1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms.  Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.

2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs.  Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents.  Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.

3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this.  They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives.  They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.

3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias.  Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction.  (What should I call it?  The “Democratic Party direction”?  That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found.  Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?)  If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.

4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually Evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people.  Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, Mood Affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?).  They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events.  Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts.  They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.

I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their Narcissistic Mood Affiliation.

4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly.  That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong.  They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.”  In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense.  As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too.  That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.

5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged.  It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in.  I have never met such a person.  Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today.  It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.

6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally.  Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net.  It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.

Have a nice day!

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