Monthly Archives: February 2018

Answering questions nobody’s asking on pages nobody’s reading

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This is from Thomas Sowell:

“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”

Higher education is today almost entirely vocational education, however unsuited to almost any vocation the products of that education system are. What is an even greater scandal is that the vast wasteland of the education system is supposedly dedicated to original research and furthering knowledge. Unfortunately, the last place you are likely to find any of this is in one of our modern universities, which are dedicated to conformity and killing dead anything resembling original thought. At the link to the quote by Sowell, there was another article even more to the point: Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads. All of this is bizarrely true.

Professors usually spend about 3-6 months (sometimes longer) researching and writing a 25-page article to submit an article to an academic journal. And most experience a twinge of excitement when, months later, they open a letter informing them that their article has been accepted for publication, and will therefore be read by…

… an average of ten people.

Yes, you read that correctly. The numbers reported by recent studies are pretty bleak:

– 82 percent of articles published in the humanities are not even cited once.

– Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read.

– Half of academic papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

The final para is exactly right:

Most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading.

I spent a quarter of a century writing submissions to governments and government bureaucracies and on not a single occasion did I find anything written by an academic worth citing and quoting. Almost none of it is designed to answer questions anyone is interested in knowing the answer to, only in having a string of publications that will allow you to keep your job. This is almost certainly less true or even untrue in the natural sciences, but in the social sciences and “humanities” it is absolutely the case in virtually every instance.

Will anyone love you tomorrow?

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https://youtu.be/3irmBv8h4Tw

This is the most tragic and melancholy song I know. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, from 1961 when during early versions of the hook up culture there was still the thought that love, real actual deep personal affection and a promise of commitment, might be involved. Now we have this instead: The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari. The first para:

Sexual mores in the West have changed so rapidly over the past 100 years that by the time you reach 50, intimate accounts of commonplace sexual events of the young seem like science fiction: You understand the vocabulary and the sentence structure, but all of the events take place in outer space. You’re just too old.

The events actually take place in inner space where the pain of the hook up culture must be phenomenal. When I was a young lad, say from around the time I was 13-14 when the song first reached the charts, every date was in some sense filled with the real possibility of marriage, which was the purpose of dating. And intimate relations [what a phrase!] were practically a marriage proposal. Now, I don’t know how any of it works, but what was a bittersweet song in 1961 is a tragic reality everywhere.

Jordan Peterson on Twelve Rules for Life

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The videos are both of Jordan Peterson discussing his extraordinary book, 12 Rules for Life. This is the statement that comes with the first:

The clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson sets out twelve profound and practical principles for living a meaningful life. His 12 Rules for Life will offer an antidote to the chaos in our lives: with eternal truths applied to our modern problems.

As for the book, I just finished it today, and my advice to you is to buy it and read it yourself. It is like nothing you have ever come across before.

Jordan Peterson discussed in The Australian

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Jordan Peterson attacked in The Australian: Jordan Peterson regurgitates discredited male chauvinism of the 1970s. The article’s last para:

Waking up at 35, desperate to have a child, is not a good realisation, as Peterson says. That reasonable point prompted the young man hosting the video to chip in with a charmless insight — that the anxieties of mid-30s women keen to be mothers are known as “baby rabies’’ among “plenty of communities of young men … in the dating scene’’. There is no lack of work for psychologists. But young women are not the ones who most need help.

And now from the comments, working from the first of the Top Comments and then down.

Ken

This article is akin to Cathy Newman’s interview of Peterson.  It’s taking what Peterson says out of context or is straight-out inaccurate.  One of the refreshing things about Peterson is that he’s telling home truths, and bases many or most of his observations on decades of being a treating psychologist of both men and women.  What an irony that a female journalist chooses to block the concerns and experience of many women in this rant against him.

Neil

Young women entering law, he claims, will find it “very, very demanding, very, very difficult, very, very stressful and very, very competitive. And you’re not going to find the fulfilment of your desire for intimate, close interpersonal relationships’’. How patronising. Isn’t he just telling it like it is and asking of women in particular “is this what you want”?

“In exaggerating the problems that women can expect to face in demanding careers, Peterson casts doubt on their capabilities” He’s neither exaggerating nor casting doubts on capabilities, he is again asking “is this what you want”.

Jordan Petersen has kept his own practice as a clinical psychologist outside his University work and the points he makes are from experience with many women who have come to him in that private practice with problems created by the real-life trials and tribulations he now seeks to point out to those who will listen.

It’s disappointing, but not unexpected, for the article to refer, in a pejorative fashion that the advice of Dr Peterson appeals to “some conservatives” suggesting extreme right-wingers and thus to be ignored. He claims no political position and an interest only in the truth.

Sarah

@Neil I agree with Peterson – I’m a doctor working 60 hours a week – it is hard, very demanding and very stressful.  Having close interpersonal relationships is extremely difficult – luckily my husband is happy to work as a team to raise children and understood the impact my career would have on family life before he married me.

