I am not interested in debating this topic from any side, I was responding to your post #137 ( I apologize I haven’t tried to post a quote of a post yet) in that I do not understand your point. Several times cosmodan posted, it did seem to clarify what point you were perhaps intending to make, yet your subsequent posts confuse me by going off on tangents that were not coherent (ie your example of subjective vs objective and linear vs non-linear. I realize the thread drifted from the OP, but your responses seemed to keep coming back to a position of your superiority over others and how can you somehow convince others of your position.
And I should clarify I understand that you are in fact trying to convince others of your position and that is fine and understandable, I’m just not sure what it is.
Obviously I’m not alone in this. And intelligence is not all that related to clarity of expression. anyhow.
I’m not saying that if you had more experience in college you’d suddenly love academia. You might really dislike it then. You might be a bit clearer on what really goes on there. We have a two year college near us where minds go to die. It’s not the teachers, but more the students. For whatever reason parents send kids there for two years expecting them to be able to transfer to Berkeley. It does happen, but not very often. Some of the teachers in the high school say that going there is equivalent to going to Harvard. Which is bullshit. My point is that there are a lot of differences between schools, and even between departments in schools.
I’ve been to a good graduate department (in Computer Science) and a not so good one. The good one had an artmosphere of intellectual combat - not nasty, usually, but you were expected to be able to defend your opinions. Kind of like SDMB. I loved it, but I understand that some people might find this atmosphere horrible. But this training was really valuable when I started to work, and has been valuable ever since. I can understand that people of a group for which this kind of argument is out of bounds might even see it as racist or sexist. But it is an individual thing, not a group thing. People who don’t get good opportunities because they sit in the corner and never talk are not being discriminated against because of race or gender, but from personality.
Maybe this is what you are seeing.
Voyager: No that’s not what I am seeing. What I am seeing is that people COMPLETELY misunderstood what I was trying to say. It’s like I can understand the language but not write it. This thread helped me come to some realizations about myself. Not wholly new ones, but a deeper understanding of it. So to a certain degree in a way this thread was about those issues because it accentuated the divide in communication I was trying to discuss. I was able to relate the same subject to people off of this board in like three sentences, but for some reason here I just failed. I am glad Cosmodan was able to understand me, and that a couple of people chimed in saying they could understand me, so that’s helpful.
I think a rhetoric course would help me most definitely. The thing that I have been saying over and over is I don’t have a problem with academia, and that is still true. I was talking about the culture within academia, that affects me as much as it does anyone in college, regardless of whether or not I go to college. I recognize that the overall academic culture has organizational splits and hierarchies. I don’t need basic hierarchical concepts that apply to ANY large group of people explained to me. I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion of such things. Unfortunately didn’t happen, people chose to continue to defend what wasn’t being attacked. So I’ll try to figure out why on my own, I feel beaten down by the whole affair, and it’s just not in my best interests to spend this much effort to try and get my point across to three people. I feel like the thread was successfully hijacked, and in the future I am going to focus more on not participating when that is done.
Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, all bureaucracies follow the same basic principles. They are easy to see, if not so easy to articulate. Academia is a group selling a product, just like anyone else. Religion, Business, Government, Academia, it’s all the same, it’s a bunch of people trying to sell their product in the end. So it’s not that difficult to recognize the structure of how it works. The flavor of that product, it’s content and how it is presented of course, varies. So seeing people around me in the Academic industry gives me a glimpse into the way that it all works. Not to mention I can see the threads of culture that permeate the society in which I live, and can try to trace their roots as memes.
One thing I noticed in this thread on a personal level, is that being able to “feel” people out is considered a ‘no-no’. I was harangued for talking about seeing a “light” in people’s eyes. It’s this same sort of intuition that is what keeps me from being the guy that gets mugged in a bad neighborhood, it’s why I am not afraid to walk in dark parks in the middle of the night when many other people are. However, I see this ability continually put down as though it’s going to turn me into some sort of bigot. In my opinion, bigotry is formed by taking rote information about people and applying it to them, it’s not formed by feeling people out and seeing how they are going to react. If you look the least bit shady in a posh suburb, it’s likely that you’ll be harassed by the police. Why is that? Just because someone is wearing a black hoody doesn’t mean they are going to rob someone. It is that ability to FEEL whether or not someone intends you harm, or intends well for you that gets you through situations where your intelligence gathering fell short. It’s the same thing that keeps you from getting bitten by a dog.
