Totally agreed. The terms for the three groups don't make a lot of sense. They're drawn from that comic, which was (presumably) intended as a quick gag, not a substantive analysis.
Great, thank you!
This is really helpful, though I always find these breakdowns to be a little disappointing. Do you know of any sources that break down government funding by program in a more detailed way?
It's not clear why we should expect government to do a better job; this is explored in some depth here.
I think that statement reads pretty clearly as both a hypothetical and as a joke; I don't consider "universally evil" to be an especially likely explanation.
Yeah, I saw that too. Definitely good for Pinker and more suspicious data about the letter.
A very jaded perspective could be that this is indeed a false flag but the whole end goal is just that Pinker wants to write a book about the subject and needed a way to insert himself into the conversation.
Wow, very interesting finds. That does make it seem even more like a false flag. Could you share the link to the article (even though it's paywalled)?
Also, would you mind if I added some of your points to the main post, for posterity?
Do you have a citation for that thing about Tenenbaum?
Interesting points. Part of why it seems so fishy to me is that, personally, I have a lot of experience with far-left lists of demands and takedowns. They're certainly not perfect, but in my experience they are reliably 1) longer, 2) better researched, 3) better written, and 4) more vicious.
Again I will offer examples like the attempt to remove Hsu and the recent list of dozens of demands at Princeton. On easily-measured scales, such as number of demands/pieces of evidence, the letter to the LSU is a clear outlier. It's hard for me to imagine them stopping at only 6 complaints. On less easily measured scales, like how damning or aggressive the evidence is, I also think that it is a clear outlier; not only worse than normal, but well worse than the normal worst examples of the genre.
Of course this is all based on my previous experience with this sort of document, and that's something I can't share, it's just built into my priors. But if you're willing to accept my semi-expert opinion on this, then my take is that it seems fishy.
This makes a lot of sense, good comment. Honestly most of my experience is with top programs so it makes sense that I missed this.
Though honestly I think Sociopath faculty are rare, being tenured at a top institution is just not that great for how much work it is.