The "Post-Truth" World of Academia

Radical ideas that defy reality can flourish at Universities that indoctrinate students with intellectual insanity while inculcating them against Biblical morality.

"Post-truth," the "Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year 2016," provides an apt description of the culture and ideology propagated today on many of America's college campuses.

The term is " … an adjective defined as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.'"

Harvard's “Office of BGLTQ Student Life” explains that " … IvyQ is an intercollegiate conference for BGLTQIA+ students and allies … " In the 2016 "Program Guide" one of the 2016 conference co-chairs describes it as " … a completely student-run conference … " The same co-chair also states, "We say that IvyQ is an explicitly radical conference—but by that, what we really mean is radically inclusive of all struggles, including across class and racial lines."

The IvyQ Conference is held at a different institution each year and has previously been held at locations including Cornell University in 2015, Dartmouth College in 2014, and the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 for the inaugural conference.

"Part of making IvyQ a safe space is respecting one another's identifications, whether they relate to sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, or any other community/identity category. Every person has the absolute right to define themselves as they see fit. If someone identifies with a particular label or culture, do not question or reject that identification."

Apparently, in the "post-truth" world of liberal academia, an individual may "identify" in a way that fails to comport with reality, yet their objectively false fantasy must be accepted unquestioningly.

And what about decency? According to the program guide, this conference that Harvard College allowed on its campus featured events like "Drag Night" and a session titled "Erotica/Porn as a Tool for Social Justice."

• Harvard Office of the Assistant to the President for Institutional Diversity & Equity

Alex Nitzberg is an intern at the American Journalism Center at Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Nassim Taleb Exposes The World’s “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot” Class

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in many countries, the government’s role is ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and rarely seen outside specialized outlets, social media, and universities?—?most people have proper jobs and there are not many opening for the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When Plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.

What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools, and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-16/nassim-taleb-exposes-worlds-intellectual-yet-idiot-class

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