Can You Trust Academic Research?

On this website you can find a mountain of evidence to show that academics cannot be trusted when it comes to their various pronouncements.

And a recent interview in the Spectator with the well-respected Professor Robert Plomin - who has, basically, spent his working life studying twins to assess the levels of inheritability of various characteristics - sheds some further light on why it is that the 'research' emanating from so many academics is bogus.

I quote from the article ...

'Education is the last - well, backwater,' says Dr Robert with a grin. Then he tells a story about the dark old days of the 1970s when he was young and antagonism to genetics was the norm.

'My very first conference was by this old guy Leon Kamin, the author of a book called The Science and Politics of IQ,'' says Plomin.

'Kamin came back to academia just so as to stop this pernicious stuff about genetics entering psychology.

There were 2,000, maybe 3,000 people. It was dark and he was bald with kinda craggy features. I mean he looked scary.

Then he started saying: "We've got to stop this talk of genetics now!" And I realised it didn't matter to Kamin what was true. (My underlining.)

He believed in what he called "science for the people", which was what he thought it would be useful for the people to know. I mean, that killed me because it was Kamin and these elite Harvard professors deciding what's for the people!

The idea was that science should serve politics.

And this is what we have had to endure for the past four decades, science serving politics - including gender politics.

In other words, it just does not matter to these academics what is true.

Their aim is to manipulate

Their aim is to manipulate, not to elucidate or to educate.

Indeed, it was during the 70s that the feminists - and the Left - really started to gain a stranglehold on almost the whole of academia, by engaging in their usual tactics of generating hysteria, hostility and aggression toward those whose views conflicted with their agenda.

And today, we are all accustomed to the histrionics of the feminists and their politically-corrected cronies whenever anybody dares to question their dogma.

Throughout the past four decades these malicious groups have physically assaulted academics who raised questions about their views. They have disrupted their lectures, vocally accused them of being sexist, racist, homophobic, etc etc, and they have had them kicked out of their jobs.

The upshot is that these people have now bullied their way into positions of power - almost everywhere - and in order to join in and climb their various power ladders (e.g. through one's career) one merely has to support their nonsense. The better you support it, the higher do you climb.

And if you don't support them then they will use every tactic possible to hurt you - if they can.

Most of you still have no idea of how big this 'beast' has become.

It is positively enormous.

Various aspects of it are commonly labelled as Cultural Marxism, political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism etc etc etc. But, essentially, they all stem from a continuing and successful power grab by government and by government workers - though, of course, most of the latter will not know what is really going on; i.e. they will not see the bigger picture.

some 96% of all university professors in America vote Left.

And when it comes to the academics themselves, some 96% of all university professors in America vote Left.

Those who don't, don't get the jobs.

So, when it comes to academic 'research', you always need to bear in mind that where social/political/economic/educational and gender issues are concerned, you are being deceived - because the research findings of these academics will mostly be designed to please their political masters and, hence, to further their careers.

Indeed, most of them do not have much choice.

Either they toe the line, or they are in deep trouble.

As such, as a layperson, you should distrust just about every piece of research ever done over the past four decades - particularly when it comes to gender issues.

This research is mostly bogus. And it has mostly been manufactured in order to manipulate people and in order to get funding, power and promotion.

As such, and for example, the research into sex-assault, rape, domestic violence, family matters, gender differences, etc etc that is produced by these academics is phony.

And most of their 'research' time is spent on trying to figure out how to manufacture the 'correct' data, how to ignore the 'incorrect' data, how to re-shape the language, and how to distort the concepts associated with these things in such a way that it all sounds convincing.

And when, eventually, the whole 'model' is complicated enough - so complicated that it takes years to understand it - and even longer to see through its carefully-constructed facade  - and with students also being indoctrinated by it as they gradually get engulfed by it in order to pass their exams - you end up with some kind of false 'ideology' that is difficult to shake off.

To repeat, ...

 it didn't matter to Kamin what was true

Finally, I should say that not all academics are frauds.

The problem is, however, how do you know which ones are honest and which ones are not?

And how do you know that what they are telling you is not a result of their own indoctrination?

End Note:

My own increasing awareness of the lack of validity of much social science research also occurred in the 70s; the period wherein I spent about a decade inside university.

Fortunately, my psychological interests were not in areas that were politically contentious, and so, for the most part, I remained relatively unaffected by the rising tide of aggression that was being directed at those psychologists whose observations countered left-wing dogma.

Nevertheless, I began to realise that something unwholesome was going on in many areas to do with Psychology and the Social Sciences.

The most disconcerting of all for me was the way in which academics in Education departments were indoctrinating teachers with the view that teaching children to read should not involve using 'phonics' - a system wherein children are specifically taught to recognise that the way in which words are spelled has a significant bearing on how they might be decoded, articulated and, hence, understood; e.g. see Learning to Read.

This just did not make any sense to me.

I just could not understand how all these academics could be so stupid.

How was it possible that they actually wanted children to ignore one of the most useful tools of language ever invented? - the alphabet.

I had no idea what was going on.

(The idea was to disadvantage the boys relative to the girls.)

Furthermore, it seemed very often to be the case that in even the most 'trivial' and non-contentious of areas, academics from one university would align themselves with a particular point of view - and find data supporting it - while academics from another university with a different point of view always seemed to manage to find data that supported their own view.

Once again, how was this possible?

Surely, on at least some occasions, the data from somebody's experiments would support the opposing camp.

And, if so, why did they never mention it?

In short, I began to realise that politics and prejudice were having far too much influence on the outcomes of academic work.

And it was mostly for this reason that I bailed out of a career as a university academic.

And it seems to me that the current situation is such that no academic can be trusted these days - except, perhaps, for most of those who work in the hard sciences; such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology.

However, even neuroscientists are infused with political dogma; e.g. see Dr Lewis Wolpert: The Differences Between Men and Women

End Note 2

Prior to the arrival of the internet, which was not so long ago, the information that entered the brains of people about the world 'out there' was derived from the mainstream media; basically TV, radio, books, magazines, newspapers.

All of these were controlled by a few organisations.

Fiction and non-fiction were both subject to their scrutiny and to their censorship.

Of course, there were usually some small enterprises that managed to provide information that was contrary to the official view but, for the vast majority of people, for most of the time, the information that they received was controlled and shaped very heavily.

As such, nearly everybody's beliefs about the world - including its history - were moulded by powerful groups that had their own agendas.

And the same is still true today, to a very large extent.

And my point is this.

For older folk, like myself (aged 61) just about everything that we learned about the world 'out there' was propaganda.

Everything.

Even the fiction that we got to read was, for the most part, fiction that was 'correct' in the eyes of the mainstream publishers.