A comment on Kevin Durrheim’s “Conversational silencing of racism in psychological science: Toward decolonization in practice” published 2023 in Perspectives on Psychological Science
How do you build a 1430 foot skyscraper, counting the 70 ft for the 6 basement levels, without figuring out how to distribute the steel. Look at the shape of the Eiffel Tower. But the ET does not have to support twice its own weight in concrete.
So how do you analyze a straight down collapse of the top 14% destroying the bottom 85% without the distribution data for the steel and concrete?
The 10,000 page NCSTAR1 report by the NIST does not even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers. So much for the Conservation of Momentum.
Systemic racism is to humanities what Newton's laws are to the field of molecular mechanics. In the eyes of the humanities researcher, therefore, the existence of the thing that they are trying to prove is so self evident that it doesn't require proof.
As such, a rebuttal like you present will only be taken by such circular-thinking people as evidence of its premise: People who deny the existence of systemic racism are proof that systemic racism exists.
But we must point out the absurdity again and again and never let it pass for scholarship among those who still know what scholarship is.
One point on South Africa: xenophobic violence does not "break out" to my understanding, but is a daily and ongoing experience for foreigners. What breaks out is not the violence, but reports of the violence.
You know, I have found myself constantly nonplussed, in the last few years, at the increasing number of people who lack any sense of the ridiculous, even more than a sense of reality, or honest decency, or what have you.
I grew up, intellectually, in the old Oxbridge environment, where the musty starches of academia guaranteed that any excessive amount of dung pretending to be scientifically valid by way of mystifying wording would be met with slaughtering laughter -- except in Art and Literature Critiques and in Philosophy, which to begin with were not allowed to pretend to empirical scientific validity, not even like History that gets its validation from accurate factual research and analysis of source documents. And even in Philosophy, which somewhat straddles the fields because of its origin, the lack of strict rational logic, or the twisting of logic into useless paradox, was often source of ridicule, like that which greeted Derrida at least at first.
Scholars stood in dread of ridicule. The destruction of a thesis by it, especially when done through an uncovering of obfuscating and magniloquent meaningless language, was a blot on one's slate that people bore for years ("Oh, the fellow who wrote that unfortunate piece.") Being ridiculed into the dust was a real danger, the cultured populace took note, and scholars took care to avoid it.
And now I find myself dumbfounded by this rather sudden broad acceptance of the most ridiculous theories passed as papers and research, actually just endless collages of empty words misapplied and misaligned, which are nothing but a litany of the most preposterous dog whistles without any substance. People build careers on this; they get published; they get professorships. I find it hard to believe my eyes.
I mean, it has always happened in the far corners of the Humanities: "Those weird fellows that nobody takes seriously but are picturesque," and occasionally produce an interesting dropping out of their extravagant lucubrations. But it was a limited phenomenon. And it never touched actual science.
Now all these articles and papers come out that you could swear were written by Alan Sokal as a satire of idiotic nonsense. And nobody notices. Everybody accepts and praises meaningless concepts and non sequiturs wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon.
It is magical thought. Once, formulae written on a piece of papyrus were applied to a suffering body part in order to treat the ailment. We seem to have gotten back there.
I think someone should set up a sort of Darwin Awards for this kind of supposedly scientific literature. With thorough deconstruction by satire of each paper. Because outrage is not enough. They need RIDICULE. Because these are clowns, and they should be called clowns, no matter how many PhDs and tenures they hold.
Regretfully, such articles are abundant, now even in STEM. My personal favorite -- a paper from the J. Chem Ed. published by the American Chemical Society and titled "A Special Topic Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconcious Racism in STEM". The paper describes “a special topic class in chemistry on feminism and science as a tool to disrupt the dysconcious racism in STEM,” which explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism.” “To problematize time as a linear social construct,” the paper says, “the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.” You cannot make it up!
Well, now that the most basic scientific commitments have been throw to the wayside and we are being fed drivel in so-called top journals, perhaps they can go back to the the less pretentious term "psychology" and stop pretending to be a real science. How about renaming the journal "Perspectives on Authors' Personalized, Contextualized, and Lived Perspectives Regarding Matters in Psychological Studies Across Diverse Perspectives"? It has a certain ring to it, no? I am sure it would find an audience.
Where do physics and psychology collide?
https://psikeyhackr.livejournal.com/1276.html
How do you build a 1430 foot skyscraper, counting the 70 ft for the 6 basement levels, without figuring out how to distribute the steel. Look at the shape of the Eiffel Tower. But the ET does not have to support twice its own weight in concrete.