I wasn’t making statement of fact about Academia, I was positing a hypothesis that I wanted to discuss and pick apart. People chose instead to pick me apart as though there was some crime in proposing this hypothesis at all. I was at no point trying to say academia is racist. I wanted to discuss why it might alienate certain people based upon threads that don’t have a racial basis, but have a massive overlap with ethnic groups. If we were to look at Hispanic Catholics and why the situation is as it is for them, perhaps we could find some similarities with Irish Catholics. The point of the whole thread was to find where certain conflicts existed that are not racist, but might be misconstrued as racist if all one is looking at is statistics about black enrollment in academic institutions, to give an example.
There are two ways that we verify whether or not something seems true. We can use critical thinking skills and pick it apart to see if it holds up to scrutiny, or we can run it through an intuitive filter. Where faith comes in is trusting that your intuitive filter works. You can then use that filter to guide your actions, trusting that you will understand why it is true as you come toward closer examination. There is no inherent conflict here at all. The two ways of parsing information should work in concert. Whenever I see someone attack overarching concepts like “faith” or “religion” I feel like I am being hit with a cognitive dissonance ray, and that’s how I felt when people assumed I was attacking Academia.
You can’t blame the overall concept called “religion” for the specific dogmas of each religious sect. By the same token I wasn’t trying to do this with Academia, had someone felt like going deeper into any one aspect of Academia that would have been fine, instead they felt like they had to defend the whole for some reason, a reason I don’t wholly understand. I was always under the impression that the POINT of Academia was to pick things apart. One thing I hate about this message board, is that people don’t seem to get that it’s a message board. It’s not to be held to the same standards of rigor as a dissertation. I shouldn’t be required to come here with a fully formulated idea in the same way I would be if I were going for my PhD. I was trying to formulate the idea with this thread, and came here thinking I’d find people interested in helping to formulate an idea rather than attack me for what they saw as an attack on their sacred cow.
If someone shows me good cites, that’s great. I see a lot of High School debater attitude on this board, and I let myself get sucked into that too easily, and I wasn’t that great when I was on the debate team back in HS. So I have to learn not to allow myself to be led by the nose by people’s misunderstanding what I am trying to say. I also need to learn to formulate my opinions better, and I am certain a rhetoric class would help me immensely.
Erek
I think that you* feel* things very strongly,and it felt like you were triyng to argue a point, when in fact, such strong feeling about things is detremental to making a point. Due to the fact this is in Great Debates, your posting style made it feel like you wanted people to back you up on them. If I am reading you new post correctly, and you want people to help you get your head around a concept, you should have posted to In My Humble Opinion, and asked people if they felt the same way.
Maybe I missed some of the responses, but I didn’t see much about hierarchy. (It exists, of course, but didn’t seem to be an issue.) Do you mean the hierarchy of different types of colleges, or the hierarchy of student-grad student-lecturer-asst prof-tenured prof-dept. chair-dean-president within a college? (And it is more complicated than that.) I was particularly interested in the differences between disciplines. There are significant differences of view between them. Remember that joke paper about how gravity is a social construct?
You were referring to bureaucracy as it applied to students. I have many professor friends, from junior guys to dept. chairs to deans, and faculty is more affected than students. I was never much affected by it as a student, my wife was the victim of a departmental feud, but that was different. So I’m still at a loss to understand why you think attending college is wasteful because of bureaucracy.
Being from NY I know what you mean. Having been a long-haired college student with a big car in Boston in the early '70s I know what you mean about being harassed. I was always getting stopped by cops. I’m sure others had and have it far worse than me. But it is not just sensing, it is reacting. As a former non-dog owner now a dog-owner, I know much better how to read dogs and how to act to make them behave. I also have active measures I use in a place that makes me nervous, like walking quickly and confidently and, if need be, mumbling to myself to make me look a bit loony. Never even had a close call. Nothing new - animals do stuff like this all the time
This probably came through the least clearly of all. In California we have big debates on affirmative action for the UCs, and both sides through around accusations of racism. I must admit I still don’t get your point, though I do get that you aren’t accusing anyone of anything.
