Bad social science, bad commentary
- Peter Lorenzi
- Sep 18, 2021
- 2 min read
September 18, 2021. The Wall Street Journal, once a bastion of free-market, small government, capitalist thinking, has succumbed to wokeness and virtue signaling, politically correct pandering of the worst kind. Some claim it is because Rupert Murdoch turned over the keys to the kingdom to his own woke kids. Regardless of the cause, it is not the paper I long used as required reading and the source material for my business leadership, management and entrepreneurship classes.
Yet there is something salvageable here. For the critical reader, there are occasional gems, just as there are some certain sources to avoid. Jason Riley is a gem; Peggy Noonan is a swamp-gas filled, well-past-her-expriation-date, former conservative, featured columnist. William Galston and Karl Rove are also good to avoid. And I don't mean that they need to be censored, just not read.
So you have to search hard and read widely, then closely. The Weekend Interview usually merits a careful read as it tends to feature critics of conventional cancel culture thinking. Today's "Science needs criticism, not cheerleading" interview with Duke professor John Station, is a good example, a spot-on critique of the social sciences, where feelings hold sway over facts, as noted in the following excerpt.
In a forthcoming book, “Fact vs. Passion: Science in the Age of Unreason,” he writes that “many social scientists have difficulty separating facts from faith, reality from the way they would like things to be. Many research topics have become taboo which, in turn, means that policy makers are making decisions based more on ideologically-driven political pressure than scientific fact.”
The published interview follows
For a good contrast, flip a page in today's Journal and find Peggy Noonan's smear of Rush Limbaugh. The full column can be found below. You can read it, yet I will offer you a good hack for getting through the noise. At the top right of the column, near a 'balloon' linking to the comments section, is a number showing the number of comments. If the number is greater than 1,000, the author is most likely to be skewered thoroughly, often by her own words, and usually by pointing out the author's biases, contradictions, misrepresentations, absence of logic and evidence, etc. And typically unlike the author's long-winded, flourishing or 'erudite' rhetoric, the commenters come straight to the point and -- more often than by the author -- with evidence, logic and data.
The attached file contains a good number of the comments. It is often more useful to skip the column and go straight to the comments, especially when there is a large number of comments. Above I asserted that comments in excess of 1,000 are a troubling sign for the author. This column received almost 2,000 comments. You can guess the rest.
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