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Matt's avatar

I agree with a lot of this, but there's a background framing that's very blinkered. I think this quote demonstrates it well.

"No one ever stopped you from reading history books on US involvement in South America. No one ever stopped you from reading old reactionary texts. Are you upset because it wasn’t assigned to you in 11th grade? Grow up."

This is what I take as literally the point of an honest reckoning with the concept of ideas as influenced by power structures. It doesn't matter if one can access a history of the US in Latin America in the 20th century. Or even a true history of the US as opposed to whitewashed propaganda as mandated now in states like Texas and was all anyone learned until pretty recently. Round to no one reads 500 page history texts, popular or academic. If the power structures ensure that round to no one learns X, then the popular imagination and all the politics downstream of it will be dramatically different than if everyone learned X in high school.

I'm a PhD statistician. I couldn't agree more that questions about society should be as informed by data and reasoning and inference as possible. But with that training I'm also very aware of another thing you miss. The data we have, the questions we ask, and the research that gets funded are all powerfully influenced by the structure of society and our polity (ie power structures).

Take an example from recent politics. Centrist and right wing types like Hanania point to the fact that the research says more police equals less crime, so obviously defunding the police is doomed to failure. Smart proponents of defunding point out two things. First, crimes by the police are nearly 100% unmeasured (because power structures). So it's actually literally impossible to truly measure the relative crime rates with more versus less police presence. But even if you grant that more police results in less overall crime, the bigger point is that, especially since Reagan, as a country we have systematically dismantled or refused to build almost any social infrastructure other than the police to deal with the problems driven by poverty, addiction, mental health, economic dislocation, etc. So if you go from one public service dealing with a while raft of issues to none, it shouldn't be surprising lots of problems get worse. The real question is should we reimagine how to structure public services. I'm open to the kinds of things smart defund folks argue for being right or wrong. But those aren't things you can measure without large investments in making some attempts at fundamental reform. Reforms opposed by and suppressed by winners in the current structure.

Again, I think lots of critical studies are net negative masturbation. But you're showing big blind spots here too.

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J.J. McCullough's avatar

You say you’ve never gotten a dopamine hit from reading statistics, but it seems to me right-wingers fixated on race-and-crime stats are really into empirical data for precisely that reason. Steve Sailer or whoever is popular with the “dissident right” because he ALSO promises his readers “forbidden knowledge” that you become a dangerous free-thinker for learning.

I think the lesson is that people who are genuinely curious about the world — and not just ideologues with pre-determined conclusions — have to have respect for both data AND narrative-driven theories. You can test theories with data, but data also has to be understood in some sort of social context that looks honesty at existing structures of power and their history, etc.

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