I think the difference is when one refuses to apply critical thinking to the results of intuition. All scientists use intuition, because that is where new ideas come from. But then we test it. That’s where the problem comes in. If someone believes in some advertised on TV drug, but then refuses to accept studies showing it doesn’t work, that’s faith and that’s a problem.
No, coming in here with a fully formulated opinion would be boring. The reason I like SDMB is that you get challenged, like I mentioned. Everyone is accepting of people who expand on their points, and even of people who change their opinion based on feedback. What people don’t like are those who don’t seem to be responsive to questions, who repeat the same stuff over and over, and who don’t seem to be willing to either refute arguments against their point or admit the validity of the arguments. See threads involving just about any creationist who comes in here.
You’re not like that, but I tried to formulate specific questions about your position and it didn’t seem to get me anywhere. One thing I learned from my writing critique group is that no matter how clear you think a passage is, if three people don’t get it you have work to do. I’m sure the answers are obvious to you, but I didn’t get them. It might be me, it might be you, but things bog down unless one side or the other tries to go the extra mile for understanding.
Good, as long as it’s clear I am not accusing anyone of anything.
So, I’ll try again with you. I’ll make a list of statements and you can agree or disagree.
The word racism gets bandied about so much it’s meaning has been watered down.
Cultural traits are a conglomeration of many factors. One of the biggest factors is religion, though it’s not the only one.
People ask questions about why “minority” communities are antagonistic to Higher Education.
These questions imply that “minority” communities find something alienating about higher education.
There is a big division as to whether something is an issue of race or if it is an issue of class.
Being “White” is a term used to describe the assimilation into the mainstream culture. Italians became white, Poles became white, Irish became white, etc…
The “Liberal Intellectual Elite” tends toward a more agnostic/atheistic stance on religion.
Black, Jewish and Hispanic communities tend to vote Democrat. (Until recently anyway)
Religion is a major part of Black, Jewish and Hispanic communities.
Jewish is both a religion and an ethnicity. (Therefore I would like to eliminate it from this discussion.)
Religion forms the way people think, as does Academia.
Therefore the conflict might be:
Much of the discrimination that Blacks and Hispanics feel from the academic institutions NOW comes from the conflict with religion rather than ethnicity.
OR
To take it a little deeper:
It has to do with different modes of thinking, and a mutual invalidation of thought processes. (Thought processes that I think are artificially in conflict)
This division then transcends race, and the conflict would exist regardless of skin color.
Statistics regarding academic enrollment based upon racial identity do not reflect anything in a meaningful way due to lack of nuance.
Measuring race at all is the source of racism.
There in a nutshell is how I feel about this situation. Please point out on a case by case basis where you have issues, or where you agree with me.
Erek
This is where I have a problem with your argument. Go to any college campus in the country and try not to find a plethora of religious groups, both student-run and otherwise. While the percentage of atheists is no doubt higher among the more educated, it’s still a rather small figure.
I think it’s far more likely that the hostility that minority groups feel toward academia (and I’m not really on-board with this notion, either; are there figures that support the assertion that there is a significantly greater portion of minority communities who are hostile to academic instututions than white people? I don’t necessarily doubt it, but it would be helpful to know to what extent this phenomena exists if we’re going to be debating it) simply because they aren’t represented within it to as great a degree as they’d like to be. That’s been changing, but it’s no mystery that exclusion breeds long-lasting contempt.
When I suggested exactly the first point, identifying the problem of one of language between groups, you accused me of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater (whatever that was supposed to mean) and then accused me of being too intellectual. Now you repeat my exact point as a “deeper” exploration of your point. Perhaps you are just so eager to make a point that you have failed to actually read the responses in this thread?
Your second point confirms my original post, as well, simply dropping your initial religious claim to leave the ultimate issue of race.
