Thread by @sjmmcd

This is obviously stupid and dangerous for a lot of reasons, but the last card ("No science. No shutdown.") stuck with me because I think it speaks to something that those of us involved in knowledge production and dissemination could pay more attention to

https://twitter.com/cdelvallejr/status/1337775582994702337

I think a lot of non-scientists/journalists believe there’s a Knowledge Orb in a lab in a tower somewhere, and you just ask it a question & out comes perfectly true information. When they find that the information is faulty, they want to throw the Orb out the window

Of course a lot of the rampant anti-intellectualism today is the product of a concerted campaign by ruling class orgs to divide-and-conquer the ruled classes by creating oppositional epistemologies (if we don’t have a shared reality, we’ll never unite against them)

But I think there are also a lot of well-meaning people for whom the knowledge production/dissemination process is understandably mystified, and their response to that mystery is a sort of reasonable but also dangerous antagonism

Part of that mystification is no different from every profession that's siloed and complex. I only have a vague sense of what mechanics do, building a house is a mysterious process to me. But there's some transparency to those professions, they’re concrete & straightforward

Knowledge production is abstract & done in a rather secretive way: it’s hidden behind expensive paywalls and academic conferences. Even the 30% or so of Americans who attend higher education tends to only see the teaching side of it, much less so the research side

I think people in knowledge production take the process for granted. It’s very human and messy, it’s entangled with researcher egos and academic politics, cognitive biases and the material precariousness a lot of academics live with

But the public doesn’t see that, they just see a lot of information coming out of an orb (filtered through news corps), and when that information conflicts with itself, as it must coming from the messy process of knowledge creation, it looks like the orb is broken

And of course some of academia does deserve the scorn it gets: universities have often been willing partners with the ruling class to create the technologies of war, surveillance, incarceration, & psychological manipulation that is so effective at repression

While most research has high integrity and is the product of earnest, well-meaning researchers, lots of corporate dollars pour into universities, and some research is corrupted by the interests of big corporations. See this great work by @BenFranta:

https://twitter.com/BenFranta/status/1268731791264776192

And it’s not just knowledge production that is sometimes corrupted. The priorities of profit also muddy knowledge dissemination. For instance, I saw this going around recently

The article frames the discovery as if it's totally rewriting our understanding of history. That's a compelling story that benefits both journalists and researchers. But it’s not really true. I don't blame the journalist, who's probably overworked & lacks specialized knowledge

Anthropologists and archaeologists have suspected for many decades that foragers tend to not have rigid, gendered divisions of labor. This new discovery doesn't really "upend gender role assumptions" in the field, even if it might among the public (& it's still important)

This new discovery is, more accurately, adding evidence to something that researchers have known for a very long time. But that’s a less compelling story for National Geographic to sell (NatGeo is owned by cartoon villain billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp)

And NatGeo isn’t the only one, a lot of stories about this research frame it that way. Several others did too, because it's a good story that gets attention

How do we address this? Researchers can do more to show how the sausage is made and write for the public more. Journalists could be more faithful to the research than the story they want to tell about it, especially headline writers since that’s where so many people stop reading

But there are limits to what we can do individually because all the systemic incentives are geared toward knowledge production that’s cut off from the public and knowledge dissemination that favors profit and capital accumulation

In the Utopia, universities would look quite different, with funding decisions made more democratically, free and open conferences, only open access journals, and much more funding. All journalism would be fully independent

Meantime, the knowledge production process is still very good. It’s worth defending from both good- and bad-faith anti-intellectualism, even if it means those of us doing it have to spend more time on charm offensives, and supporting independent journalism—check out @curaffairs!

academic mutuals on here who I think are good at this:
@athenogenes
@yungneocon
@g_kallis
@giulio_mattioli
@DoctorVive
@jfeldman_epi
@IronicProfessor
@ii_sambliss
@a_vansi
@doreenstabinsky
@JKSteinberger
@aldatweets
@abhaney
@shwinnebego
@peyton_k
@triofrancos
@emilypawley

I guess this is also relevant to the discourse around the dipshit who said Jill Biden should drop Dr because she has an Ed D rather than MD. Guy doesn't know the first thing about academia yet is paid to comment on it in a national magazine