture, we know what happened, so someone saying he “would have predicted that” gets short shrift, except from those who want to use his work as cover for what they propose.
kaba says, “Obama was obviously playing to his base last night. His petty, snide remarks…. If he is attempting to consolidate and avoid defections of his base at this point he is in deep, deep trouble.”
Playing to the base has been their biggest error in all 4 debates. Depending upon turn out, there is a possibility that R&R might win 55-45 or even 60-40. R&R have the momentum, I hope they pile on over the next 13 days. I want BHO and his running dog lackeys to feel shunned and chagrined.
Shunned & Chagrined.
Sounds like a crummy law firm.
T.,
Oh, no, I didn’t take offense at all, sorry if I came across that way. My experience squares with yours. I do think that the arts winds up with more emotional folk than rational folk. I just think it’s a self-reinforcing system, with a little bit of molding and a little bit of initial attraction feeding each other. It’s even worse in arts heavily influenced by academia.
I’m way too late to the discussion here about the humanities vs. the sciences. All of my degrees are in the humanities. What made the experience of getting a doctorate particularly worthwhile for me, though, was not so much the stuff I was studying, learning, and writing about, but the fact that I spent years teaching basic undergraduate courses, mostly in writing. Doing so meant I thought and learned a lot about principles of analysis, and more importantly about logic and evidence. As a result, I became very good at recognizing logical fallacies. That was how, after I finished my doctorate, while teaching full-time at a small college, I found myself with colleagues who were discussing Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski scandal and not making the least bit of sense, as most of their premises were absurd, their logic was faulty, and most didn’t even have a basic grasp of the facts. That was, as I’ve mentioned before, one of the key turning points for me politically, as well. As a graduate student in the humanities, I naively assumed that my professors were well-informed, reasonable, thoughtful people. When I had professors as colleagues, though, I recognized how mistaken I had been.
parker wrote: Playing to the base has been their biggest error in all 4 debates. Depending upon turn out, there is a possibility that R&R might win 55-45 or even 60-40. R&R have the momentum, I hope they pile on over the next 13 days. I want BHO and his running dog lackeys to feel shunned and chagrined.
I am certainly hoping for the same sort of outcome. While 60-40 would be amazing, I’m imagining that the upper end for Romney and Ryan could possibly be 54; Obama could bottom out at 45, with others taking the remaining one percent.
Kurt,
Late or not, welcome to the discussion. Since you are using the past tense with regard to your humanities teaching, it seems you are yet another member of the group of “I used to work in the humanities, too.”
I think you make a salient point. It’s not just the degree work which contributes to critical thinking skills, but being in a position of teaching the material with some sense of objectivity which also contributes to those skills.
This thread is a fine example of why I read Neo’s blog. She has an excellent command of the written word and strong intelligence to back it up. Her commenters are equally brilliant. I always learn something when reading this blog.
Keep in mind that academic professionals can be intellectually rigorous within their own fields but be loose thinkers outside of their professional spheres in their personal opinions.
Also, many Islamic terrorist leaders have STEM backgrounds.
Baltimoron,
Interesting. Is there something different about the bayonets now? In my time, our firearms were kept in the arms room, of course, but we kept our bayonets with the rest of our gear (ie, clipped on the LBV).
Eric wrote: ” . . . academic professionals can be intellectually rigorous within their own fields but be loose thinkers outside of their professional spheres . . . .”
I agree. I’ve noted in past discussions that what many people deem lack of critical thinking skills might simply be an inability to apply those skills outside of one’s areas of expertise.
A plumber has critical thinking skills, so, too does an electrician and a homemaker. Such skills don’t necessarily need to be accompanied by a B.S., a Ph.D. or an MD. In this upcomng election are we seeing a country beginning to put those critical thinking skills to work?
In his book Arrogance Bernard Goldberg references a study that notes people judge physicians who wear white lab coats superior to physicians who wear blue lab coats. Goldberg’s reasoning is that people have no basis for judging a superior v. an inferior physician so they grab onto any evidence at hand.
Is this what happened in 2008? In a wave of media-generated Bush fatigue, did people vote for Obama because he “wore a white lab coat” to McCain’s blue lab coat? Regardless, now some powerful evidence is in and it appears that the voting public understands that it was snookered in 2008.
T: Yes, I left the humanities more than a dozen years ago. I still work in a university, but not in any academic capacity. I’ve had to serve time on various university committees and things on occasion, though, and it makes me thankful that my life and work now are very different.
Eric wrote: Keep in mind that academic professionals can be intellectually rigorous within their own fields but be loose thinkers outside of their professional spheres in their personal opinions.
That is largely true, and it’s one reason why I find Plato’s “Ion” to be such a worthwhile dialogue to know about, as it is about the limits of specialized skill and knowledge in other areas of life. Within the humanities today, though, I’d say that Eric’s observation would require even greater qualification as most of the disciplines are so theory-driven, that most academics in those fields know how to be rigorous within the demands of certain fashionable academic theories, but those theories themselves don’t necessarily have much to do with reality or the world at large, aside from the fact that most of them are also pushing political agendas; far too many academics buy into the theories without questioning their foundations.
Kurt,
“. . .far too many academics buy into the theories without questioning their foundations.”
As I noted above, they are theories not Newtonian laws, but as Occam’s Beard posted earlier, and it should be repeated often:
“A plumber has critical thinking skills… ”
I spent my last 5 years in the field of health physics (radiation safety) at a university with a strong emphasis in research. I encountered many a PI who was brilliant in their selected field of research. Yet, when it came to areas outside their expertise, namely radiation safety, they were often ignorant (and reluctant to admit so) or arrogant (and vehemently reluctant to admit so).
BHO is ignorant and arrogant and absolutely could never admit to either flaw. Its not binders that are dangerous, its blinders!