Richard Hanania writes a Substack on politics and the culture war, including civil rights law, wokeness and institutional politics.
HN commenters cite it for the argument that woke institutions come from civil rights law, finding the evidence compelling, though one dismisses another piece as hand-wringing.
Unfortunately there's a lot of evidence that fraud really is very prevalent and we don't hear about it anywhere near enough. It depends a lot on the field though.
One piece of evidence comes from software like GRIM and SPRITE. GRIM was run over psychology papers and found around 50% had impossible means in them (that could not be arrived at by any combination of allowed inputs) [1]. The authors generally did not cooperate to help uncover the sources of the problems.
Yet another comes from estimates by editors of well known journals. For example Richard Horton at the Lancet is no stranger to fraud, having published and promoted the Surgisphere paper. He estimates that maybe 50% of medical papers are making untrue claims, which is interesting in that this intuition matches the number obtained in a different field by a more rigorous method. The former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine stated that it was "no longer possible to believe much of the medical research that is published".
50%+ is a number that crops up frequently in medicine. The famous Ioannidis paper, "Why most published research findings are false" (2005) has been cited over 12,000 times.
Marc Andreessen has said in an interview that he talked to the head of a very large government grant agency, and asked him whether it could really be true that half of all biomedical research claims were fake? The guy laughed and said no it's not true, it's more like 90%. [2]
Elizabeth Bik uncovers a lot of fraud.…
> But something odd then happened in the US. The left, having been pushed too far by something or other (Trump being the usual cited example), began to reason that since the “right” had free speech as a value, the “left” were free to oppose it. This is where I believe the new trend of what has been called “cancel culture” comes from.
Left-wing intolerance in the United States became more publicly prominent after the 2016 elections, but its roots are far older. A full accounting can be found in the books "America's Cultural Revolution" (Christopher Rufo, 2023) and "The Origins of Woke" (Richard Hanania, 2023), but the TLDR is:
The most extreme, intolerant, and revolutionary fringes of the 60s civil rights movement (Angela Davis et al.) completely failed in the end to achieve their goals of violent overthrow of the government. So instead, they pivoted to taking control of institutions, like university and government bureaucracies. They were greatly aided in doing so by civil rights law; specifically, by activist judges and bureaucrats who twisted the laws that Congress passed, so that every major corporation, university, and government department lived in constant fear of being sued for "disparate impact" or "hostile workplace environment." It turns out, that instituting speech codes and hiring the radicals into your HR department is a great way to ward off the lawsuits (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case). So free speech lost in the…
Richard Hanania had some interesting comments about this ( https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/reflections-on-2021 )
> When I’m on Twitter, how rude should I be?
> I tend to admire thinkers who are civil and think less of those who are rude. Usually, I try to emulate those I admire and not those I don’t, but I actually think there’s an intellectual case to be made for rudeness and snark as long as it’s used in defense of worthy ideas instead of tribalism or self-aggrandizement (maybe a topic for a future Substack). One thing that used to bother me about academia was how someone would have a critique of a research project that completely discredited it, but nobody would actually follow the argument to its logical conclusion and say the research was therefore worthless and the author should go do something else. We as a society would be better off valuing being correct more and being civil less. Maybe you would ideally want both, but I suspect that there’s actually a tradeoff, as people who tend to be right about a lot are often jerks, and academics who are wrong about everything always seem to be complimenting each other for being stunning and brave (see #HighlightingWomen and #WomenAlsoKnowStuff). Economics is less crazy than other disciplines, and now there are female academics complaining that the field is too mean, which to me seems necessary to trim bad ideas. So I’m sort of a fan of incivility and rudeness, but also thinking carefully about how to make snark…
> why they can even exist in the first place
They're legally required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its consequences. Let me explain:
The act prohibits discrimination on several protected characteristics, and the Supreme Court has expanded that to cover even things that merely correlate with those characteristics, unless an employer can convincingly show those characteristics are required [1].
But how can employers shield themselves from the legal risk of a discrimination lawsuit, when "discriminating" is so vaguely defined? By showing they engaged in "best effort" not to discriminate, which means mouthing all the right platitudes, employing ever-evolving "best practices", and having departments devoted to the cause (first HR, now DEI).
It's a red queen's race to be the most progressive and anti-racist, plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society, and these are the results after 60 years of it. Any corporation, school, or university that goes against it, that merely tries to stay neutral, will fall behind and be made a legal and PR example of [2].
[1] To see how harsh a test this is, requiring an IQ test for management positions is prohibited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
[2] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Caring about one thing substitutes for caring about other things. Shocking.
This seems like a particularly late entry to the hand-wringing "the grey tribe fails is failing to embrace the neo-Victorian moral posturing of the blue tribe and all internal scandals are attributable to this" spate of post-SBF articles. Imagine writing a similarly-broad article attacking anti-racism as a concept based on a collection of stories of Venmo grifting or poorly-allocated BLM donations. The strawman is obvious to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
>Every AI safety researcher knows about the paper clip maximizer. Few seem to grasp the ways this subculture is mimicking that tunnel vision.
Lol really?? You're comparing some bad PR incidents to the literal unintentional destruction of life on Earth?
Relevantly, Richard Hasania has a great article discussing this sort of woke ref-working of the EA movement here: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die .
I'm for destigmatizing mental illness so that people who need the help don't have to face that barrier to getting help. However, could it be that the focus on mental health is in a perverse way making things worse?
The way it is analogized here [1] was interesting to me:
"If we told people that fear of flying was something everyone struggles with, that it was the result of what others have done to them, or structural racism or whatever, I’m sure we’d get more of it. Imagine further if TV, music, and movies taught kids that fear of flying made them deep and interesting, and schools and universities had fear of flying awareness weeks. This is pretty much the modern approach to mental illness."
[1] https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/how-i-overcame-anxiety?r=3rgcb&utm_medium=ios