Your third point may or may not be true, but you would need to expand on it to make it clearer.
I’m sure that the people who continue to be denied jobs, promotions, and housing because they belong to the wrong ethnic community can take comfort from the fact that it would not happen if they were from the right ethnic community. It is an odd claim that if the authorities (whoever they are) ignored race, then no person would be subjected to discrimination. (Certainly it is true that if the authorities ignored race there would be no way to know how badly ethnic groups have been treated–a point that affects my pereception of this claim.)
Okay. Now we are getting somewhere.
Somewhat. What has happened more is that groups seize on racism for ulterior motives. Some members of groups that are legitimate targets overplay it as an excuse, and some members that aren’t try to use it to suck the meaning out of the word.
It is hard to say if religion comes from culture or vice versa. Many groups of the same religion have different cultures. For the second, I am not aware that this is true. The only antagonism I know of comes from the feeling of being excluded.
Nah. Except that the distribution of race and class is uneven - but we have finally gotten to the point where race is insignificant in lots of cases. Look at Colin Powell.
Umm - they always were white. Humanity is very inventive, and can find all sorts of ways of hating people for reasons other than race.
For the latter, I don’t think many southern blacks voted democratic (if they could vote at all) before FDR. There are many historical reasons for voting patterns.
Religion was not a major part of the predominantly Jewish community where I grew up. We all got bar mitzvahed, but that was, to quote Sam Levinson, so we’d get presents. I can’t speak for anyone else.
Academia collects people who think a certain way. Anyone without the weird, obsessive personality it takes to get a PhD is not going to be an academic.
But religion is the least of the problems. Some discrimination is no doubt racial still. But a lot of the apparent discrimination comes from other causes. Universities are torn. If unprepared people are not let in, it can be considered racist. If they are, and they fail, it is considered racist. But the reason they are unprepared are economic and historical.
You might want to look for studies correlating success in school of minority kids and religious belief. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a positive correlation. However, you may not be aware that there is no place on college applications where religion is mentioned. (At least in the ones we just filled out - no doubt Oral Roberts U has one.)
Whether measuring race is a good thing to do is an issue. But it sure is not the source. The source is hatred of the other, and the need to dehumanize blacks to support slavery. Racism did not start with affirmative action. The argument for it is to make up for past racism. There are legitimate arguments against it, but the “lets pretend everything is even” one doesn’t work for me.
If religion were an issue at all, you’d have to demonstrate that kids from equally religious white backgrounds were being shut out. This might happen soon if they continue to prevent the teaching of science and logical thinking, but not yet.
Your proposition is easily testable. I don’t see discrimination based on religion. I do see discrimination based on intelligence, but I trust you are not saying that is also discrimination against religion.
I also think it is cultural in the family. I’ve seen lots of my daughters friends, white as white can be, whose parents were unsupportive of college.
I understand where you are coming from better - and I think you are reading causation in the correlation between a subset of non-academics and the religious.
I’m not talking about “pretending everything is even” and I don’'t agree that I have to demonstrate that kids from the same religion have equal problems if they are white or black.
I posted the definition of culture. I don’t wholly agree with what I see as your definition of culture. It seems too much like tunnel vision, like the cause is either A or B, rather than a combination of 20% A, 12% B, 9% K, 12% Q, and so on. So to even TRY to prove about the equity of discrimination is silly. You’d want to look for trends to be sure, and I think there are a lot of trends to be found, but the situation just isn’t as simple as whether or not they are black or whether they are baptist. What if a person has no real prejudice against black people but has a prejudice against baptists, and then because of that it brings up any latent prejudice against them for being a black baptist?
Religion caused culture caused religion caused culture caused effect caused effect caused effect caused effect caused effect caused effect. Religion and culture are inseperable. They are fused, and forever will be. No one is beyond it’s reach, everyone is affected. It’s like a culture in a petry dish, certain bacteria can’t scoot to the other side and say “We’re not of the same culture as those guys on the other side of the dish.”, while they have a unique environment on the west side of the petry dish, they are still the same culture as those in the north, south and east and if you pull your lens far enough, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between any of them. However, here in the Petry dish where we have a microscopic lens with which to look at the culture, we can see marked differences in the evolution of the bacteria on the other side of the dish, from us. Now they want to move to our side, because we need labor, or it’s just plain better over here, and they can come over here as long as they don’t affect our culture, oh no, they are affecting our culture! My neighbor bacterium just fornicated with an eastern bacterium!