Thomas

 “By the time you’re 40, if you don’t have a family and children you are one lost soul.’’

That’s true, as a generalisation.  Obviously some women do not ever want to have kids and live happily without them, but the vast majority eventually realise children are what they want most of all.  It’s usually around 35 that it dawns on them they’ve wasted their best years sleeping around with worthless men and obsessing over meaningless work.

This doesn’t affect men as much because there is usually no shortage of younger women willing to date older men, and men remain fertile their whole life.  Women, on the other hand, struggle to find a decent partner once they hit 35 and inevitably have to significantly lower their standards.  The result is more miserable women, more broken families, more neglected children and more socialism to pay for it all..  Feminism is self-defeating and unfortunately it’s women who usually end up worse off.

You might say Peterson is patronising; I say he is realistic.

Greg

Why do people with a left jaundiced view find it so hard to actually listen to what Peterson actually said?

Gordon

He seems to get a lot of support from women in their 50s and over so you cant speak for them as a group. This is the type of emotive shallow analysis that drives people to Peterson. The contrast between Newman and Peterson was embarrassing and your contribution is almost as insipid as Newman’s was.

Denzil

One has always to be careful of an article like this…cherry picking without context is dangerous.  I have seen a lot of Petersons work and I have rarely heard him say anything that would upset a well grounded woman. That is why his interview with Cathy Newman was such a car crash (for her) She tried on the feminist rant only to be met with sensible well researched answers that she could not deal with.

Helio

I don’t find Jordan Peterson patronising. He is realistic and respectful – realistic about the differing natures of men and women and able to recognise, as most feminists do not, that difference does not mean unequal in value.

Helio’s wife

Kathleen

Sorry Tessa, but I can’t fault a single word that JP says in this video.

I know from personal experience that pursuing a career is hard work, often unsatisfying, always competitive…and it doesn’t come without many sacrifices.

Young women are fed a whole lot of aspirational and unrealistic claptrap, which is all well and good for some, but for others, it simply leads to regret and disappointment.

JP’s video dispels some of the myths that are fed to young women about what’s important in life.

More power to him.

cecily

I think the writer must have watched a different video to the one I saw? Either that or she has a problem listening and actually responding to what was said rather than responding to what she wanted him to say!

CRISP

Classic false arguments being used here.

“Straw man” : she misrepresents what he said so she can tear it down.

“Red herring”: he’s trying to tell girls not to work but to just marry and have kids.

“Argumentum ad hominen”: he is an old-fashioned chauvinist troglodyte so we should abuse him and not hear what he has to say.

He would demolish Tess in a debate.

Brian

Tess – this is not a fair analysis of what Peterson has actually said. It is a lazy and biased set of unsupported assumptions.

Etc

Do economists understand what’s happening to the American economy?

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The answer is, of course, no, they don’t. A couple of examples from the very highest reaches of economic theory. First this from The Institute of International Monetary Research:

The accompanying video therefore looks at a different topic. In an article in the current issue of The Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Professor Paul Krugman claims that economic theory and analysis have worked well over the last decade. He is a champion of the well-known Keynesian prescription, that an increase in the structural (i.e., cyclically-adjusted) budget deficit boosts aggregate demand and makes above-trend growth (with falling unemployment) more likely. According to Krugman, cheered on by Keynes’ biographer, Lord Skidelsky, in the Project Syndicate blog, these textbook ideas were translated into policy in the USA and went far to check the Great Recession. Krugman and Skidelsky believe that, in this sense, economics worked.

That is, it worked in the sense that the ridiculously exaggerated forecasts of doom never eventuated. But the recovery never occurred either, a recovery that is occurring now based on principles absolutely and completely antithetical to the policies adopted by those who applied a Keynesian stimulus.

And while we’re at it, I might also mention this, Should We Reject the Natural Rate Hypothesis?, from the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. This is the interim conclusion:

To summarize: I read the macroeconomic evidence as suggestive of persistent effects of monetary policy on the natural unemployment rate and potential output. But the evidence is not overwhelming. Moreover, looking just at recessions has its limits: It cannot answer whether there are symmetrical effects of booms and recessions, which is a crucial issue for the design of policy. In this context, a closer look at potential channels of persistence and more microeconomic evidence may help to assess potential nonlinearities or asymmetries between recessions and booms.

And this is the conclusion at the end:

Where does this leave us? . . . The general advice must be that central banks should keep the natural rate hypothesis as their baseline, but keep an open mind and put some weight on the alternatives. For example, given the evidence on labor force participation and on the stickiness of inflation expectations presented earlier, I believe that there is a strong case, although not an overwhelming case, to allow US output to exceed potential for some time, so as to reintegrate some of the workers who left the labor force during the last ten years.

That is, we should keep the theory intact but ignore the theory when it suits us because something else would be preferable. Indeed, if we are looking at the US economy and trying to explain its astonishing reversal over the past year, there is not a theory found in any modern text [except mine] that will help you understand what is going on or why it’s happening.