So how do you analyze a straight down collapse of the top 14% destroying the bottom 85% without the distribution data for the steel and concrete?
The 10,000 page NCSTAR1 report by the NIST does not even specify the total amount of concrete in the towers. So much for the Conservation of Momentum.
Can psychologists do Newtonian physics?
Oh, look, a throwback antisemite.
Sorry friend, go peddle your Protocols of the Sages of Zion somewhere else. This is a substack about science.
All of the points you raise are very well made.
Systemic racism is to humanities what Newton's laws are to the field of molecular mechanics. In the eyes of the humanities researcher, therefore, the existence of the thing that they are trying to prove is so self evident that it doesn't require proof.
As such, a rebuttal like you present will only be taken by such circular-thinking people as evidence of its premise: People who deny the existence of systemic racism are proof that systemic racism exists.
But we must point out the absurdity again and again and never let it pass for scholarship among those who still know what scholarship is.
One point on South Africa: xenophobic violence does not "break out" to my understanding, but is a daily and ongoing experience for foreigners. What breaks out is not the violence, but reports of the violence.
*MIGHTY HEADDESK*
You know, I have found myself constantly nonplussed, in the last few years, at the increasing number of people who lack any sense of the ridiculous, even more than a sense of reality, or honest decency, or what have you.
I grew up, intellectually, in the old Oxbridge environment, where the musty starches of academia guaranteed that any excessive amount of dung pretending to be scientifically valid by way of mystifying wording would be met with slaughtering laughter -- except in Art and Literature Critiques and in Philosophy, which to begin with were not allowed to pretend to empirical scientific validity, not even like History that gets its validation from accurate factual research and analysis of source documents. And even in Philosophy, which somewhat straddles the fields because of its origin, the lack of strict rational logic, or the twisting of logic into useless paradox, was often source of ridicule, like that which greeted Derrida at least at first.
Scholars stood in dread of ridicule. The destruction of a thesis by it, especially when done through an uncovering of obfuscating and magniloquent meaningless language, was a blot on one's slate that people bore for years ("Oh, the fellow who wrote that unfortunate piece.") Being ridiculed into the dust was a real danger, the cultured populace took note, and scholars took care to avoid it.
And now I find myself dumbfounded by this rather sudden broad acceptance of the most ridiculous theories passed as papers and research, actually just endless collages of empty words misapplied and misaligned, which are nothing but a litany of the most preposterous dog whistles without any substance. People build careers on this; they get published; they get professorships. I find it hard to believe my eyes.
I mean, it has always happened in the far corners of the Humanities: "Those weird fellows that nobody takes seriously but are picturesque," and occasionally produce an interesting dropping out of their extravagant lucubrations. But it was a limited phenomenon. And it never touched actual science.
Now all these articles and papers come out that you could swear were written by Alan Sokal as a satire of idiotic nonsense. And nobody notices. Everybody accepts and praises meaningless concepts and non sequiturs wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon.
It is magical thought. Once, formulae written on a piece of papyrus were applied to a suffering body part in order to treat the ailment. We seem to have gotten back there.
I think someone should set up a sort of Darwin Awards for this kind of supposedly scientific literature. With thorough deconstruction by satire of each paper. Because outrage is not enough. They need RIDICULE. Because these are clowns, and they should be called clowns, no matter how many PhDs and tenures they hold.
(Speaking of Alan Sokal, did you see his painstakingly kindly but yet rigorous rebuttal of the much quoted cosmologist-turned-clown Chanda Prescod-Weinstein? https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/260)
Regretfully, such articles are abundant, now even in STEM. My personal favorite -- a paper from the J. Chem Ed. published by the American Chemical Society and titled "A Special Topic Class in Chemistry on Feminism and Science as a Tool to Disrupt the Dysconcious Racism in STEM". The paper describes “a special topic class in chemistry on feminism and science as a tool to disrupt the dysconcious racism in STEM,” which explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism.” “To problematize time as a linear social construct,” the paper says, “the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized.” You cannot make it up!
Well, now that the most basic scientific commitments have been throw to the wayside and we are being fed drivel in so-called top journals, perhaps they can go back to the the less pretentious term "psychology" and stop pretending to be a real science. How about renaming the journal "Perspectives on Authors' Personalized, Contextualized, and Lived Perspectives Regarding Matters in Psychological Studies Across Diverse Perspectives"? It has a certain ring to it, no? I am sure it would find an audience.