We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat.
If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was.
I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”.
(As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Thank you Natalie.
Yes the Gentleman is correct – a group of people have gained control of academia (and cultural institutions generally) who have extreme opinions – way out of line with what ordinary Americans (of whatever race) believe – yet they do not see their own extremism, they think their opponents (who have hardly changed their opinions at all – who have much the same opinions they have always had) are extreme (which they are – but only from the perspective of the far-left) and have radically changed (which they have not).
The cultural change is profound – and has made universities (and other cultural institutions) an “unsafe environment” (to take one of the forms of words the left love to use) for conservatives and even for moderate Democrats – these places are now in the grip of cultists.
The implications of all this are profound – it means that the “research” that comes out of these places is so fundamentally biased, in its basic starting assumptions, that it is often worthless. And it means that conservatives, or even moderate Democrats, can not really live and function in these places – because these institutions are now just so alien and actively hostile.
The case for both taxpayer funding, and for private (individual or corporate) funding for academia and for other cultural institutions, therefore, collapses.