So I am trying to determine the effect of religion upon the culture. For instance here in New York, if a black guy wearing a nice tailored suit comes to the interview, followed by a black guy in a cheap suit with a crucifix and a bible, the black guy in the tailored suit is gonna get more attention. The employer is going to weigh the poise of one versus the likelihood that the other won’t go partying on a Wednesday night and come in Thursday with a hangover. However, the hiring officer is going to wonder how preachy the baptist might be, and whether or not that will be conducive to the situation. There are a lot of judgments at play.
So while religion isn’t totally causal, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a cause. I sort of was trying to dissect race because it’s kind of an useless term as people can’t really even agree with what it means, or if it’s applicable. Both sides in a racism argument will use the fact that people are not ‘pure’ anything to make their points.
I don’t particularly agree with most mainstream assessments of intelligence I have found. Every IQ test is biased in some way or another. Standardized tests are skewed, and they constantly skew them in a new direction every time they revise them. I’ve seen consistently people who are supposed to be “intelligent” mistake people who can’t communicate with them as stupid. I’ve seen ‘stupid’ people play smart people like a fiddle in order to exact some agenda.
A friend of mine who is a street hustler couldn’t get his GED because he has a problem with numbers, but he knows more about how basic human relationships work within his particular area of society, and how those types of relationships apply to human relationships overall. His spelling is very good despite dropping out of school at 13. I’d say he’s one of the more intelligent people I know. I’ve watched people with PhDs do some inordinately stupid shit in social situations. I’ve seen the same espousing information that is just straight up wrong.
I think the assumption that academia only turns away the unintelligent is a misnomer. First of all, it embraces a lot of extremely stupid people, who go on to do rather well in it because they have one particular narrow focus at which they can excel. Secondly, there are a lot of smart people that don’t feel like Academia is for them. This doesn’t mean there are not brilliant Academics and stupid non-Academics(SDMB disclaimer).
There are many factors that lead to prejudice, and while race is one of them, there is not really any such a thing as race, it’s an artificial construct that is becoming obsolete. Ethnicity and Nationality still have some meaning, but in America particularly, most people are of mixed ethnicity. I think in this day and age a person is a lot less likely to be discriminated against because he is black, but because of a number of other factors, that while RELATED to being black are not because the person is black.
Erek
If that is how you think, no wounder your arguements are so circular. Now, you seem to be taking this idea as an indesputable fact. I don’t see why, since it is so obvious that beer caused culture.
Ha, beer caused culture eh? Well in Europe it was the Christian monks brewing it a lot of the time! How do you know religion didn’t cause beer?
Religion isn’t a static thing neither is culture. Every effect is also a cause, and when things have something called a “RELATIONSHIP” they are equally affected by the other.
Methinks there are some pretty narrow definitions of the words science, culture, religion, spirituality, and academics being bandied about.
Erek
We are in agreement. You are indeed bandying about a narrow, false defintion of academia. Also, what with the monks? What does that have to do with what I said? What I said was about the very beginging of civilization, possibly involvng a form of religous that is several steps removed from how you are likely to define it, or maybe priest stepped in to take controll of the process only well into its becoming successful… (Before you ask, it seems fair to assume your defintions of religion are quite limited, judging from conversations with you earlier.)
Then we clearly don’t speak the same language. I don’t know what your language is. We apparently don’t share the same definition for the word “English”.
Erek
From what basis do you draw that conclusion?
FWIW, as I’ve mentioned in threads on unrelated issues, when I was in academia, it was the old-school white guys who tended to be more religious, and the younger minority faculty who tended to be the least religious.
I admit, I don’t know anything about the “activist” community (see OP). I don’t even understand that label, even though I read articles by people who describe themselves as “activists”.
But I do have a problem with this:
Ditto for whites.
