Rant away — I enjoyed reading your thoughts on this.
the idea that you can know a lot about a subject from tumblr, and blog posts online, and twitter and whatnot, isn't wrong exactly and online resources may well have a queer lens or an anti-patriarchal lens that mainstream textbooks don't have? but the idea that "reading about it online as a teenager" can replace "many years of intensive and rigorous study with other scholars" does hack me off.
This is it, exactly. I guess what I find frustrating about criticism of academia from the left — especially of humanities and social sciences academia — is that what these people are really criticising is misogyny, or racism, or transphobia, or homophobia, or precarious zero-hours teaching contracts and the employment crisis facing postgraduate students. But instead of criticising these things, they end up criticising academic study and expertise themselves. I expect criticism of the humanities from the right, but at least right-wing criticisms (as dangerous as they are) have a kind of ideological consistency.
Another example of criticism from the left that just makes me despair: I work as an academic librarian in a medical subject area, and as a result I work with a lot of medical researchers and NHS staff on various projects. One such project last year led to the changing of diagnostic criteria for COVID to include a loss of taste and smell, and the data from our project was presented to the UK government in order to formalise this change in criteria. But when all this was announced, it was accompanied by ridicule and incomprehension from the general public — not because they disbelieved us, but because COVID patients had been speaking about this symptom for months at that point, so they thought our study was just confirming something everyone already knew. And all this just showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the importance of rigour, and of following a specific method to systematically collect and synthesise data in an unbiased way — and that this takes time. We can't just randomly take the word of some person on Twitter saying they have those symptoms!
Obviously there are a lot of other problems here — a failure of communication on the part of the experts, and a lack of understanding of the scientific method, not just in this case but in general. But it was absolutely emblematic of these broader issue of anti-intellectualism, and contempt for expertise.
no subject
the idea that you can know a lot about a subject from tumblr, and blog posts online, and twitter and whatnot, isn't wrong exactly and online resources may well have a queer lens or an anti-patriarchal lens that mainstream textbooks don't have? but the idea that "reading about it online as a teenager" can replace "many years of intensive and rigorous study with other scholars" does hack me off.
This is it, exactly. I guess what I find frustrating about criticism of academia from the left — especially of humanities and social sciences academia — is that what these people are really criticising is misogyny, or racism, or transphobia, or homophobia, or precarious zero-hours teaching contracts and the employment crisis facing postgraduate students. But instead of criticising these things, they end up criticising academic study and expertise themselves. I expect criticism of the humanities from the right, but at least right-wing criticisms (as dangerous as they are) have a kind of ideological consistency.
Another example of criticism from the left that just makes me despair: I work as an academic librarian in a medical subject area, and as a result I work with a lot of medical researchers and NHS staff on various projects. One such project last year led to the changing of diagnostic criteria for COVID to include a loss of taste and smell, and the data from our project was presented to the UK government in order to formalise this change in criteria. But when all this was announced, it was accompanied by ridicule and incomprehension from the general public — not because they disbelieved us, but because COVID patients had been speaking about this symptom for months at that point, so they thought our study was just confirming something everyone already knew. And all this just showed a fundamental lack of understanding of the importance of rigour, and of following a specific method to systematically collect and synthesise data in an unbiased way — and that this takes time. We can't just randomly take the word of some person on Twitter saying they have those symptoms!
Obviously there are a lot of other problems here — a failure of communication on the part of the experts, and a lack of understanding of the scientific method, not just in this case but in general. But it was absolutely emblematic of these broader issue of anti-intellectualism, and contempt for expertise.