Manifesto

C. van Gog, 15 October 2021

Here is a manifesto against academic charlatanism I like. It seems to me that the problem has only increased since 1995.

In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia (archived)

No chemistry department would hire an alchemist. A department of crystallography is no place for believers in the psychic power of crystals. No engineering school would keep someone intent on designing a perpetual motion machine. An astronomical observatory is no place for people who believe that the planets are pushed by angels. A biology department would close its doors to anyone who rejects genetics. No one who denies the existence of Nazi concentration camps or Communist labor camps would be able to teach history at a decent university. No mathematics department would tolerate anyone holding that logic is a tool of male domination and quantity is masculine. No Jungian psychology is taught in any self-respecting department of psychology. Whoever believes in homeopathy cannot make it into an accredited medical school. To generalize: neither proven falsities nor lies are tolerated in any scientific or technological institution. And for a good reason, too: namely, because such institutions are set up with the specific purpose of finding, refining, applying, or teaching truths, not just any old opinions.

Walk a few steps away from the faculties of science, engineering, medicine, or law, towards the faculty of arts. Here you will meet another world, one where falsities and lies are tolerated, nay manufactured and taught, in industrial quantities. Here the unwary student may take courses in all manner of nonsense and falsity. Here some professors are hired, promoted, or given power for teaching that reason is worthless, empirical evidence unnecessary, objective truth nonexistent, basic science a tool of either capitalist or male domination, and the like. Here we find people who reject all the knowledge painstakingly acquired over the past half-millennium. This is the place where students can earn credits for learning old and new superstitions of nearly all kinds, and where they can unlearn to write, so as to sound like phenomenologists, existentialists, deconstructionists, ethnomethodologists, or psychoanalysts. This is where taxpayers’ moneys are squandered in the maintenance of the huge industry of cultural involution centered around the deliberate rejection of rational discussion and empirical testing. This fraud has got to be stopped in the name of intellectual honesty and social responsibility”

One strategy against bullshit is insisting on concreteness. If someone claims X, can they make this concrete?

When did X apply in the past? Why?
When did X not apply in the past? Why not?
Which alternatives are there to X? Why are they inferior to X?
How does X relate to established knowledge A, B, and C?

It’s important to not allow a gish gallop out of X. Insist on X: if they retract their claim, they lose credibility: they were overconfident in believing X and might be equally overconfident in believing Y, Z, and whatnot. If they fail to retract X while failing to provide adequate evidence for X, this is worse still: it could indicate a unwillingness to engage in critical thought.

Another strategy is non-engagement.

Pictured below: an academic charlatan.