The “white society” I grew up in could hardly have been any more anti-intellectual. I kept my grades as much of a secret as I could in primary school, and when I went off to college I became a pariah to many in my hometown. After all, weren’t they good enough for me? What was I trying to prove? Did I think I was better than them? It ain’t pretty, but that’s the way it was – and is.
And mswas, while you’re removing the mote from the eyes of the liberal socialist academics, as you describe them, why not pull that log out of your own? How can you claim that “academia very often promotes a very narrow ideal of what intelligence is” when you admit you don’t know academia from the inside?
Overall, I find the OP to be a mirror image of the faults it claims to find in others.
Lets start with the term “supernatural” I hate this term, because I don’t think that there is any such thing that is beyond nature. If you find something that is beyond nature your definition of nature was pretty narrow to begin with.
In terms of these boards it’s more of an epithet than anything. If Psychic phenomena exist, they are natural, not supernatural. If Ghosts survive death and haunt the Earth, it is a natural process not supernatural.
If one’s definition of religion requires the supernatural then religion as a term is as meaningless as supernatural. It’s really easy to debunk an argument for the supernatural, because in the end supernatural is a nonsense word.
Examples of religions from my point of view:
Christianity, Psy-trance*, buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, Satanism, Wicca
Also, I’ll give you some more definitionsnarrow
broad
Now that you know the difference between narrow and broad, you will realize that my definition of religion is BROAD as opposed to NARROW. If you feel that my definition is overly broad then we can discuss that.
I’m sorry if these definitions conflict with your OBVIOUSLY more OBJECTIVE definition. Don’t worry though scott, even though I’ve scene your cites shot down time and again, I still enjoy your posts in OTHER threads.
Erek
*For those confused by this one, Psy-trance operates on a global network of parties and festivals that gather small groups to tens of thousands of people meeting in widely exotic locales, there is a very heavy spiritual element to it and live acts are often treated as priests at their pulpits. There is also a strong community thread within it, one can go to a psy-trance party anywhere in the world and find a community within that milieu, thus it’s inclusion.
When you said:
, you were most likely talking about other people. My response, that you are guilty of narrow defintions, was sarcasm, f.y.i. However, your attempt to remove the admittedly nonsense term, “supernatural” from religion, is byond the pale.
P.S. People have said that my cites have been shot down time and time again. I have seen a simular acusation logged at me in the pit. I chalenged the poster to give examples, and have not scene a responce. Hmmmmm…
“my Cites keep getting shot down.” You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think. True, my arguements are disliked on other thread, but I have asked time and time again, for people to find wholes in my arguements, and the best I have seen is that they use diffrent world views then mine, not actuall holes in my logic, so: Tell me, what “cites” of mine have been shot down?
I wasn’t looking for the faults in others. But thanks for playing.
Try to keep up with the evolution of the thread. There is the most recent statement about assessments of intelligence. I didn’t say it was limited to academia. I also never said the faults I am discussing were outside of myself.
As for the motes in the eyes of people in this thread, all I have asked of people is that they practice what they preach. If you are preaching hard empiricism, practice hard empiricism. Hold yourself up to the standards of rigor you hold others to. If you are going to say “Religion and Science are diametrically opposed” back it up with some cites if you are on the side of hard empiricism. If you aren’t trying to empirically prove anything, say what you will, and don’t back it up for all I care.
And keep in that skepticism doesn’t mean that something unproved is untrue, or that something proven for something slightly similar to the subject at hand has anything to do with the subject at hand. Just holding the bargain basement skeptics to a higher standard.
I would hold the same standards to anyone that tells me they are a communist and doesn’t like to share with their friends.
On the other hand if you don’t say “I AM…ism”, I won’t hold you to the standard of the professed ideal.
The only ideal I’ve professed to hold in this entire thread is a desire for groups to communicate better.
So show me where I professed a standard that I hold myself to and failed at it. Because I can show you a few where others did that. There is nothing wrong in my holding other people to a standard I don’t hold myself to, if they are the ones professing that standard as desirable.
Erek
P.S. More rote repetition for you: “I am not anti-critical thinking”