On Bajada Dialogues

So we had a conference actually in June on this theme I call post-progressive social science.

The idea is that politicization, so a kind of more or less left-wing monoculture with accompanying politics, red lines and taboos have kind of caged in the pursuit of knowledge.

And so you're really only allowed to, I mean, if you want to get published, hired and get funded, you kind of have to espouse a certain set of viewpoints, which may or may not be right, but really may in many cases be wrong.

And so in a way, the pursuit of knowledge in the social sciences has been worked in a way and so you're only allowed to ski on the ski hill and not off the ski hill and that's kind of what we're trying to do is to say well let's we want to look at topics that have been neglected

we want to look at

viewpoints uh and theories and data that have been neglected and so that's what the conference was about we had quite a few illustrious people there stephen pinker yasha monk chris ruffo came in online we had um Yeah, just quite a nice range of people who all kind of agree there's a big problem in academic social science.

Actual diversity of thought, I see.

Yeah.

It reminds me a little bit of Thomas Chatterton Williams and his Harper letter, his Harper's letter from 2020.

I don't know if you saw that.

Yeah, well, exactly.

So, well, they're kind of connected, but they're not the same.

So the battle for free speech and against cancel culture is... partly a way of pushing back against these red lines that have been established by progressives around what we're allowed to say and do and think.

But what we're doing is we're saying, okay, yes, we're totally on board with that, but what we want to do is set out an academic research agenda.

So we want to do two things.

The first is what I'll call critical woke studies, which is more or less studying the the cultural left, cultural left ideology, as an ideology like we would study other ideologies like fascism and communism.

We've got to study this as an ideology rather than pretending this is some kind of background public morality that everybody agrees with and you can't question.

And so the first part of this is just to say we need to, you know, this term has been exploding, this subject's been exploding, and yet academia's been silent because it's just too uncomfortable to touch.

So the first thing is to really study this ideology, its effect, its influence, where did it come from? The second thing is to do what I said before, kind of off-piste social science where, you know, is family formation, family structure unrelated to the race gap? You know, if we're talking about a race gap in terms of SAT scores, in terms of wealth, Yeah, it could be about some kind of systemic racism, although I would want to see that measured, tested, falsified.

But equally, it could be caused by other things to do with, for example, family structure.

But you will never get, you know, it's very difficult for an academic to investigate that possibility.

So what we have is we only have certain explanations allowed.

Whereas in science, what you want is all explanations and you want them fighting against each other in the best way possible.

Yeah.

I've often asked the question on this podcast, are we past peak woke? You've probably gotten it plenty of times.

So we had a conference actually in June on this theme I call post-progressive social science.

The idea is that politicization, so a kind of more or less left-wing monoculture with accompanying politics, red lines and taboos have kind of caged in the pursuit of knowledge.

And so you're really only allowed to, I mean, if you want to get published, hired and get funded, you kind of have to espouse a certain set of viewpoints, which may or may not be right, but really may in many cases be wrong.

And so in a way, the pursuit of knowledge in the social sciences has been worked in a way and so you're only allowed to ski on the ski hill and not off the ski hill and that's kind of what we're trying to do is to say well let's we want to look at topics that have been neglected

we want to look at

viewpoints uh and theories and data that have been neglected and so that's what the conference was about we had quite a few illustrious people there stephen pinker yasha monk chris ruffo came in online we had um Yeah, just quite a nice range of people who all kind of agree there's a big problem in academic social science.

Actual diversity of thought, I see.

Yeah.

It reminds me a little bit of Thomas Chatterton Williams and his Harper letter, his Harper's letter from 2020.

I don't know if you saw that.

Yeah, well, exactly.

So, well, they're kind of connected, but they're not the same.

So the battle for free speech and against cancel culture is... partly a way of pushing back against these red lines that have been established by progressives around what we're allowed to say and do and think.

But what we're doing is we're saying, okay, yes, we're totally on board with that, but what we want to do is set out an academic research agenda.

So we want to do two things.

The first is what I'll call critical woke studies, which is more or less studying the the cultural left, cultural left ideology, as an ideology like we would study other ideologies like fascism and communism.

We've got to study this as an ideology rather than pretending this is some kind of background public morality that everybody agrees with and you can't question.

And so the first part of this is just to say we need to, you know, this term has been exploding, this subject's been exploding, and yet academia's been silent because it's just too uncomfortable to touch.

So the first thing is to really study this ideology, its effect, its influence, where did it come from? The second thing is to do what I said before, kind of off-piste social science where, you know, is family formation, family structure unrelated to the race gap? You know, if we're talking about a race gap in terms of SAT scores, in terms of wealth, Yeah, it could be about some kind of systemic racism, although I would want to see that measured, tested, falsified.

But equally, it could be caused by other things to do with, for example, family structure.

But you will never get, you know, it's very difficult for an academic to investigate that possibility.

So what we have is we only have certain explanations allowed.

Whereas in science, what you want is all explanations and you want them fighting against each other in the best way possible.

Yeah.

I've often asked the question on this podcast, are we past peak woke? You've probably gotten it plenty of times.